The Myrtles

There is a mirror in the front hall of the Myrtles, a long, gilded antique that has hung in the house since the 1800s. If you look at it closely in the right light, guests say, you can see handprints on the glass — small ones, like a child’s — that appear on the inside, beneath the surface, where no hand could possibly reach.

The mirror has been cleaned. The glass has, by some accounts, been replaced. The handprints come back.

That, at least, is what you’ll be told when you visit the Myrtles, a white antebellum plantation house in the Louisiana countryside north of Baton Rouge, which has been called one of the most haunted houses in America. It is a beautiful house with a long, gracious gallery, wrought iron latticework, and oak trees dripping with Spanish moss.

It is also a house where the truth and the legend have become so tangled that it takes real work to separate them. I’ve tried to do that here. What I found is in some ways stranger, and sadder, than the stories.

Whiskey Bradford

The house was built in 1796 by David Bradford, a lawyer and businessman from western Pennsylvania who had been one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion — an armed revolt against a federal tax on whiskey. When President George Washington sent troops to crush the rebellion, Bradford fled south to Spanish-controlled West Florida, which included the land around present-day St. Francisville. There he received a land grant and built a modest house he called Laurel Grove. He was later pardoned by President John Adams and brought his family down to join him.

After Bradford died in 1808, his daughter Sara Mathilda and her husband, Clark Woodruff, a young lawyer and judge, took over the plantation. They had three children.

The Story of Chloe

Here is the legend, and it is the heart of the Myrtles’ fame.

Clark Woodruff, the story goes, took an enslaved woman named Chloe as his mistress. When he tired of her — or caught her eavesdropping on his conversations — he had one of her ears cut off as punishment. She wore a green turban afterward to hide the scar.

Desperate to win back his favor, or to take revenge, Chloe baked a birthday cake for one of the Woodruff daughters and laced it with poison made from oleander leaves. She intended, perhaps, only to make the family sick so that she could nurse them back to health and prove her value. But she used too much. Sara Mathilda and two of her daughters died. The other enslaved people on the plantation, terrified that they would all be punished, dragged Chloe from her cabin, hanged her from a tree, and threw her body into the Mississippi River.

Ever since, the legend says, Chloe has haunted the Myrtles in her green turban — along with the ghosts of the mother and children she poisoned.

What the Records Say

It’s a vivid story. The problem is that the historical record doesn’t support it.

Researchers who have gone through the property records, local archives and family documents have found no evidence that an enslaved woman named Chloe lived at the plantation, or that Clark Woodruff had her ear cut off. More importantly, the deaths in the story did happen — but not the way the legend tells it.

Sara Mathilda Woodruff died in 1823. Two of her children died the following year, in 1824. According to records, all three died of yellow fever, an epidemic disease that ravaged Louisiana in that era, killing thousands. There was no poisoned cake.

The Chloe story seems to have grown up in the twentieth century, as the house changed hands and its owners began promoting its ghostly reputation. Some historians have pointed out, uncomfortably, that the legend turned a real tragedy — a family destroyed by disease — into a tale that blamed an enslaved Black woman for murder and depicted her lynching as a kind of justice. The enslaved people who actually lived and labored at the plantation, whose names are recorded in the property inventories, have largely been forgotten.

The Seventeenth Step

There is one violent death at the Myrtles that is documented.

In 1834, Clark Woodruff sold the plantation to Ruffin Grey Stirling, who enlarged the house and renamed it the Myrtles, after the crape myrtle trees on the grounds. After the Civil War, the plantation passed to Stirling’s son-in-law, a lawyer named William Drew Winter.

In January 1871, William Winter was shot by a man outside the house. The killing was real, reported in the newspapers of the time.

The legend goes further. It says that Winter was called out onto the side gallery by a stranger on horseback, shot, and staggered back into the house, where he tried to climb the main staircase to reach his wife. He made it to the seventeenth step and died in her arms.

Guests at the Myrtles have reported hearing slow, heavy footsteps climbing the stairs — and stopping at the seventeenth step.

The Mirror

Which brings me back to the mirror.

In the nineteenth century, it was a common custom in the South to cover all the mirrors in a house after someone died, so that the soul of the dead person would not become trapped in the glass. According to the legend at the Myrtles, the mirror in the hall was not covered after the deaths of Sara Mathilda and her children. Their spirits, the story goes, are trapped inside it. The handprints you see are theirs.

Guests and staff have reported seeing figures in the mirror, standing behind them, who aren’t there when they turn around. Some have reported seeing the handprints themselves.

The Photograph

In 1992, the owner of the Myrtles took a photograph of the house for insurance purposes. When the film was developed, she said, there appeared to be a figure standing in the breezeway between the main house and the old kitchen — a woman in what looked like a long dress and a headwrap.

The photograph was examined by experts who said they could find no sign of tampering. It became famous as the “Chloe photo,” and it’s sold on postcards in the gift shop. Skeptics point out that the image is blurry and open to interpretation, and that the figure could be any number of things.

I’ve looked at that photo many times. It is unsettling. But every time I look at it, I think about the fact that there is no evidence Chloe existed — and I wonder whose face we’re really seeing.

Real Ghosts

The Myrtles has been featured on dozens of paranormal television shows. People claim it is the site of as many as ten murders. That is not true. As far as the records show, one person was killed there.

But I don’t think the house’s real ghosts are the ones in the legends.

The plantation was worked by enslaved people for decades. They planted and harvested the cotton and indigo, built the outbuildings, cooked the meals, raised the children of the people who owned them. They lived and died there. Their stories were never told in the family documents, except as names and prices on inventory lists.

If any presence lingers at the Myrtles, I suspect it’s theirs. Not as a vengeful poisoner in a green turban, invented a century later. But as real people, whose lives were stolen, and whose stories are still waiting to be told.