Haunted History at the Myrtles Plantation

Scott: 00:00:00

The air at the Myrtles Plantation hangs heavy, not just with the scent of magnolias and ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss, but with the whispers of a past that refuses to rest.

Built in: 1796

Perhaps the most famous is Chloe, an enslaved girl who, according to lore, baked a cake laced with oleander leaves, hoping to make her master's daughter ill to secure her role in the home as a caregiver and not work in the fields. When her treachery was discovered, she was hanged from a tree on the property and her body was thrown into the Mississippi River.

Her spirit, however, is said to linger.

Often seen wearing a green turban, peering through windows, or appearing in photographs, visitors have reported feeling her presence, a cold touch, or hearing a mournful sigh. The Myrtles Plantation stands as a lone witness to its tumultuous past.

A beautiful yet unsettling monument where the veil between worlds seems remarkably thin. For those who dare to visit.

The line between history and haunting blurs, leaving an indelible impression of a place where the dead are not merely remembered, but perhaps actively present. Welcome to Talk with History. I am Rose Scott, here with my wife and historian Jen.

Jenn: 00:01:40

Hello.

Scott: 00:01:41

On this podcast, we give you insights to our history Inspired World Travels YouTube channel Journey and examine history through deeper conversations with the curious, the explorers and the history lovers out there. Now, Jen is our listeners heard in the intro. We're doing a little bit of haunted history here.

History with mystery with history type stuff as we like to joke. So tell us a little bit about the Myrtles Plantation.

I didn't realize this was a thing, but for those who kind of enjoy ghost tours and haunted houses, this is actually relatively well known here in the United States.

Jenn: 00:02:19

Yeah, Like I had first heard about this house on Unsolved Mysteries.

They did an entire, like little segment to the Myrtles and they went there and they told the ghost stories and they even said that they had a hard time filming, like their cameras would shut down and things like that. And they told a couple of the different stories there and I had always wanted to see it because of that.

And now that I'm on American cruise line doing the history, every evening on the cruise, one of the days we were going to St. Francisville and I was able to go on one of the excursions to the myrtles. And so I was so excited to go and do that. And I was able to film at the house and talk about the stories, the accuracy, the inaccuracy.

But I learned something closer to my upbringing where I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, connected to the murals that I never even knew about.

Scott: 00:03:14

Yeah. So this was kind of one of those neat things of history, of the characters of history. They, they travel around.

And so it sounds like there was a relatively well known character tied to a pretty significant historic George Washington, that this man came from Pennsylvania down to Louisiana.

Jenn: 00:03:34

Yeah. So if you know anything about the Whiskey Rebellion, like that's from southwest Pennsylvania. That's where I kind of grew up.

I went to high school there. My dad's from there. The Canonsburg, Houston area, it's kind of south of Pittsburgh and in Washington County.

And General Bradford, General David Bradford lived there. And General David Bradford was a lawyer. He also helped start Washington Je College there. He was good friends with George Washington.

Scott: 00:04:03

In Pennsylvania.

Jenn: 00:04:04

In Pennsylvania. And he is also part of the Whiskey Rebellion. And this is really upsets George Washington since they are friends.

He has to send 13,000 troops in to kind of stop them. They're trying to not get their whiskey taxed. Right. And. And Bradford runs away. Bradford gets away. There's a Warran out for his arrest.

He gets away to Louisiana. And this area of Louisiana at the time has Spanish, Spanish, French. Remember how we talk about this area goes back and forth.

And so he's, he's able to get away because it's not an American colony. So it's, it's a different country.

al David Bradford's home from: 1796

Scott: 00:04:57

Yeah. If. And if you think about it, the Louisiana Purchase hasn't happened yet.

Jenn: 00:05:01

Nope. That's: 1803

Scott: 00:05:03

Right. So that. So. So we're still in between eras here. So I always kind of like to kind of put a.

Put whatever we're talking about in between, like very well known, like everybody's heard, you know, here in the US Everybody learns about the Louisiana Purchase, but that hasn't happened yet. So he goes down to Louisiana, which isn't really Louisiana yet.

Jenn: 00:05:23

No, it's. It's basically Spanish land. And so he buys the land. He. The first place he lives in is like the gift shop.

If you go there now and then he builds the main house. And you can always tell when you visit the main house. And when you see it in our videos, it's that Creole style house.

It's not that Greek revival antebellum house that you think of with these southern plantations. This is a Creole style house, which. It's more like shutters and colors and long and flat instead of tall and up. It doesn't have the colum.

And so that's what this house looks like. And it's the myrtles, because of all the crate myrtles that are outside in the yard and they're very mature myrtle trees.

So that's where it gets its name from.

Scott: 00:06:13

Yeah.

Now he gets down there and if you think about it like, I mean, talk about something, you know, kind of a bad point in your life turning out for the better. When he gets down there, gets, essentially gets in early on this prime land, you know, do they start trying with rice and then they move to sugar?

Jenn: 00:06:34

So he doesn't do rice or sugar.

Scott: 00:06:36

So he doesn't. Okay.

Jenn: 00:06:37

He. They're kind of north.

When you're getting a little past Baton Rouge and you're getting out of that 12 month climate that you can really use for sugar, he does what a lot of people do, their indigo. So they, they farm indigo. And then he'll farm corn and cotton.

Scott: 00:06:55

Okay.

Jenn: 00:06:55

So it'll be the, for lack of better terms, it'll be the traditional crops of a plantation. Indigo is very prosperous, but it's, it's hard on the soil. So that's why they go to corn and cotton. And he doesn't live for very long.

And when it's taken over by his son in law, he buys a lot of land, he gets the land all the way to the Mississippi. And, and so that's where they farm out more cotton and corn.

Scott: 00:07:26

And if I remember right too, he escapes Pennsylvania, goes down there, open, you know, kind of starts his stuff down there. Eventually George Washington kind of pardons him.

Jenn: 00:07:36

Well, he's not part of George Washington. He's pardoned by John Adams.

Scott: 00:07:40

Okay. But eventually he kind of gets back in the good graces.

Jenn: 00:07:43

Yes.

Scott: 00:07:44

Right. And then, then he brings his family down.

Jenn: 00:07:46

til John Adams pardons him in: 1799

oesn't live long. He lives to: 1808

will run the plantation till: 1817

And the Woodruffs is where you're going to get a lot of this haunting. This is where you're going to get that story of Chloe. It's his wife and their children that are going to die. Chloe is there.

Scott: 00:08:33

When I was doing my, my research before this, I don't remember which of the Chloe stories was the more historically accurate one. I saw a story saying, hey, Chloe was actually like kind of like a mistress of the gentleman of whatever the husband's name was.

And then he ended up, you know, stopped seeing her and then was with someone else.

And part of this was part of the reason that she kind of baked these oleander leaves into a cake to make the kids and families sick to secure her house was because of that or if it was because there was a possibility of her having to work the fields and she didn't want to do that. Like what was the, what was the, what was the kind of the true to life fact that we know?

Jenn: 00:09:18

So the hard part is it's not really true to life.

So that's what's hard about this is because the story of Chloe is that she's going to bake this cake and she's going to poison the two daughters and the wife and they're all going to die. Well, they, they do die, but they die of yellow fever. They really do die, but it's of yellow fever.

Scott: 00:09:38

So it's not from anything in the food.

Jenn: 00:09:40

It's not from anything in the food. So it doesn't fit the story. However, there's a famous photograph of Chloe and that story has grown from that.

And so but because there's different versions, like you said, so Chloe, the more I'd say accurate or I wouldn't even say accurate. The more prevalent story of Chloe is that she belongs to the Woodruff. So which again is the second fan after Bradford. This is his children. Right.

His son in law, Clark Woodruff, would do business dealings and talk and Chloe would listen to the in the door to hear who he's going to sell off. What slaves does he have to sell what slaves he's going to buy so she could tell the other enslaved, hey, he's going to be selling us soon.

Make yourself look more profitable. Make yourself look like he wouldn't want to sell you off. Like she wanted to be useful to her people. And he caught her listening.

And when he caught her Listening. He cut off her ear for that as punishment. And so she would cover her head in a green turban to hide the cut off ear.

Now, could she have been a mistress? Yes, because we know that that kind of exploitation happened to women then they had no agency. They were enslaved.

And so that could be part of the true story. But because the next part isn't accurate, I don't know how much any of it is accurate. There's never been a. An act.

There's never been a historian who's ever been able to pinpoint a enslaved woman named Chloe owned by the Woodruffs. Doesn't mean she wasn't, because those records are hard to find and they're not accurate.

And they weren't kept very well because they're considered property. And.

Scott: 00:11:30

Yeah.

Jenn: 00:11:30

And so. But when Chloe's ear is cut off and she loses favor in the house, another woman comes in and starts baking and stuff in the house.

So Chloe thinks if she can poison the wife and children and nurse them back to health, that she could be looked at favorably.

Like, I'll get them sick and then I'll nurse them back to health, and everyone will think I'm the savior, and I'll get my place back in the house, which is. I wouldn't say better work, but more. It's less manual labor work. And. And I. Maybe I can be looked at favorably if I help save the life of the.

The head mistress and her children. Now it's supposedly backfires and she puts too much in and they eat the cake and they. They all die.

And then the enslaved are so mad because now all of their lives are in jeopardy. He wants to sell all of them that they hang her, okay? She's. She's hanged by her own people, and they throw her body into the mystery.

Scott: 00:12:31

And that's actually. And that's why I asked, because there's. It's. It's difficult to parse through the different things you kind of find online about, like, her story.

And there's kind of multiple versions, which makes sense to your point, because there was. This isn't technically historically accurate, right?

Or not necessarily true history because the family died of yellow fever, not actually of this other supposed event. Maybe it happened and maybe they didn't. Maybe they got sick and were fine.

But on the Unsolved Mysteries, which was kind of fun to dig up, and I actually found some old clips from this. Probably, what, the 80s? Yeah, it was probably the 80s.

Unsolved Mysteries, classic guy in the trench coat, you know, and he's talking in his, in his voice and all this stuff. But they, they have reenactors in the Unsolved Mysteries show. And that's actually what they're showing in that.

It's her with the green turban and it's, you know, the other enslaved, you know, kind of pulling her out with, you know, torches and all this stuff. And they show, you know, them throwing a rope over, kind of reenacting. Obviously not all the way through the actual hanging, but they do show that.

So that was kind of, like you said, the prevalent story that has continued on from the myrtles.

Jenn: 00:13:40

Yes. So. And because it's such a popular story, it's because it has evidence behind it. So the house is eventually sold to different people.

ually a family buys it in the: 1980

And as they take pictures in the back of the house and I show you the location and point it out to you.

Where the main house meets that gift shop, which was what Bradford originally built when he first move there with that little gift shop area, because he needs a little place to live while he builds his main house. This is a 22 room main house that he builds. There's a little like walk through, dog trot, whatever you want to call it.

And in that part of the picture, it looks like a woman is walking in that space.

Scott: 00:14:38

Yeah, it's like the silhouette.

Jenn: 00:14:39

Like a silhouette. And when they. So much so that when the insurance people saw it, they said, you're not supposed to have any people in these pictures.

And they were like, what do you mean? And they looked at it and they're like, there's a person right there. And they're like, no, that was. There's no people here.

And so they're able to look at the height and it would have been about a 4 foot 8 person. And it looks like a woman, African American woman with a turban.

And even if you look up on the porch sitting outside, it looks like two children are sitting outside dangling their feet off of the roof of the porch. So it all lends into this story of the children being poisoned and dying. It could even be the yellow fever children that died there.

And they still hunt. But that Chloe's story was kind of cemented with that photograph. And so now when you visit there, Chloe's story is probably the most prominent story.

There's another story that's pretty prominent too, but women aren't Supposed to wear hoop earrings and things because Chloe will take them, take them off of you. You won't even realize it. And then you'll find them by the door when you leave. So they even told us that before we visit.

Don't, don't wear anything like shiny. She likes to take those things. Now there's other reported deaths there. You know, there's tuberculosis. Bradford dies of tuberculosis.

Children die of yellow fever. We've talked about yellow fever a couple times on the, the show. It's very prominent where water is. So Mississippi mosquito, yellow fever.

That's how the wife and children die there. But there was a murder that happened on the porch and that murder happens.

And that really is the only real incident that can be a hundred percent proved with accuracy.

Scott: 00:16:25

Confirmed.

Jenn: 00:16:26

Confirmed, yeah. So the story is that the person was shot and then stumbled back into the house and died on the 17th stair.

And so there's a lot of legend about the 17th staircase of the main staircase. Now the accurate story is the person died right there on the porch.

Scott: 00:16:49

So I was gonna say, if someone gets shot, I don't think they're gonna go be like, I need to get upstairs.

Jenn: 00:16:55

Yeah. So it's William Drew Winter. He's the only victim verified murder in the house.

He shot on the front porch of the main house, according to legend, staggers, crawls up the stairs, collapsed on the 17th step. So people have claimed to see ghosts up to the 17th step.

And then like you had said, the mirror in that same front area where the main staircase is with the 17 step is that mirror where they see like the handprints of children. It looks like you can see the mirror.

It looks like, you know, sometimes when a, a mirror starts to get stained from long time cleaning and things, it looks like little stains in the mirror. The other stories that are there is there's a picture of a Confederate soldier. It's a, it's a portrait. They found it in the attic.

You can see it there. They say if you stare at it long enough, it'll start to grimace at you and like scowl at you. They found a sword.

They found a saber, a Confederate saber out in the front lawn and in the ground. So that is there. And then there's a portrait of one of the daughters in the house that's across from the Confederate portrait.

And that was done after her death. So it's one of those death portraits.

So after people had died, sometimes they were, you know, they're going to bury them, but they never had a chance to make, to document Them and document the way they look.

So there's a lot of photographs done like that where they sit people up and they try to open their eyes and they take photographs of people to not forget how they look. This was one of those same things, but a portrait. So there's a couple stories that kind of circulate there at the Myrtles.

And it's, it's made its mark because of those stories. So much so that you can stay there. It's one of those places that you can rent. They have the main bedroom of the 17 steps.

There's a main bedroom there that you can stay. And it's. I think it's named for that gentleman who was killed, the William Drew Winter Room. And. Or you can stay.

There's a back staircase with more bedrooms and everything's ensuite with a bathroom. But people freak out. There's so many stories online of people not being able to stay the night and stuff like that.

Scott: 00:19:11

I always appreciate, I mean, people who are way into that stuff, right. Because they'll try to go stay at the Lizzie Borden house or they'll stay at this house.

There's that one in San Diego that's super haunted that you went to one time. I forget what the name of it.

Jenn: 00:19:23

Yeah, the McDory house.

Scott: 00:19:25

Yeah, something like that. And more. All the props to places like this that can embrace these stories and use that as a pole. Right. As kind of a tourist draw.

But there was a fair amount of people there and it was like, if you want to just go see like a typical southern plantation style home, it's a beautiful place to go see as well. It's not like Oak Alley. I mean that's, that's a incredibly unique and world class, you know, kind of beautiful plantation. But it's, it's a neat spot.

Jenn: 00:19:55

It is. And like I said, It's 22 rooms. So they have a very nice huge examples of dining rooms and women's sitting rooms and men's sitting rooms and.

And it has a nice gift shop. They actually sell whiskey there, which I bought whiskey for Scott there.

great restaurant there called: 1796

It's the, the, you know, eating. It's having a, you know, fine dining is having a nice meal and, and the stories and if you want to stay the night and yeah, it's an.

Scott: 00:20:33

Easy place to make a weekend of it.

Jenn: 00:20:35

Yes.

Scott: 00:20:35

Right. It's.

It's definitely one of those spots where if you like that kind of thing and you want to go see some plantations, you know, some old school antebellum plantations in the south, see a little bit of history.

We always kind of joke that I finally understood after numerous years why you liked going on ghost tours so much is because of the history that's tied to those. And it took me probably a decade that. But there is history tied with all of this stuff, so it's a fun thing to go do.

Jenn: 00:21:00

Yeah. So it was definitely a place. It was neat to have seen it on Unsolved Mysteries as a kid and then actually see it in real life and be there.

And what's really funny to me is I kind of stumbled on the front porch, not knowing there was a sign there that said, don't go on the front porch. Because I went the sideway and I couldn't see the sign. And so I'm on the front porch and I'm talking about the blue.

But I'm at the spot where the only confirmed murder actually happened in the house. Like, I stand there, and so it's kind of funny. The other stories that are. That are stories that are legends.

I don't stay in the house, and I didn't see anything in the mirror, and I didn't feel anything on the 17th step, and I didn't wear any hoop earrings. But I do show you the location where the photograph was taken, so you can actually see the. The.

The spot, like where they're standing, and then you can see the photograph. It's available, and Scott will probably put a link to it so you can look at it as well. It's.

It's one of those ones that it's very common to look at and see, and they even show it there at the house. They're showing you exactly where it is and what it looks like. So if you believe that story, it's a great evidence of that story.

Scott: 00:22:15

Yeah, yeah. No, it was. It was super neat. Another beautiful southern home, and those are always fun to visit, I think, kind of no matter what you're doing.

We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into the haunted history of the Myrtles Plantation. If these tales sent a shiver down your spine, be sure to subscribe and tune in next time for more untold stories from history.

But until then, stay curious and we'll talk to you next time.

Jenn: 00:22:40

Thank you.

Scott: 00:22:46

This has been a Walk with History production. Talk with History is created and hosted by me Scott Benny episode researched by Jennifer Benny.

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