Oakland Plantation

Dr. Abel Skannal kept a coffin in his attic on this 1850 Bossier Parish plantation. Faceless women, thrown blankets, a thermostat stuck at zero.

Dr. Abel Skannal kept a coffin in his attic. That is not speculation, not a tour-guide embellishment. It's the line on the Louisiana state historical marker out front on Sligo Road, and it's the reason everyone in Bossier Parish knows the Oakland Plantation story before they know anything else about the house.

Why the coffin was up there is where the legend forks. One version has the doctor sleeping in it, chained at the wrist to one of the people he enslaved, a nightly ritual nobody can fully explain. The other version is uglier. Grief stripped him down after he lost several of his children in the house, some as infants and some in their teens, and the rumor that settled into local memory is that he murdered his wife and stored her body in the coffin until his own death made the discovery possible. The Louisiana Historical Association's own sign, standing on the shoulder of the road, doesn't endorse either version. It just notes the coffin, and moves on.

Skannal built the place in phases. Construction started in 1832, ran through the 1840s, and the house was finally his and finished by 1850. From those walls he and his family controlled five plantations across more than 8,000 acres of northwest Louisiana. He was a physician by trade and, by all local accounts, a strange man, an ancestor a family doesn't write much about. The Bossier Parish Libraries History Center has oral history interviews with descendants who grew up inside the house, and their accounts line up enough that it's worth taking them seriously.

The most-told ghost stories come from Melinda McCallon Coyer, a great-granddaughter of a former owner who spent nights there as a child. Coyer told KTBS and the Bossier Press-Tribune that her mother would set the dinner table and the forks and spoons would start popping off it, as if someone were slapping the ends of each one. Glass milk jugs went flying across the front porch once while the family watched. The scariest nights were in the bedroom. Blankets would get yanked off her and her sister, wadded up, and thrown into a corner. One night she opened her eyes and a woman with no face was standing over the bed. "She wasn't moving, she wasn't saying anything," Coyer said. "She was just looking."

The more recent witness is Sassy Williams, a Haughton mother whose family moved into the house later. She woke up one morning to find every single cabinet door in the kitchen standing open. The old rocking chair in the front room started rocking on its own in front of her. A dog sitter they hired took a photo inside the house and, when she looked at it later, saw what she described as a ghost baby in the frame; she didn't come back. Williams's young son kept telling his mother he couldn't sleep at night because people were running through his bedroom.

Then there's the thermostat. Both Coyer's generation and the Williams family describe the same specific malfunction: the thermostat resets to zero every night, no matter where the family leaves it. It does this in summer. The local theory, which the family clearly finds more comforting than the alternatives, is that Dr. Skannal is trying to keep his wife's body cold.

Historian Pam Carlisle, who's written about the property for Bossier Parish coverage of haunted sites, shrugs at the whole catalog in a single line: "When he was alive he kept a coffin in the attic. A lot of these stories are very bizarre." That is probably the right register for Oakland Plantation. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the facade is essentially unchanged since the 1840s, and the Skannal family cemetery is still tucked into the woods nearby where the doctor is buried with the children he lost.

Most haunted-house stories in Louisiana lean on a single dramatic event and then spiral into vague "guests feel watched" filler. Oakland Plantation is the opposite. The event is small and domestic, a man with a coffin upstairs, and the stories that came out of it are oddly specific. Faceless women. Milk jugs. A thermostat stuck at zero on a July night. Separate families, generations apart, describing the same things.

The house is a private residence today, still owned privately off Sligo Road, and the family who lives there isn't running tours. That's probably for the best. The Oakland Plantation story is better as something you pass at forty miles an hour while reading the state marker through the passenger window.