The Myrtles Plantation: America’s Most Haunted House?
About this episode
This episode explores the Myrtles Plantation as a haunted site intertwined with historical narratives of slavery and tragedy.
The Myrtles Plantation near St. Francisville, Louisiana, is promoted as one of America’s most haunted houses. Its reputation rests on reported apparitions, children seen in windows, footsteps on a staircase, a famous photograph identified as Chloe, and an antique mirror said to show handprints and faces. But the best-known legend is also the most historically disputed. The story of Chloe, an enslaved woman accused of poisoning Sara Woodruff and her children with oleander cake, conflicts with research connecting those deaths to yellow fever and with the lack of reliable records confirming Chloe herself. This episode examines the Myrtles as both a haunted destination and a historical site shaped by slavery, epidemic disease, family loss, a documented homicide, commercial tourism, and decades of retold ghost stories. It follows the house from David Bradford and the Whiskey Rebellion through the Woodruff and Stirling families, the death of William Drew Winter, twentieth-century publicity, paranormal photographs, visitor testimony, and skeptical investigation. The central question is not only whether ghosts appear there, but how documented tragedy, disputed folklore, expectation…
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