Houmas House Plantation

Three workers saw a girl in a blue dress on Houmas House's staircase during a 2003 renovation. She may be Hampton's granddaughter or Miles's daughter.

During a renovation in 2003, three different construction workers at Houmas House saw a small girl in a blue dress walking down the main staircase. She vanished before she reached the bottom. The sightings happened on different nights, by different crews, and nobody had told them anything about a resident ghost. When the stories started circulating, the owners pulled historical records and narrowed her identity down to two candidates: a granddaughter of General Wade Hampton I who died young at the house, or the seven-year-old daughter of Colonel William Porcher Miles, who also died there. Nobody knows which one she is.

Houmas House Plantation sits in Darrow, Louisiana, on the Mississippi River in Ascension Parish. The construction history is layered. A small French-style house went up on the property in the late 1700s, and in 1829 General Wade Hampton I began the Greek Revival expansion that defines the place today. John Smith Preston, married to Hampton's daughter Caroline, completed the mansion around 1840 and ran it as his family seat. John Burnside, an Irish immigrant who built a fortune in New Orleans dry goods, bought the estate in 1857 for a reported one million dollars, at which point it ran to more than 12,000 acres of cultivable land worked by over 550 enslaved people. Burnside became known as the Sugar Prince of Louisiana, and he famously kept Union forces from seizing the house in 1862 by claiming British citizenship and warning Benjamin Butler about the international incident that would follow.

The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 27, 1980. The line of 24 live oaks leading up to the house, locally called "The Gentlemen," was planted before any of the main construction, probably in the 1700s. Staff say enslaved workers died during construction of the earlier French-style house that still sits tucked behind the mansion, and the oak alley is where their spirits are said to gather.

The girl on the staircase is the property's most frequent sighting, but she isn't the only one. Tour guides describe her following groups through the parlor and the music room, close enough that guests occasionally look behind them expecting to see a child. A woman in a long mourning dress has been seen crying at the third-floor windows. Doors open and close in empty rooms. Guests have described a sudden drop in temperature in the parlor on summer nights with no obvious source. None of this is dramatic Hollywood material. It's slow, persistent, low-level activity, and the staff have mostly quit arguing about it.

The house has had a strange run of owners. After Burnside died in 1881, the estate passed to Oliver Beirne and then to William Porcher Miles. Dr. George B. Crozat bought it in 1940 and kept it as a private weekend home for decades. Kevin Kelly bought the property in 2003 and poured millions into restoration, which is why the renovation crew was there when the little girl appeared. Kelly has said he likes having her there.

Houmas House was used as the setting for the 1964 Bette Davis film Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which was shot primarily on site. Locals say Davis reported strange activity during filming, though those accounts are secondhand and fifty years old. The more reliable stories come from the last twenty years, since the house has been open as a museum, restaurant, and inn.

A seven-year-old in a blue dress going down a staircase is not the horror-movie ghost. That may be why Houmas House works as a haunted place worth visiting. The scale of the grief on this property, the enslaved workers in unmarked graves along the oak alley, the yellow fever deaths, the child who never grew up, doesn't present itself as terror. It presents itself as a girl walking downstairs like she's going to the kitchen.