The Myrtles Plantation
St. Francisville, Louisiana

 This plantation was built in the late 1700’s and there are stories of several deaths over the years. It’s also been called the most haunted house in the U.S. by a major newspaper. I wasn’t particularly a skeptic. I knew ghosts existed, since Belle told me things and I truly believed her. I just didn’t think I could experience them. Well, during that trip, any skeptic thoughts left me forever. We had too many experiences to discount them as imagination. We stayed in what was then called the Peach Room, and had formerly been called the Voodoo Room. I even heard the children playing during the night, and once I woke up paralyzed and unable to move.

The first night, we went outside after dark. While we were walking around in front of the house, a little girl took my hand and accompanied me. She just skipped along right beside me, and held my hand the entire time.

The most famous ghost at The Myrtles is Cloe, a house slave. There are different versions of the story, but one says that Cloe was the mistress of the second owner. He caught her eavesdropping outside his study one day and cut off her ear. From then on, she wore a green scarf around her neck to cover her missing ear when necessary. Cloe was desperately afraid that she’d alienated her master, and she wanted to get back into his good graces before he banished her from the house and back to the fields. At the time, the master had a wife and three children, two toddlers and one baby. Cloe fixed a birthday cake for one of the children and added oleander to the batter, planning to nurse the master’s family back to health after she poisoned them. However, the wife and two toddlers died from the poison. The baby lived, since it hadn’t ingested any of the cake.

The other slaves found out what Cloe had done and she tried to run away. They caught her down by the creek and hung her. Many people have seen Cloe and captured her on film.

We met two of the employees while there, one of whom, Dianna, has become a good friend over the years. After our first night, Dianna asked Belle and I if we’d seen Cloe, the black slave. She then took us up to the Blue Room and tapped on the mirror, calling to Cloe and one of the little girls. Mist formed on the mirror and we could see the faces forming! We took several pictures during this.

After we came home, we went to a one-hour photo and had our film developed. I leafed through my pictures and dropped one like it had bitten me! I saw right away that I’d captured the face of Cloe, the black slave who was hung at The Myrtles, with even the green scarf around her neck.

Stubborn as I am, I decided to re-take this picture my next trip…and I did go back to The Myrtles several times after that. This picture shows a wall hanging where Cloe’s face is in the other one. The wall hanging is definitely not what showed up in the other picture!

On one trip to The Myrtles, I took my husband. He was rather grumpy at first, when he found out that the rooms did not have t.v.’s, but he came anyway. The first evening, we were eating dinner in the Carriage House, which is in the back across the courtyard from the rear veranda of the house. We sat beside a large window and had a clear view of everything. From the far left, a woman appeared. She was dressed in a long, old-fashioned skirt and white blouse, her hair in an old-fashioned style. She floated, rather than walked and started across the courtyard. I nudged my husband and he looked out the window. We watched her float across the courtyard, up the back steps, then to the right across the veranda. Then she disappeared straight through a closed door!

My husband was stunned. He asked me who she was. I replied that, of course, she was a ghost. He kept trying to rationalize what he’d seen, but he couldn’t. He had to admit that he’d seen a real ghost!