The Myrtles Plantation rises above Bayou Sara in St. Francisville, Louisiana — a white-columned antebellum house where Spanish moss hangs low and the 125-foot front porch never quite looks empty. General David Bradford built it in 1796, a Pennsylvania lawyer who had fled the state after organizing the Whiskey Rebellion, a violent tax protest that nearly earned him a treason charge. He received a pardon from John Adams in 1799, settled permanently in Louisiana, and built the home that would carry two centuries of unresolved history.
The plantation’s most famous ghost is Chloe — an enslaved woman said to have been caught eavesdropping on her enslavers, her ear severed as punishment. Legend holds she baked a birthday cake laced with oleander leaves, accidentally killing the plantation mistress and her two children, then was hanged by fellow enslaved people who feared retaliation. Historians found no evidence Chloe ever existed; plantation records document no such poisoning, no person by that name. Real death is confirmed: yellow fever claimed Sara Mathilda Woodruff and two of her three children in 1823 and 1824. What visitors still report — handprints inside the foyer mirror that no cleaning removes, children’s laughter in empty rooms at night, a woman who walks the property line and vanishes — has never been explained.
Today the Myrtles operates as a bed and breakfast and one of Louisiana’s most visited historic sites. A label attached by the National Enquirer in the 1980s — “America’s Most Haunted House” — has never been shaken loose. The property offers ghost tours and overnight stays, and former staff have described doors that lock themselves and lights that refuse to hold in certain rooms. The grounds don’t need embellishment. The history — enslavement, disease, violence, and loss accumulated over two centuries — makes itself felt without any help.
Story Source: Documentary titled “Files of the Unexplained” (Netflix, 2024)
