The Myrtles Plantation

by Ghostly Enconter

  Jim must have picked up on this antiquated attitude, too. Later that night, we were back in our guestroom at the Cottage Plantation. He was sitting on the flowered lounge chair by the dormer window, and I was sprawled across the huge four-poster bed.

  “You realize that if we want this place, we will have to be married. John L. made it very clear that he only wants to sell to a family. He thinks we’re already married.”

  “I know.” I grimaced.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?” I asked, avoiding the issue.

  “Do you want to get married?” he asked.

  Jim caught me totally off guard. While we had never said we were married, we had never corrected anyone who assumed that we were. The South was much less progressive than the West Coast, and I had already encountered discrimination as a young, single woman purchasing property in the much more liberal state of California. We both knew it might be difficult, if not impossible, for a staunchy Louisiana businessman to take any female purchaser seriously. Jim would have to represent both of us in the negotiations.

  It wasn’t the first time that Jim had proposed. I was the one who didn’t want to get married. Partly because I had been down that road once before and failed, and partly because there would be no children of our own, I didn’t feel the need to sanctify our relationship. We had been together for four years, and I loved him very much, but I was terrified by the “M” word. Yet I knew he was right—we would probably have to get married if we wanted the Myrtles, or at least it would make the business dealings a lot easier. I looked at this man who was about to give up his security, his job, the life that he knew, and move thousands of miles from his children and friends to buy the house with me. With tears streaming down my face, I ran over to hug him, nearly knocking him over as I embraced him. I loved him so much. It’s just that I was so afraid of marriage.

  The next day Betty Jo prepared a purchase offer for the house and all the antiques, representing ourselves as man and wife. Since we had already decided to do it, there was no sense in creating unnecessary concern. It was torture waiting to find out if John L. accepted the offer. I called Betty Jo almost every hour to see if he had responded. Twenty-two excruciating hours later, we got our reply. The offer was accepted! We were ecstatic! The Myrtles Plantation would soon be our home!

  The funny thing was that I wasn’t even worried about financing. I had recently been turned down for a mortgage for far less than we would have to borrow to get the Myrtles, and yet I had no doubt that somehow it would all just work out.

  John L. invited us to come over that evening to celebrate. As the car twisted and turned up the dark lane, I was reminded of The Hobbit. The lighting gave the house a mystical look. Inside, the atmosphere seemed even more fairy-tale-like. The huge chandeliers had all been dimmed, and there were over one hundred twinkling lights casting a spell throughout the home. Dozens of real candles flickered from elegant gold candelabra and wall sconces set in every room. It felt surreal.

  John L. led us into the gentlemen’s parlor. This time, there was a bottle of champagne waiting for us.

  “Isn’t this candlelight marvelous,” John L. commented. “It makes everyone look thirty.” Jim, very young-looking for thirty-seven, was eating it up, and Betty Jo, older than Jim, was obviously flattered as well, but at twenty-eight, I didn’t appreciate the compliment. However, nothing could shake me off my cloud. I had so many dreams for the house, and so many questions.

  “Can I look around again?” I asked John L., dying to see the rooms once more.

  “Why, of course, my dear, feel free.”

  The way he talked amused me. I had not heard expressions like his except in old-time horror movies.

  I wandered off by myself into the ladies parlor, and through the dining room, the entry hall, the French bedroom, and the private quarters downstairs. Back in the gentlemen’s parlor, I stood at the entrance to the gaming room, hesitant to enter the room. I was very drawn to the original staircase, accessed from that room, but the staring eyes of the sentry in the painting prevented me from passing through. Reluctantly, I sat down and joined the others.

  Whether it was the fact that the purchase offer had been signed and sealed, the late hour, or perhaps the second bottle of champagne that enticed John L. to finally admit to any supernatural occurrences at the Myrtles, I felt a sense of both relief and surprise by his sudden admission. “Now that you’ve agreed to buy the place, and you will find out soon enough, there have been a few incidences.”

  “What kind of incidences?” Jim asked.

  “Footsteps. Whistling. The kind of noises you would expect from an old home.”

  “Anything else?” I prodded.

  “Voices. A woman’s voice usually.”

  I shuddered.

  “But don’t worry,” he added quickly. “There is nothing frightening here.”

  If that were so, why had he tried to keep it secret? But I was so ecstatic to be moving to the Myrtles that it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  We sat in the parlor until the wee hours of the morning. I wanted to stay on forever. The next day, we were to fly home to California. Although our return was just three months away, I knew it would feel like an eternity.

  From the airport in New Orleans the next morning, I stopped to make a quick phone call to my friend Charles in San Jose to tell him the news, before rushing to the gate to catch our plane. It was hard to believe that we had arrived at this very same airport just several days before. So much had happened in those few days. My life had changed forever.

  On the plane back home, I ruminated about the plantation. I was lost in visions of the Myrtles past, and the Myrtles present. I was surprised that my feelings were so intense. It was just a house, after all. Since the moment Betty Jo first mentioned the place, I felt like I was in a dream state, transfixed.

  As we stepped off the plane in San Jose, I felt a jolt. I was momentarily stunned, as if a connection had shorted, or a spell had been broken. Why would a house affect me like that? But the feeling vanished as I stepped outside, and into the cool, dry California night.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next few weeks in California were a whirlwind of activity, as we put our properties on the market and planned our wedding. Jim and I were married six weeks later at a small private ceremony in my parents’ home. My mother cringed every time I told someone that we “had to get married.” I’m sure a few people were counting the days and watching my belly, but my baby was the Myrtles.

  I thought about little else but the Myrtles. As Christmas came and went, I mentally decorated my new home with fragrant green garlands with bright red ribbons draped over every mantel, abundant wreaths and centerpieces of fruit and nuts, and a towering pine tree holding court in the entry hall, decked in strands of cranberries, popcorn, and candies, with tiny gifts and candles peeking between its boughs.

  Although Jim was pleased with our new venture, he didn’t seem nearly as excited as I was. He had little or no interest in antiques and history, but he did enjoy partying and people, so the inn and tavern were right up his alley.

  With Jim back at work every day, my friend Charles Mandrake became my greatest coconspirator. Charles had been watching our Victorian properties for us while we were traveling. When I called him from New Orleans to tell him we had just purchased a plantation called the Myrtles, he immediately asked, sight unseen, if he could move with us and become our curator. Everything was falling into place. Now if only qualifying for the mortgage and selling our California properties would work out as well.

  Charles seemed almost as excited as I was about moving to Louisiana. It was only one year ago that he had first called me in response to one of my newspaper ads under “Apartments for Rent” in the San Jose Mercury News: “Charming Victorian furnished with antiques and lace.” The frilly ad attracted mostly women, and I explained to him that all the renters in that place were female.

  After checki
ng with all the ladies I agreed to let him come over. When I opened the door there stood a nerdy-looking fellow in polyester pants (ugh!), long, unkempt hair, and dark, thick glasses that magnified his big brown doe eyes, making them appear too big for his head. The instant our eyes met, I felt like I had known him before, and I immediately liked him.

  Charles later told me he felt the same connection when we first met. He took the apartment, and before long, he became one of my best buddies, and he was managing all my properties for me.

  We shared many things—a love of antiques, history, and music. I had studied the violin from the time I was eight, and Charles was a piano virtuoso. Originally from Ohio, after graduating from Kent State University, he decided to move away from home. For some reason, two towns captured his interest: San Jose and Baton Rouge. He claimed it was the sound of the names that drew him to them. Was it merely a coincidence that we met in San Jose and would move together to the Myrtles, just a stone’s throw up the river from Baton Rouge?

  Charles and I spent hours poring over copies of historical documents and listening to a recording of the house tour that John L. sent back with me. The Myrtles’ history was fascinating. According to John L.’s information, General David Bradford, who led the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, built the plantation in 1796 high atop a rolling hill that was once sacred Indian grounds. Barely escaping George Washington’s troops, he hopped aboard a river barge and fled to what is now Louisiana. With a Spanish land grant he purchased five hundred prime acres at $1.40 an acre and built his new home.

  Bradford’s eldest daughter, Sarah Mathilda, inherited the plantation after the General’s death and married Judge Clarke Woodruff. She had met Clarke when he came to study law under her father. Her death is one of the famous murders at the Myrtles. In 1823 Sarah and two of her daughters were poisoned by one of the servants. Heartbroken, the Judge stayed on at the Myrtles for another decade, until he moved to New Orleans with his only surviving daughter, Mary Octavia, and became the first circuit judge for District Three. In 1834 he sold the plantation to the Ruffin Gray Stirling family of Scotland.

  By then, St. Francisville had become a bustling river city. Accounts of Ruffin Stirling portray him as a kind and jovial fellow, most remembered for his kindness, his entertaining, and much to his disdain, the time he fell off a steamboat into the Mississippi River and almost drowned.

  Stirling increased the Myrtles acreage to over five thousand acres and bought several hundred more slaves. Planted with cotton and indigo, the property extended all the way to Bayou Sara on the Mississippi River. Ruffin Gray and Mary Catherine had nine children, eight boys and one girl. It was a happy and prosperous time at the Myrtles.

  It was during this period that the house was renovated, nearly doubling in size, with the addition of a massive entry hall, two more rooms downstairs, and a formal staircase leading to the second floor, with another large hall and a magnificent suite added upstairs. Stirling brought in European artisans to create the faux bois (false wood) finishes on doorways and fireplace mantels, the hand-painted French-cross-patterned glass in the entry hall, and the intricate plaster friezework on the ceilings throughout the downstairs. From Europe he imported the finest chandeliers and ornamental ironwork that could be found. The Myrtles was truly a showplace.

  The history that John L. supplied ended with the Stirlings and left lots of unanswered questions: What happened to them and their nine children? How did the War affect the Myrtles, and the town? And why did the servant poison Sarah Woodruff?

  John L. had told me that seven of the Stirling sons, like most of the young men in St. Francisville, went off to fight in the War, and that only one of them, Lewis, had returned. How horribly sad. What about the other children, what became of them? Had the Stirling family or its heirs eventually sold the Myrtles, or was it lost in the War or during Reconstruction? Who owned it in this century? I wanted to learn about every detail of the Myrtles’ history, about every owner who ever walked its halls.

  Charles and I went to the San Jose Library hoping to find some clues, but there was little information about the South. I couldn’t wait to get back to Louisiana, where a wealth of information would be available. I planned to search the libraries, LSU archives, the Historical Society, the courthouse, newspapers, and church records. For now, however, the gaps in the history that we had been provided continued to haunt me, and I became fixated on learning the truth.

  CHAPTER 8

  I felt a strong connection to the house, especially the older section. I couldn’t shake the powerful feeling of déjà vu I experienced when I peered up the back staircase, and I had the strangest feeling that someone (or something) wanted me to come up those stairs. Then there was the dream . . .

  Not long after I got back to California, I started having a recurring dream. It wasn’t scary, but I found it odd that I would have the same dream night after night. In the dream, I was at the Myrtles, though the time period was much different. I would slowly walk up the steep back stairs, pausing in the massive hall before continuing to the end of the hall. I would stop before a door I did not recognize. Sometimes I would pace outside the door. I don’t remember if I knew what was beyond the door or not, but I never opened it, I would just stand there transfixed by it. As the dream would end, I was still in the hall.

  I felt a little bit silly that I was becoming obsessed with something that was two thousand miles away and two hundred years in the past. The dreams, and my feelings, were possessing me.

  Jim just laughed at me when I tried to talk to him about it, so I stopped confiding my thoughts to anyone but Charles, though I suspect that even Charles may have had his doubts about me.

  “Okay,” Charles began when he called me one evening. “In these dreams you have, what are you wearing?”

  I’m sure he expected me to say that I had on an elegant hoop-skirted ball gown, Scarlett O’Hara style. Actually that was the first image to cross my conscious mind, but from somewhere in the depths of my memory I looked down and could see myself in much different attire.

  “I don’t know why, but I was always in my nightgown,” I told Charles, puzzled.

  He asked me to describe my nightgown.

  “It had a high waist, fitting tightly on the top, with a long, flowing skirt. I almost always wore white, but occasionally I wore soft pastels, pale yellows and pinks.” I smiled because although I loved yellow and white; my mother would never let me wear those colors as a child because she said they washed out my pale complexion and wheat-colored hair.

  Charles was astounded. “I thought for sure you would tell me a hoop skirt, but what you described is identical to the Empire dress styles of eighteen-ten through eighteen-twenty, the years that Sarah Mathilda had been a young woman at the Myrtles!”

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  He admitted that he had spent the better part of the day researching historical costumes at the library, just to prove that my imagination had run wild. There was no way I would have known what Sarah would have worn, and even Charles had to admit that be it glimpses of a former life, or just some kind of vision into the past, my descriptions were uncannily consistent with the era.

  “Wow, maybe you were Sarah in a past life!” Charles offered.

  I felt so much empathy for her, so much compassion. But a past life? Yet the coincidences certainly presented a case for the possibility.

  CHAPTER 9

  It seemed as if history itself was beckoning me back to St. Francisville. I planned to return before March 21, in time for the annual Audubon Pilgrimage, when the entire town dons period clothing and celebrates the life of John James Audubon, the famous artist and ornithologist who once resided in St. Francisville.

  In 1821 Audubon was hired to teach Miss Eliza Pirrie of Oakley Plantation how to draw. When he was not tutoring Eliza, he roamed the woods looking for birds, carefully killing and stuffing the birds in order to observe each intricate detail of the carcass.

  Audubon left
St. Francisville just four months after his arrival, due to a misunderstanding with Miss Pirrie. His short tenure was very lucrative, however, having painted thirty-two bird portraits while at Oakley. These paintings were incorporated into his most famous work, The Birds of America, which was published between 1827 and 1838.

  Although he lived at Oakley for such a brief time, he is touted as St. Francisville’s own, and an annual festival is held in his honor. The entire town participates, donning Empire-style costumes, and each day of the Pilgrimage is full of historic reenactments and tours of the local plantations. One local, Bill Caldwell, dresses as Audubon each year, greeting people and playing an old jig on his violin. Young girls in their period attire perform at Grace Church hall, and in the streets. Along with plantation tours there are historic demonstrations of such necessary skills as candlemaking and horseshoeing. At night, historic Royal Street is illuminated by candlelight, and the historic homes on this street are open for a very special nighttime tour, offering entertainment and refreshments of Audubon’s day. It’s the biggest event of the year in St. Francisville. John L. insisted I come for the festivities and stay on as his guest until the closing, just a couple of weeks later.

  Finally the move was just one day away! I was excited beyond words. It wasn’t long after Jim left for work that afternoon (as a member of management, he worked a rotating shift supervising scientific computer operations at a large aerospace company) that Charles appeared on my doorstep to share our last night together in San Jose. We sat in the living room and rambled on and on about all our plans for the Myrtles.