The Myrtles Plantation: The Girl Named Chloe, the Mirror That Keeps Souls, and the Ten Murders That Never Happened
Drive north out of Baton Rouge along the river road, past the cane and the live oaks with their beards of Spanish moss, and you come eventually to St. Francisville, and just outside it there is a long low white house with a wrought-iron veranda running the whole length of its front. It is genuinely lovely. It was built in 1796. It is also, according to roughly every list ever compiled on the subject, one of the most haunted houses in America, and unlike most contenders for that title, it will rent you a room. You can sleep there tonight. You can have breakfast in the morning in the room where a man is supposed to have been shot. The house makes its living this way, and has for decades, and that fact is not incidental to the story — it is the story. Because the Myrtles is the perfect specimen of a particular kind of American haunting: a place where something is genuinely wrong, and where a century of commerce has buried whatever it was under so much invented gothic that the truth can ...