Madewood Plantation

An 1840s Greek Revival mansion on Bayou Lafourche whose builder, Colonel Thomas Pugh, died of yellow fever four years after moving in. Enslaved workers made the bricks and milled the wood on site, which is where the name came from. The hauntings are quiet, footsteps upstairs, doors clicking shut, weight in specific bedrooms, rather than theatrical, which fits a property shaped by slow epidemics and unnamed laborers.

Madewood Plantation killed the man who built it. Colonel Thomas Pugh commissioned the Greek Revival mansion on Bayou Lafourche around 1840, hired a young unknown architect named Henry Howard to design it, and waited eight years for his house to be finished. He lived in it for four. Pugh died of yellow fever in 1848 at fifty-six, one of thousands of Louisianans killed by the epidemic cycles that rolled through the state every summer. The house he almost didn't live to see is still standing in Napoleonville today, a National Historic Landmark and one of the purer examples of Greek Revival plantation architecture left in the country.

The name came from the building materials. Enslaved workers on the property made every brick on site. They milled the interior woodwork from timber cut on the plantation itself. Made wood. The phrase stuck. Those same workers, unnamed in the construction records, built a twenty-five-room mansion with massive Ionic columns and a central hallway wide enough to use as a ballroom. The Pugh family was a dynasty: Thomas was a half-brother of William Whitmell Hill Pugh, who owned Woodlawn, and Alexander Franklin Pugh, who had interests in the Augustin, Bellevue, Boatner, and New Hope plantations. Sugarcane money built most of them.

Harold Marshall bought Madewood in 1964, when it was deteriorating badly, and spent fourteen years restoring it. By 1978 the house was habitable again, and Marshall's family eventually turned it into a bed and breakfast, complete with candlelit dinners and overnight stays in the period-furnished bedrooms. In 2016, Beyoncé shot interior scenes for her visual album "Lemonade" at Madewood, which did more for the property's public recognition than any preservation award.

The hauntings at Madewood tend toward the quiet end of the Louisiana plantation-ghost spectrum. Guests who've stayed overnight describe footsteps in the upstairs hallway after everyone else is in bed. Doors in bedrooms click shut without being pushed. A few people have reported seeing shadowy figures near the Pugh family cemetery on the grounds. The most commonly described sensation is a kind of weight that settles into particular rooms, especially the ones tied to yellow fever deaths. One longtime housekeeper told a visiting journalist she'd stopped going into certain second-floor rooms alone after dark, though she wouldn't say which rooms.

What Madewood doesn't have is a flashy single-ghost story, and that's probably an honest thing about the place. The deaths here weren't theatrical. Yellow fever killed people slowly, in rooms that became sickrooms and then death rooms. The enslaved workers who died building the bricks and milling the wood aren't named in any record, because the Pugh family didn't keep those records. The grief at Madewood is diffuse. It's everywhere and attached to nobody specific.

That pattern is what a lot of guests pick up on. They describe dusk at Madewood, when the light drops across Bayou Lafourche and the columns cast long shadows across the lawn, as one of the strangest twenty-minute windows they've spent anywhere. It isn't scary so much as it's sad.

Eight years to build, four years of ownership, and 175 years of aftermath. Henry Howard went on to design about 250 other buildings in New Orleans and Louisiana before he died. Thomas Pugh got four summers in the house he designed.