“Do black kids and white kids socialize at all?” I realized that the groups of children I had seen playing were either all white, or all black, and I certainly hadn’t seen any of the biracial pairings that were commonplace in California.
Lillie May stopped sweeping and leaned on her broom, head down. “Oh, no, ma’am. If they dos, theys ends up dead. Last year, twice, black boys was found down by the low-water bridge. They had been stripped butt-naked, and boths times a hose was goin’ froms the exhaust into the car. They calleds it an accident.”
One of the things I noticed first about Louisiana was the large black population and the pronounced class system. It was totally different from California, and I was appalled and saddened. I could not imagine what it must be like to be black in the South. But did I even know what it was like to be black in California? I had led a pretty sheltered life. There had been no blacks in my upper-
middle-class neighborhood, and very few non-Caucasians, for that matter. Lillie May’s experiences could not have been more foreign to me if she had been raised in a different country.
“I hads fourteen chilrens,” Lillie May continued, standing up proudly. “I had nine of them befores I found out where they comes from. I always thoughts they came from walkin’ through the cabbage patch.”
I looked her in the eye to see if she was pulling my leg, but she looked totally sincere.
“I was fourteen when I hads my first baby. I worked in them fields until the day I delivered,” she boasted, as she started down the stairs.
“Wow, Lillie May, you are an amazing woman,” I gushed. As Lillie May continued talking about her life, I continued to be amazed, and I couldn’t help but admire her strength and courage.
Later, we sat in the gentlemen’s parlor nibbling on leftover biscuits and honey. “Tell me all about the ghosts,” I urged. “I know you must have experienced them.”
“Oh, I’ve experienced them, all right. There is one spot here in the entry hall where no matter how hards I push, I just can’t gets the buffer to work. It’s like runnin’ up against a wall. Mr. John L. tolds me that a man had died on that very spot,” she answered, pointing over toward the dining room doorway.
I pretended not to look afraid as Lillie May studied me hard, then continued.
“Sometimes, if Mr. John L. was goings to be gone, he would haves me come over heres at night to clean the house. I always brought one of my chilrens with me. This time, I broughts my youngest, Victor. I took him upstairs and sats him down in front of the TV. I tolds him not to leave the room. I was up there cleanin’ when I heards the double doors downstairs crashing shut. I thought my son had disobeyed and gones downstairs, so I called hims, but he was still upstairs in the next room, right where I left him. I called out for Mr. John L., thinking it must be him, but no ones answered.”
“That was it for me. I gathered up my things, and we went to leave, but when we got to the top of the staircase we were shocked. It looked like someone had taken buckets of dirts and just throwns it down those stairs. I couldn’t believe it. We lefts it just like it was, and we ran down those stairs and out of this house. When Mr. John L. gots home, he called me on the phone and he asked me abouts all the dirt.”
“‘Mr. John L., you knows I didn’t throws dirt down your stairs,’ I tolds him. ‘I don’t know hows it gots there, and that’s the truth.’
“My other son came with me one night. He was about eighteen at the time. He comes runnin’ out just a screamin’ and a hollerin’. He swears that a broom was chasing him on out of there.
“I don’t much like working here alones at night,” she added, shaking her head.
CHAPTER 18
We were still talking a little after eleven when my car hummed up the drive with Charles at the wheel. I bounded outside to greet him, hugging Charles as we both jumped up and down with excitement.
Charles and I drove Lillie May home in my newly arrived car. I thanked her profusely for agreeing to work that night. She had really saved me. We dropped her off at her home in an all-black subdivision across the highway called Hardwood, a remnant from the old black sawmill community on that site.
Back at the Myrtles, Charles grabbed my hand as we danced up the back walkway and in through the double French doors.
“I’m finally here!” he stuttered.
Charles’s eyes grew larger and larger as I led him from room to room. He paused in the gentlemen’s parlor, squeezing my hand tight. “This looks exactly the way I imagined,” he whispered.
We entered the gaming room next. “Watch the man in the portrait as we go in,” I told Charles. “His expression will change.” As if on cue, the man’s face in the painting changed from a smile to a frown as soon as we passed through the door.
“I want to see that again,” exclaimed Charles.
“Okay, watch him so you can see him change to a smile when I leave,” I suggested, stepping out into the gentlemen’s parlor. “Is he smiling yet?”
“Yes, he’s smiling,” Charles replied. “Wow.”
I stepped back into the gamingroom, and again the man’s lips pursed and got small and his eyebrows lowered.
“That’s really weird!” Charles said, wide-eyed.
I was dying to tell him about the latest ghost disturbances, but I was afraid he might get in the car and drive straight back to California. I could tell he was exhausted, so I offered him the French bedroom, where John L. had slept, and I retired to my lumpy sofa in the sitting room right next door, far preferable to sleeping upstairs all by myself.
I actually began to let my guard down just a little after Charles’s arrival, and I let my mind wander back to all the exciting plans I had for the Myrtles. An antiques buff most of his life, Charles was able to tell me many interesting details about the furniture and art objects in the home, from the age of one piece to the maker of another. Being the curator at a Southern plantation was right up his alley.
We spent most of our waking hours planning for business as a guest inn. It was so exciting and so much fun! Since only two of the six upstairs bedrooms had been restored, we had a lot of work ahead of us: selecting color schemes, period wallpaper, drapes, and bedding, carefully selecting the antiques for each room. In addition, there was the marketing. The Myrtles had been open for tours for decades, but we needed to get the word out that it was going to open as an inn, so I wrote brochures, ads, and press releases. I joined the Louisiana Travel Promotion Association (LTPA) and both the New Orleans and Baton Rouge Tourist and Convention bureaus. There were licenses to apply for, and breakfast recipes to test.
In the evenings, Charles and I would relax on the verandah or in the parlors, just imagining life at the Myrtles as it had been in the past. We never spoke about the ghosts, and I prayed they would not disturb us again. Fat chance!
That very evening, Charles and I were settled in the rockers on the back verandah, talking about our plans. It was a beautiful, enchanted evening; the grounds sparkled with hundreds of tiny pulsating firefly lights, and the fragrance from the sweet olive tree was intoxicating.
Charles brought out his antique gramophone and set it up on the verandah. We were enjoying the tunes from his classic 78-rpm records, when suddenly, in the scratchy part at the end of the record, we heard harpsichord music. I looked over at Charles and he looked at me.
“This is impossible,” he stated, reaching for his machine. “The only way there could be harpsichord music is if it had been recorded with the music.”
We listened to several other records. At the end of each one we could hear a harpsichord playing.
“I swear, the harpsichord is not part of this recording,” he protested, mostly to himself. “I have listened to these old records hundreds of times.”
Charles put on a record that we had listened to earlier, with no harpsichord, but when it got to the end this time there was the harpsichord again. Without uttering another word, Charles stomped over, turned off the machine, and carried it into the house. It wa
s late anyway, so we retired to our respective rooms.
At Charles’s request this time, we left the door open just a crack between his room and mine.
Our nightly ritual included a leisurely stroll down the oak-lined lane to the gatehouse, which had doubled as the garçonnière to close the main gates. We chatted happily about our progress. Once the gates were pulled closed and secured, we would turn back up the lane to the house. One night, as we headed back toward the house, we froze in our tracks.
“Oh, noooo . . .” I softly pleaded. “Please . . . no.”
The house was no longer the same place we had left a few short minutes ago. It had taken on an eerie glow. It was no longer illuminated by electricity. The few lights we had left on inside the home had been extinguished, and the soft, pale glow of candlelight glimmered from every room. It was as if we had left the home in the twentieth century, but returned to it in 1850!
I took off for the gate, with Charles close behind.
“Wait, where are you going?” he shouted.
“I’m getting out of here, and I am never, ever, going to set foot inside this property again.” I had reached the gate and was tugging it open with all my might. Charles came up behind me and put his arms around my shoulders.
“You can’t leave,” he said softly.
“Watch me,” I replied.
“What about all your dreams, your business, your money?”
I turned to face him, burying my head deep in his broad shoulder. “I just can’t take it anymore,” I sobbed. Charles put his arms around me as we stood there in limbo.
Finally, Charles said, “Look, it’s changed back.”
I peeked around his shoulder, and the house had returned to normal.
“Do you want to go back now?” Charles whispered, still holding me.
“No.”
“I will be with you. Come on, let’s just start walking, slowly,” he urged, reaching out his hand.
I reluctantly took his hand and let Charles lead me slowly up the drive. We stood outside for several minutes before I gathered the courage to go back inside. Everything appeared to be the same as it had been before. But as I had learned the hard way, things are not always what they seem.
CHAPTER 19
A few weeks later, my mother came to visit from California. It was her first visit to the plantation since I moved there. I put her upstairs in the suite I had once occupied before the footsteps drove me downstairs. Not wanting to frighten her, we didn’t tell her about any of our experiences.
Malcolm and Wayne came to visit that weekend. They brought a bottle of peppermint schnapps, and after the last tour, they opened it. With our tiny shot glasses, we toasted my mother with the first round, and the Myrtles with the next. I had forgotten to tell them not to talk about the ghosts, so my mother got an earful. I felt bad, as I could see the apprehension in her eyes as Malcolm and Wayne retired for the evening, and she walked up the main staircase alone.
“Don’t worry, Mom, the guys are across the hall, and I am right below you,” I assured her. Charles had already gone to bed, so I took the chore of turning out all the lights. Walking through the parlors and out into the entry hall, I heard a man’s voice calling from the gentleman’s parlor:
“Come back, we want to talk to you.”
Thinking it was Malcolm and Wayne, I turned back into the parlors, but no one was there. Although I was curious to know what the “voice” wanted to tell me, there was no way I was going back into that room alone. I knew my mom would still be up, so I ran up the stairs to get her. I related what I had heard and begged her to come sit in the parlor with me. She told me she was already in her nightie and didn’t feel like going back downstairs. Disappointed, I rushed downstairs to see if I could wake Charles.
“Charles, wake up,” I called as I rapped on his door. “I need you to go into the parlor with me. They said they want to talk to me!”
“Who wants to talk to you?” he mumbled.
“I don’t know . . . someone, a voice,” I stammered.
Quickly donning his flannel robe over his pajamas, a bedraggled Charles gingerly opened his bedroom door, and together we tiptoed inch by inch into the gentlemen’s parlor. We stood in the double doorway, waiting, but we heard and saw nothing. Garnering a little more courage, we crept little by little inside the room, finally sitting down on the goose-down sofa.
Very nervous, but feeling a little bit embarrassed about being afraid, Charles and I simultaneously broke out singing a tune from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical The King and I called “Whistle a Happy Tune.”
Whenever I feel afraid
I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune
So no one will suspect I’m afraid.
At the instant that we finished singing the final words “so no one will suspect I’m afraid,” the fireplace ornament, a solid cast-iron figurine about fourteen inches tall and very heavy, flew across the room and crashed into the wall. Charles and I jumped out of our seats, looked over at the ornament, then at each other. We nearly knocked each other down as we bolted from the room, not even stopping to extinguish the lights.
If something wanted to talk to me, it would have to wait until daytime. As curious as I was, there was no way I was going back into that room that night.
In the morning we told my mother about the fireplace ornament flying across the room, and I could tell she was glad she hadn’t come down. She did, however, have two encounters.
When she arrived, we were in the process of opening up the original door in the suite between the bedroom and the bathroom/sitting area so guests wouldn’t have to go out into the hall to get to the bathroom. The door had probably been there when Sarah occupied the suite, but had long since been plastered over.
Since the removal of part of the wall created a lot of rubble and dust, we gave my mother the option of staying in the suite above us or in the bedroom on the north wing. She chose the suite, to be closer to us.
Mother went upstairs later that evening to open the windows and let in some fresh air. The windows had been closed and locked. When she entered the sitting room, she gasped. One of the windows was already wide open, but there were no footsteps on the fine layer of dust on the floor leading to the window. At first she insisted that one of us had climbed up on the steep gabled roof and opened the window from the outside. She chose to ignore the other possibility. In her bed that night, she heard footsteps, not only the heavy footsteps outside in the hall, but softer, daintier footsteps coming from the sitting room. Yet in the morning, the dust on the floor had not been disturbed.
The next day my mom was leaving to go back to California. Charles and I carried her luggage out and waited for her at the car. As Mom walked alone through the parking area, we saw her stop and turn around. I assumed that she wanted one more look at the Myrtles, but she told us that she had heard a voice behind her call, “Goodbye, Millie.” When she turned, no one was there.
No one that she could see, anyway. Obviously, they were there all around us, both indoors and out, invisible, watching our every move. They knew us by name, and they were conscious enough to know our comings and goings, and what we were doing. That thought was more than unnerving.
We waved goodbye to my mother at the airport. I could tell she was relieved to be leaving. I wished that somehow I could fly back to San Jose with her and forget all about ghosts. My emotions had become so torn, so extreme. On the one hand, I loved the house passionately, and I wanted with all my heart to make it work. But another part of me could no longer deny that there was something here that I did not understand, that I could not explain, something that terrified me beyond words.
Back at the plantation, Charles and I were alone once again. Work continued on the restoration. We kept very busy during the day, keeping our minds occupied with the work at hand, and in the evenings we carefully avoided any mention of the ghosts, knowing that soon enough there would be another confrontation. We just didn’t realiz
e how soon.
CHAPTER 20
Nights at the Myrtles continued to haunt us, so Charles and I left the door between our rooms wide open every night, so we could easily reach each other if we needed to.
One night, I heard a commotion in Charles’s room. I looked through the door, and as my eyes focused, I saw a lady dancing around the room. Her hair was shoulder length, turned under at the ends. She was wearing a slinky black dress that looked like it was from the 1930s or 1940s. As she twirled around the room I could see that she was very short. She was illuminated by sparkling lights around her head. She kept twirling, oblivious to Charles and me.
“Charles . . . Charles!” I choked out. “There’s someone in your room.”
Charles mumbled something and sprang from his bed through the door and into my bed, where he stayed the rest of the night and for several nights to come. We huddled together like two little kids left all alone in a big house.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve seen her. At first, I thought I was dreaming, but then I wasn’t sure,” Charles reported. “You could see her, too?”
“Yeah. She looked so real, but I realized a real person would not be floating a foot off the floor.”
“Good Lord. She was talking!”
“What was she saying?” I asked.
“I couldn’t make out most of it, but at one point she was complaining about ladies wearing pants and not dresses,” he replied.
Charles and I sat up half the night talking about our experience. We could not relate her to any of the ghosts we knew about in the home, and her attire was much too recent for her to have lived at the plantation during its heyday. Perhaps she had lived here, or visited, much later.
As much as I loved the Myrtles and everything about it, the restoration process, the guest inn, and all my dreams for the future, there were times that were nerve shattering and I felt that I needed to escape. It had been over a month since I had seen my husband, and I missed him terribly. Although I talked to him nearly every day by phone, it just wasn’t the same. It could take weeks, or even months, before our properties sold, and I just couldn’t stand to wait another moment to see him. I loved him so much that there were times before I moved here when I didn’t think I could survive even a day without him, when my heart ached for him if he was in another room, so this separation, although necessary, was excruciating. I made plans to fly home on May 3. I hated to leave Charles all alone, but he was such a good friend he insisted that I go, and that he would be fine.
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