This house is marketed as one of America's most haunted. Scholars who have looked at how that marketing works have reached an uncomfortable conclusion about it.
The Myrtles is a historic home and former antebellum plantation at St. Francisville, Louisiana, built in 1796 by General David Bradford. In its early history the property was worked by enslaved people. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978.
The architecture is worth the visit on its own. It is a frame house with a clapboard exterior in the Creole cottage style common to Louisiana plantation houses in the 19th century, sited on a hill and facing east. The original 1796 building had six bays and three dormers. In the mid-1850s the one-and-a-half-storey house was extended south, nearly doubling it and taking it to nine bays with a new double door entrance, surrounded by a transom and sidelights holding original hand-painted stained glass, etched in a French cross pattern said to ward off evil. The main feature is the 125-foot veranda running the whole length of the facade and wrapping the southern end, with ornamental cast-iron railing in an elaborate grape-cluster design under a broad Doric entablature. The gabled roof carries six brick chimneys and pedimented dormers with Doric pilasters.
Then there is what the tours do. A 2013 brochure from the owners billed the plantation as one of America's most haunted houses, and the site runs evening Mystery Tours alongside its daytime historical ones. The historian Tiya Miles, writing in 2015, records that the two main ghost stories told on those tours, of Chloe and Cleo, are at bottom stories of violence against Black women, and map onto the Jezebel and Mammy stereotypes.
A separate academic study of haunted plantation tourism makes the same point about the genre: the entertainment on offer is the torture and bondage of enslaved people, staged as hospitality and beauty. Worth knowing before you book the evening tour.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
