In Brief
At T'Frere's House, a bed and breakfast in Lafayette, Louisiana, the resident ghost speaks only French and wears a rose-colored dress. Her name is Amelie. Years later, staff found that an earlier woman had drowned in the very same well.
The Full Story
At T'Frere's House, a bed and breakfast in Lafayette, Louisiana, the ghost everyone tells you about answers to a name. They call her Amelie, and the story goes that she speaks only French. Guests who don't know a word of it say they can still tell which language they're hearing, even when they can't make out the words.
She has shown herself, they say, in a rose-colored dress, her hair parted down the center and pulled into a bun, a small woman who turns up and is gone. An exterminator working in the attic is said to have met her behind the brick chimney. She spoke two words to him in French, "venez voir," come see, and he left the attic fast. Staff and guests put her behind a longer list of small things too: pots banging in the pantry, lights flipping on and off, doors moving with no one near them, the alarm system going off for no reason anyone could find. Nobody who tells these stories sounds frightened. They describe her as gentle, almost a member of the household.
The story behind her is older than the house. Amelie Comeaux was a young schoolteacher, a relative of the man this place was built for, who lost her husband and her baby to yellow fever in the same year. She was found drowned in a well behind the house. How she got there has never settled: an accidental fall while she leaned to wash her face, a grief no one could carry, or, in a version told less often, locals who threw her in over a man she wasn't supposed to love. The Catholic Church ruled it a suicide, so she could not be buried beside the husband and child she'd already lost.
None of it is in any record. People have spent years trying to confirm that Amelie Comeaux ever lived, and come back with nothing.
The well sat at the rear of the original home. Guest rooms were later built on top of it, and it's covered now. In 2014, a Louisiana paranormal team spent a night here with recorders and a spirit box. Out near where the well used to sit, one of them gave up on a quiet stretch and said he was heading back inside. A female voice came back through the box: "Bye!" Twice that night, asked who was present, the box returned one word. Amelie.
The part that stays with you came after they'd packed up, from a staff member who'd been digging through the home's history. She told the team something no one had mentioned before: a young Comeaux daughter had drowned in that same well, years before the house was even built. Two women, the same water, and the staff themselves say the truth of it will never be known.
