On U.S. Highway 61, just north of St. Francisville, Louisiana, stands a pale green house under moss-hung live oaks. It is called the Myrtles Plantation, and it is marketed as one of America’s most haunted homes — twelve ghosts, ten murders, and one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken.
The house is real, and its history is real. But the most famous ghost in the house has no paper trail at all — and the records, when you read them, tell a quieter, sadder story than the legend.
The house
The Myrtles was built in 1796 by General David Bradford, a leader of the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania who had fled to what was then Spanish West Florida. He built on about 600 acres and called the place Laurel Grove. He lived there alone until President John Adams pardoned him in 1799.
The house passed to Clark Woodruff and his wife Sara Bradford Woodruff, then to the Stirling family, who enlarged it from 1834 and renamed it the Myrtles, after the crape myrtles growing nearby. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 6 September 1978. Today it operates as a bed and breakfast, with evening mystery tours and a restaurant.
It was also a working plantation, built and sustained by enslaved labour. The 1820 census records five enslaved people on the property; by 1830 there were thirty-two. That fact is part of the house’s history, and part of why its stories carry weight.
The legend of Chloe
The most famous ghost at the Myrtles is Chloe, an enslaved woman said to have served the household of Judge Clark Woodruff. According to the legend, Chloe was forced into a sexual relationship with Woodruff, was caught listening at a keyhole, and had one ear cut off as punishment. She hid the wound under a green turban. In revenge, she baked oleander into a birthday cake, killing Woodruff’s wife Sara and two of their children. The other enslaved people, fearing retribution, hanged Chloe and threw her body into the Mississippi River.
It is a powerful story. It is also, as far as the records show, invented.
No Woodruff inventory or holding list that researchers have published names an enslaved woman called Chloe, Cloe, or Cleo. And Sara Woodruff and two of her children — Sarah Matilda, James, and Cornelia — did not die of poisoning. They died of yellow fever, in 1823–24, as the house’s own official history records.
The green-turbaned figure is older than the name Chloe. Earlier owners described an older, matronly Black woman in a green headdress who tucked guests in — a very different figure from the young girl of the modern legend. The name, the ear, and the murder were added later, after the house opened to paying guests.
The sceptical investigator Joe Nickell spent a night at the Myrtles in August 2001, examining the claims. He concluded that Chloe was “fakelore” — a writer’s invention, not a person recovered from the archive. The historian Tiya Miles, in Tales from the Haunted South (2015), treats the legend with similar care, as a story that says more about the tellers than about the past.
The photograph
In 1992, the owner Teeta Moss took a photograph between the main house and an outbuilding, for insurance purposes. The image appeared to show a figure in period dress — a woman in what looked like a turban and a long dress — standing where no one had been. The house has long presented the photograph as Chloe, and has claimed that National Geographic examined and verified the image.
No independent verification has been published. The photograph is a real picture of a figure in a frame; calling her Chloe is the owners’ caption, not an identification. What the image shows, if it shows anything unusual, is unexplained — but an unexplained figure is not evidence of a named person who left no record of existing.
The one confirmed murder
Of the ten murders the tours attribute to the house, the records confirm one: William Drew Winter. Winter, a Maine-born lawyer, married Sarah Mulford Stirling at the house in June 1852. On the evening of 26 January 1871, a man on horseback rode up to the house, called for a lawyer, and shot Winter in the chest at his own door. Grace Episcopal Church in St. Francisville recorded the death in a single line: “shot at his own door 26 Jan. at half past seven o’clock.”
The legend says Winter staggered inside, climbed the main staircase, and died on the seventeenth step in his wife’s arms. Guests still report hearing footsteps on the stairs that stop at the seventeenth step. The church record puts him at his own door — the staircase is the legend’s addition, not the record’s.
Winter’s death was real, and it was violent, and no one was ever charged with it. That is enough to haunt a house without inventing nine more murders.
What the evidence says
- Documented: The Myrtles Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana, was built in 1796 by General David Bradford (a Whiskey Rebellion leader) as Laurel Grove, on about 600 acres in what was then Spanish West Florida. The Stirling family enlarged it from 1834 and renamed it the Myrtles. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 6 September 1978.
- Documented: The only verified murder in the house is William Drew Winter, shot at his own door on 26 January 1871 at about 7:30 p.m. Grace Episcopal Church recorded the death. The legend that he died on the seventeenth step of the staircase is not in the record.
- Disputed: The Chloe legend — an enslaved woman who had her ear cut off, wore a green turban, and poisoned Sara Woodruff and two children with oleander cake — has no supporting record. No published Woodruff inventory names a Chloe; Sara Matilda, James, and Cornelia Woodruff died of yellow fever in 1823–24. Investigator Joe Nickell, after an overnight stay in August 2001, concluded Chloe was fictitious.
- Claimed: A 1992 photograph taken by owner Teeta Moss appears to show a turbaned figure between buildings. The house claims National Geographic verified the image; no independent verification has been published.
- Documented: The house claims about twelve ghosts and ten murders; the records support one murder.
What remains unknown
Whether anything unexplained happens at the Myrtles is a matter of testimony — guests do report experiences, and the house’s atmosphere is genuinely eerie. But the central ghost story, Chloe, has no paper trail, and the central murder count is nine higher than the record. The Myrtles is a real house with a real history of slavery, disease, and one unsolved killing. The legend is larger than the truth — and, in the end, the truth is haunting enough.