Myrtles Plantation

The Myrtles stands among live oaks outside St. Francisville, in the cotton country of West Feliciana Parish. David Bradford, a leader of Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion who fled south, built the original house, which he called Laurel Grove, in 1796. In 1817 his daughter Sara Mathilda married Clark Woodruff, a lawyer, who took over the plantation. In 1834 it passed to Ruffin Gray Stirling, who bought the property together with the people enslaved on it, renamed it the Myrtles and in the 1850s nearly doubled the house into the long-galleried mansion seen today. Its wealth, like that of every plantation along this stretch of the Mississippi, was produced by enslaved men, women and children whose names are largely absent from the stories now told there.

The house’s famous ghost story concerns “Chloe,” described as an enslaved woman forced into a sexual relationship with Clark Woodruff, punished by having an ear cut off for eavesdropping, who then poisoned a birthday cake with oleander, killing Sara Woodruff and two of her daughters, and was hanged by the other enslaved workers. Visitors are told that she wanders the house in a green turban to hide her wound, and the plantation sells a 1992 photograph said to show her between two buildings. Some versions call her “Cleo.”

The historical record contradicts nearly every element. Researcher Troy Taylor, working from records in St. Francisville, found that the Woodruffs’ property records list the people they enslaved and that no one named Chloe or Cleo appears among them. Sara Woodruff died on 21 July 1823 and her children James and Cornelia in July and September 1824, of yellow fever – not poison; their sister Octavia lived to old age, and Clark Woodruff died peacefully in 1851. The legend itself can be traced: a nameless older woman in a green bonnet in a Williams family story; a ghost narrative promoted by owner Marjorie Munson in the 1950s; and the ear, the cake and the poison added in the 1970s, spread nationally by LIFE magazine in 1980 and by later owners who ran the house as a bed and breakfast.

The Myrtles is often said to have seen ten murders. Only one is documented: William Drew Winter, Ruffin Stirling’s son-in-law, was shot on the front gallery by a man on horseback in January 1871 and died there; the case was never resolved. The tale that he staggered inside and died on the seventeenth stair is an embellishment, and claims of murdered Union soldiers, a stabbed Stirling son and a killed caretaker have no support in burial or court records. Historian Tiya Miles has argued that the Chloe and Cleo stories are fundamentally stories of violence against Black women, built on old stereotypes, and that they stand in for – and distract from – the real, unrecorded suffering of the people enslaved at the Myrtles. That is the history visitors deserve to hear.

Guests and staff report a woman in a green turban or headwrap, children seen on the gallery and in mirrors, handprints said to appear in a hall mirror, footsteps on the stairs, a piano playing by itself, the smell of tobacco, and a man staggering up the stairs. Visitors photograph the grounds hoping to repeat the famous 1992 “Chloe” image.

The front gallery where William Winter was shot, the main staircase, the entrance-hall mirror, the gentlemen’s and ladies’ parlours and the guest rooms of the main house. Evening “mystery tours” focus on these spots.

The Myrtles has appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures and the 2024 series Files of the Unexplained, and has long been promoted as “America’s most haunted house” – the phrase former owner Frances Kermeen used in the subtitle of her book about it. Historian Tiya Miles analyses it in Tales from the Haunted South (2015) as a case study in how ghost tourism distorts the history of slavery.