Just as we began drifting off to sleep, we could make out the music from a string quartet playing nineteenth-
century sonatas. I thought Charles must be playing records downstairs.
“Do ya’ll hear that?” he shouted up the stairs. Within minutes, Charles, Joanie, and I converged in the ladies’ parlor. The quartet was still playing somewhere in the distance. As we went from room to room, we could not make out the exact origin of the music, and it seemed as if the room it came from changed as we roamed around the house.
We finally gave up trying to find the source and retired to our respective quarters. The phantom string quartet continued its sweet serenade until we drifted cozily off to sleep, one of the few times at the Myrtles that our slumber was so peaceful.
CHAPTER 38
I had been dreaming about Christmas at the Myrtles since the day we first visited, so we spent the day after Thanksgiving putting up our Christmas decorations. We made a fruit fan to hang above the front doorway, and fruit and pine decorations to be placed around the house. Pine boughs with fancy ribbons adorned each of the eleven fireplace mantels, and were draped on the stair banisters. We made pomander balls from oranges and cloves to hang in the bedrooms, and strung popcorn and cranberry wreaths for the tree, drinking wassail as we worked.
Charles and Jim found a huge, fourteen-foot Christmas tree in the forest in back of the plantation. We placed it in the entry hall in front of the inside window to the parlor, so it could be seen from both parlors. I’m not sure which came to life more: the Myrtles, or me!
True to the season, about a week before Christmas the weather turned icy cold, creating a chill that, to many men in the South (and their wives), signified the beginning of hunting season. I was sitting in our room, looking out the window at the soft layer of snow barely beginning to alight on the barren oak trees, when I saw a man walking across the clearing beyond the parking area, carrying a rifle!
Alarmed that a hunter would be on our property so close to the house, I ran out to ask him to leave. Outside, I couldn’t find him. I figured he must have walked off into the woods.
I went back inside and he was clearly visible again through the window. This time he walked right across the parking lot and up to the fence around the rose garden directly in front of my window. He was only about twenty feet away. I could see that he was dressed in gray and wore a gray pillbox-style hat on his head. I shivered as he seemed to look me directly in the eye, then turned and walked back to the clearing where he stood facing the house. His feet were planted about eighteen inches apart and he held his rifle across his chest, like a soldier at attention. I wondered if he could still see me.
Unsettled, I ran to find Jim, who was in the next room, and asked him to go investigate the man. I pointed him out through the window, and Jim, dressed only in a cotton shirt without a jacket, went out in the freshly falling snow to confront him. Jim seemed to be looking for him, but I could still see him clearly through the window. Why couldn’t Jim see him?
“What are you doing?” Charles stuck his head out from the carriage house where he had been practicing the piano.
“There’s a man out here hunting on our property,” Jim replied. “But he must have left.”
I ran outside. “No, he’s still here. I can still see him from the window.” I looked around but couldn’t find him. “It’s really weird, because you can see him from inside, but not out here.”
“That’s not all that’s weird about it,” Jim stated.
“What else?” Charles asked.
“There’s no footsteps in the snow.”
“That is weird,” Charles replied.
We all ran back into our room, and there he was, clearly visible through the window.
“That’s not a hunter,” Charles squawked. “That’s a Confederate uniform he’s wearing. He’s a Confederate soldier!”
We all exchanged glances, speechless.
“What are y’all looking at?” Elaine asked. She had just finished her tour.
“That man out there. He looks real, but he’s the ghost of a Confederate soldier,” Charles told her.
“Where?”
“Over there, right behind the parking lot.”
“Oh, yeah,” Elaine said. “I see him now. Did y’all know that they hid a Confederate soldier here during the War?”
“No, what happened to him?” Charles and I asked simultaneously.
“He had been injured. I think it was his leg or foot. Supposedly the Stirlings took him in and hid him upstairs, but the people at Rosedown found out and came looking for him. When they found him they lynched him. There’s a letter about it at Rosedown.”
Day after day, the ghost of the Confederate soldier stood sentinel in the clearing outside our window. Although he didn’t seem malevolent, the presence of a ghost is never something you get used to.
CHAPTER 39
Christmas day was nearly upon us! Full of holiday spirit, we gaily entertained friends, and one night Bill Caldwell and I accompanied a group of carolers with our violins as we serenaded the families in the historic downtown. Most evenings our guests joined in as we gathered in the entry hall around the gaily decorated Victorian Christmas tree and sang carols.
On Christmas Eve Jim and I sang in the choir during the midnight mass at Grace Church. Everyone present seemed joyous and friendly, even the little old ladies from the Historical Society. It’s a shame the Christmas spirit of peace and goodwill toward all can’t last all year!
Joanie and I were the first ones up on Christmas morning. For both of us, it was our very first Christmas away from our families. When Jim and Charles finally woke up and joined us, we sat around the tree and opened our gifts. Later Hampton showed up unannounced with an armful of gifts. This Christmas day was everything I had imagined: wonderful friends, delicious food, festive Victorian decorations everywhere, and plenty of Christmas spirit!
The only oddity was that although the plantation was clearly closed for tours, groups of tourists would come up to the house and peer in the windows at our private celebration. But we smiled and waved and didn’t let the intrusion dampen our celebration.
The day after Christmas was a little bit of a letdown, but I had booked a wedding two days after Christmas, our first indoor wedding, so I busied myself with the preparations. Although the wedding didn’t start until eight, by 6:00 p.m. the guests began to arrive. I didn’t give it a second thought when one of the guests asked me in passing if I owned a blue car. I didn’t, and I figured it must have been blocking another car. At 7:30 p.m., Charles ran into my room shouting that we had a fire and that he was calling the fire department. I ran outside and saw the blue car engulfed in flames. At least fifty wedding guests had passed the smoking automobile, yet no one had reported the fire.
Generally very calm in any real-life crisis (though I had proven I wasn’t so composed when confronted with paranormal phenomena), I panicked. Fire is a four-letter F word, and one of my biggest fears. Several years before, Jim and I returned home from an outing in San Francisco to find that our Queen Anne Victorian home had burned to the ground. Apparently, neighborhood boys, playing with matches in the carriage house, lost control of the flame. Within minutes, the fire jumped from the carriage house ten feet to the house, and the entire house was gutted.
I could not lose the Myrtles the same way. It meant everything to me! The thought of fire at the Myrtles scared me to death, and I had recurring nightmares that a fire broke out and I was not able to dial the fire department. At the same time, I felt deep within me that there had been a fire at the Myrtles many many years ago, a fire that had tragically taken the lives of children, and those images haunted me.
I watched as Charles grabbed the fire extinguishers and rushed outside, but the tiny streams did not have any effect on the towering flames. I just stood there stupefied. From the bedroom window it appeared as though the tavern itself was ablaze as the flames leaped higher up the old oak tree, torching the Spanish moss da
ngling from its dry limbs.
I couldn’t take it anymore, so I ran outside to help. The entire car was engulfed in flames. Jim was fruitlessly battling the inferno using our tiny, pathetic garden hose. I foolishly walked right up to the fire, dazed.
“Move back!” Charles shouted at me. I just stood there, helplessly trying to figure out what I could do to save my home.
“Get away, the car is going to blow up!” Charles screamed.
Jim, his extinguisher now empty, put his arm around me and led us to a safer spot away from the inferno. We clutched each other. Buried in his arms, I started sobbing uncontrollably.
Within minutes the St. Francisville Volunteer Fire Department arrived, along with several dozen fire chasers, curiosity seekers, and the local press. In a few long, harrowing minutes the seasoned volunteers had extinguished the flames. Desperately relieved, I felt my body go limp.
“You were very lucky,” the fire chief told me. “With this wind, and the dry, dead limbs on the tree, it’s a miracle that the entire place didn’t burn down. And that car should have exploded!”
“Thank you God,” I whispered.
In the tavern, drinks were on the house for the volunteer fire department, while the wedding party continued in the main house. Images of the thirty-foot flames engulfing the dead branches of the tree played in my head. I walked over to examine the site. The plastic plumbing on the side of the tavern had melted completely off. The branches were charred. The entire car was nothing but a black, scorched mess, and the fur coat that had been left in the back seat was unrecognizable, and yet the gas tank never exploded. Yes, we had been very, very lucky.
I pulled myself together so I could take care of my business. I walked into the house to check on the wedding reception. Surprisingly, no one at the party seemed phased by the near-catastrophe! I went back outside to the tavern to thank the fire department one more time. I was so grateful to them all.
Later, one of the guests pulled me aside and asked to speak with me privately.
“I heard this house was haunted,” he half-asked, half stated.
“I don’t know,” I replied cautiously. “Why do you ask?”
“My son was the best man at the wedding, and we were the first to arrive here. I walked into the parlor, and was fixing my tie in the mirror when suddenly a man appeared, standing right behind me in the mirror. I turned around to face him, but he disappeared.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
He described a young man, dressed in a gray Confederate uniform, sporting a gray pillbox hat.
He had obviously seen the same soldier who had been standing guard outside the Myrtles all week. Although I hated to admit to the man that I had seen ghosts at the plantation, I understood that he wanted an explanation, something I could not give. But I could offer him a little peace of mind. I told him about the soldier we had all seen during the week before the wedding. I know for myself it feels better somehow to know that you aren’t crazy, that you aren’t the only one who can see the phenomenon.
By the next day, my nerves were slowly recovering from the fire, and the house was recovering from the two hundred guests of the previous day. I looked outside for the soldier who had been standing guard outside our window every single day for a week, but he was gone.
Throughout the day I continued to look for him, but he was not there. Could the ghost of the Confederate soldier have been there to warn us of the impending danger, or maybe even to fight the fire? Had he fulfilled the purpose of his earthly visit?
CHAPTER 40
We had made a lot of changes at the Myrtles, renovations not just to the unfinished upstairs, but to the entire property. We cleared the overgrown island in the center of the pond and built a Victorian gazebo on the island with a footbridge over the water. A brick path wound up to the gazebo, and continued to just beneath the huge weeping willow tree. In the spring vivid purple and yellow irises (my favorite flower) surrounded the pond. The setting looked very much like Monet’s famous garden, which inspired me to paint the bridge and gazebo blue, matching not only the trim of the house, but Monet’s famous blue bridge as well.
Charles found a beautiful antique oak bar in upstate Ohio, and we put it in the carriage house tavern, which had previously been used as a gift and antique shop. We moved the gifts to one side of the building and added round oak tables and chairs and an old piano. Charles also brought back another rare find—a barrel full of old hats in all colors and sizes, adorned with gaudy feathers, netting, cloth flowers, and fake fruit! It was so much fun to watch the guests, even the men, trying on the hats.
Months before we had applied for and received the Myrtles’ liquor license so we could offer a full line of beverages, from brandy milk punch to our special mint juleps served in tall Myrtles glasses (our secret recipe included both the traditional bourbon and a splash of rum). I was surprised (and a little hurt) at the town council meeting during which our liquor license was reviewed when there was some strong opposition to our application. In a town where folks were granted liquor licenses to serve liquor from their trailers, this was unusual. Had it not been for the support of the mayor, Billy D’Aquilla, our license application might have been denied. But Billy and Jim had hit it off, and my husband was soon a part of the “good old boys” clique that also included the judge and the police jury president.
Not long after we received the liquor license, a representative of the Alcoholic Beverage Commission (ABC) for the state of LA paid us a visit. He seemed like a very congenial fellow and he assured us we would have no problems at all from the ABC.
“That’s wonderful,” I thought, until he spelled it all out.
“Look, I don’t care what you do up here. I don’t care if you serve minors. And you can stay open all night, for all I care. Just don’t serve niggers,” he explained.
I was so shocked by what he said that I couldn’t respond. We were living in our own isolated world, and except for the things that Lillie May had told me, I had not confronted such blatant racism and I feared it wouldn’t be the last time. I felt very sad. I wasn’t, however, going to refuse service to anyone.
We added a wing of rooms behind the old carriage house that included a manager’s apartment for Charles and four guestrooms that we called “garden rooms.” The bank president insisted that we use a particular local builder, and I was very disappointed with the way he turned out, but at least Charles now had a place of his own so he didn’t have to shuffle from room to room whenever a paying guest usurped him. We set Joanie up in the guestroom next to Charles’s apartment, since most of the guests preferred to stay inside the plantation.
I noticed that in spite of the fact that she now had her own room in the new wing, Joanie was still sleeping in the old nursery. One morning Joanie came down, making sure I was alone and Jim was busy giving a tour, safely out of hearing range. She wanted to know all about the history of the nursery. I told her about Sarah Mathilda and Judge Clarke Woodruff, and how he would bring slaves up into the nursery. She sat still listening, her head down, eyes lowered.
She was silent for quite a while, and I felt she wanted to tell me something.
“Has anyone ever seen a man up in that room?” she finally spoke, with trepidation in her voice.
“No, not that I know of. Why? Have you?” I asked.
“Kind of,” she replied.
“Kind of?” I asked.
“Well, yes, I guess I have,” she admitted.
“What does this man look like?” I asked. It was clear that Joanie was not going to volunteer anything.
“He looks sorta like that man in the photograph . . . that judge guy,” she stammered, obviously very uncomfortable talking about it.
“Judge Clarke Woodruff?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“Does he say anything?”
“No.”
“What does he do? Just stand there?”
“No. Nothing really, it’s nothing. I shouldn’t have
brought it up,” she replied, as she stood up and practically darted for the door. That was the end of that conversation! As the days passed, she had returned to her own room outside to sleep, so I figured that whatever fascination she had with the old nursery had ended.
It was Joanie’s nineteenth birthday, and she had never been to New Orleans, so she asked if Jim and I would take her. We took her to the French Quarter, where we ended up in the courtyard bar at Pat O’Brien’s. In spite of the fact that Joanie didn’t usually drink alcohol, she wanted to try one of their famous hurricanes. At that time, the drinking age was still eighteen, so we ordered three. Because they taste just like tropical fruit punch, one would never suspect that they are spiked with four ounces of rum, so until you try to stand up you don’t realize how inebriated you are.
The rum in the hurricane must have loosened Joanie up, because as soon as Jim left the table to go to the washroom, she slowly inched her body around the table, leaning in directly toward me, and slurred, “If I tell you something, do you promise you won’t get mad?”
“Yes, Joanie, I promise.”
“I mean, really, you can’t get mad. I know you’re going to freak out!” she exclaimed.
“I promised already. What’s on your mind?”
“It’s about that man. I think it’s the judge guy. He visits me.”
I shot Joanie a quick glance, and then quickly diverted my eyes. I didn’t want her to know how alarmed I was, and I wanted her to continue talking to me about whatever she wanted to tell me. “Yeah,” I replied, as nonchalant as I could force my voice to be. “Where does he visit you?”
“In my room,” she replied.
“In your room?” I repeated. I didn’t like the sound of this.
“Well, not my room, exactly, but upstairs, you know, the old nursery.”
The Myrtles Plantation Page 16