Is Myrtles Plantation haunted? The Chloe story, checked

What the Myrtles Plantation ghost story says

The Myrtles Plantation ghost story that guides tell centres on Chloe, said to have been enslaved by Clark and Sarah Woodruff in the 1820s. In the telling summarised by a review of the historian Tiya Miles's book on Southern ghost tourism, she is an enslaved teenager forced into the main house by an enslaver who abuses her, later charges her with eavesdropping, has her ear maimed and banishes her from the house. To win back her place she bakes oleander into a birthday cake, in some tellings meaning only to make the family ill. Sarah and two daughters die, and Chloe is hanged. Since then, the story goes, she has walked the house in a green turban.

Other ghosts appear on the evening tours, but Chloe is the one who made the Myrtles plantation haunted in the public mind, and her story makes claims about real people that records can check.

Who built Myrtles Plantation, and how

Who built Myrtles Plantation is a matter of record. General David Bradford, a Pennsylvania judge and businessman, was a leader of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. When it collapsed he fled the federal army and arrived by boat at Bayou Sara, then Spanish territory, in 1796, according to the house's National Register of Historic Places nomination, entered in 1978. The nomination gives both 1796 and 1797 for the first part of the house; the plantation's own history uses 1796. The nomination calls Bradford's plantation Richland; the house's timeline calls it Laurel Grove.

How was Myrtles Plantation built? The nomination describes a long, low timber-framed house of a story and a half, sided in clapboard and built in two stages. Bradford's part forms the western six bays of the front. Ruffin Grey Stirling, who bought the property in 1834 and renamed it The Myrtles, almost doubled the house in a mid-nineteenth-century renovation, adding a southward extension with a wide stair hall, three more rooms and the cast-iron galleries, the front one 107 feet long.

It was a cotton and indigo plantation, worked by enslaved people. The Woodruff family's property records, kept as public records in St. Francisville, list the people the family held.

Where the Chloe story started

The real Woodruffs are well documented. Clark Woodruff studied law with Bradford and married his daughter, Sarah Mathilda, on 19 November 1817. The ghost-history writer Troy Taylor, working from research by David Wiseheart, gives the deaths the legend borrows: Sarah died of yellow fever on 21 July 1823, her son James of the same disease on 15 July 1824, and her daughter Cornelia two months later. The plantation's own timeline also gives yellow fever as the likely cause. A third child, Octavia, survived, married and lived a long life. Woodruff sold the plantation to Stirling on 1 January 1834.

Set against those records, the legend falls apart. The story kills a wife and two daughters on one day; the real family lost a wife, a son and a daughter over fourteen months, to an epidemic. Taylor and Wiseheart searched the Woodruff property records for Chloe herself and found no enslaved woman of that name, nor of Cleo, the name in some versions. Taylor's conclusion: "Chloe simply did not exist." Nothing supports Woodruff's supposed affair or the mutilation either.

Taylor traces the ghost to the 1950s. A granddaughter of the Williams family, owners from 1889, recalled her aunts joking about an unnamed ghost, an old woman in a green bonnet. Marjorie Munson, who bought the house in 1953 according to the plantation's timeline, heard local talk of odd happenings and asked around, and that, Taylor writes, is when the legend of Chloe began.

How the haunted reputation grew

In the 1970s, under new owners, the story gained the poisoned cake and the severed ear, Taylor writes, and LIFE magazine repeated the poisoning in November 1980. In the 1980s James and Frances Kermeen Myers turned the house into a bed and breakfast. In 1992 Frances published The Myrtles Plantation: The True Story of America's Most Haunted House, and the Moss family bought the property.

The photograph most often offered as proof dates from that year: the plantation's timeline credits Mrs. Moss with the famous 1992 picture said to show Chloe. Taylor describes the image the house sells on postcards, a cloudy figure between two of the buildings, captured by accident by an owner. Television kept the Myrtles Plantation mystery going. Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode on the house on 1 August 2001, according to IMDb, and in December 2017 The American Conservative's Rod Dreher posted a guests' photo that seemed to show a figure in a window.

Today the Moss family runs it as an inn with 20 guest rooms, a restaurant and evening mystery tours seven nights a week.

Which details hold up

• The house: real, begun by David Bradford in 1796 or 1797 and almost doubled by Ruffin Stirling after 1834.
• The Woodruff deaths: real, in 1823 and 1824, and attributed to yellow fever, not poison. A daughter the legend kills grew up.
• Chloe: no record. The Woodruff property records list the people the family enslaved, and no Chloe or Cleo is among them.
• The one documented killing: William Winter, Stirling's son-in-law, was shot on the front porch and died on 26 January 1871; as far as records show, his killer was never identified.
• The photograph: a blurred figure. Nothing in it identifies anyone, and the person it is said to show has left no trace in the records.

The invention has a cost. In Tales from the Haunted South (University of North Carolina Press), Tiya Miles reads Chloe as a set of stock figures written by white storytellers and reshaped for each listener; her reviewer in the University of Texas's E3W Review of Books quotes her line that Chloe "can appear as any visitor's fantasy." The people the Woodruffs actually enslaved are named in the property records. The one visitors hear about was made up, and cast as a poisoner.

Common questions

Verdict

Myrtles Plantation explained: a real Louisiana house from the 1790s with a real history, including slavery, epidemic deaths and one unsolved killing, onto which the twentieth century grafted an invented villain. What guests feel at night cannot be tested. The story that made the house famous can be, and it fails: no Chloe in the records, no poisoning, and deaths the family's history puts down to yellow fever. Real or Legend files the Chloe story as debunked.