The Myrtles Plantation

Legend says ten people were murdered at The Myrtles Plantation. Only one is historically documented: lawyer William Drew Winter, shot on the porch in 1871. The famous Chloe story has no record behind it, but the 1796 house and its dead children are real.

The Myrtles Plantation tells visitors about ten murders. Only one is real.

William Drew Winter, a lawyer who managed the plantation for his wife's family, was shot on the front porch in January 1871 by a man who rode up, called his name, and fired when Winter stepped outside. Four Black men and one white man were arrested. None were convicted. Winter's killer was never identified. The rest of the body count, the Confederate soldier murdered in the parlor, the Union soldier robbed in the gentleman's parlor, the overseer shot during the Civil War, all the others the evening tour guides name off, have no historical records behind them. A team of researchers working through parish death records and contemporary newspapers found nothing to corroborate them.

The most famous ghost at Myrtles is also the most historically doubtful. Chloe, the enslaved woman in the green turban who supposedly baked an oleander cake that killed the Woodruff children, has no documented existence. The Woodruffs are real. Clark Woodruff married Sara Bradford, daughter of plantation founder David Bradford, in 1817. The US Federal Census confirms the family owned five enslaved people in 1820 and thirty-two by 1830. But there's no record of a woman named Chloe or Cloe in any of those ledgers. And Sara Woodruff and her two children James and Cornelia didn't die of poisoning. They died of yellow fever in 1823 and 1824, the same disease that was killing white planter families across the Mississippi Delta that decade.

So what is actually at Myrtles Plantation, if the headline stories don't hold up?

A 1796 Spanish-colonial house built by David Bradford, who fled Pennsylvania after being indicted for treason in 1794 for leading the Whiskey Rebellion. President John Adams later pardoned him. A property where multiple generations of children died young, including Sara Woodruff's kids, and later William Winter's three-year-old daughter Kate of typhoid. A porch where a respected lawyer was assassinated in front of his family in 1871. Owners who went bankrupt during Reconstruction. A house that passed through Stirling, Winter, Williams, and eventually James and Frances Kermeen Myers, who converted it to a bed and breakfast in the 1970s and began leaning hard into the ghost tourism angle.

A 1992 photograph is the piece that gave the Chloe legend its modern kick. The shot, commonly attributed to then-owner Teeta Moss, shows a shadowy figure between two buildings, roughly human-shaped, wearing what some visitors swear is a turban. No primary source surfaces the provenance cleanly, but the image sits framed in the house, and every tour guide points it out. Skeptics see pareidolia. Believers see Chloe. It's been reprinted in every ghost book about Louisiana for thirty years.

Guests who stay overnight cluster their reports around the seventeenth step on the main staircase, where legend says Winter collapsed. Footsteps land there more than anywhere else in the house, and night staff describe feeling someone pass behind them on the way up. The rest of the plantation has its accounts too, but the seventeenth step is the one even skeptical guests come back to the desk to mention.

Netflix featured the property in a 2024 docuseries, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. It's still a working bed and breakfast. John and Teeta Moss run it, and the nightly Mystery Tour walks guests through the greatest hits: Chloe, the seventeenth step, the grand piano that plays one chord on its own. The tour doesn't particularly care that most of the stories don't survive fact-checking. Neither do the guests.

Call it one of the most documented hauntings in America if you want. What it actually is, based on the research, is one of the most documented ghost marketing operations in America, built on a foundation of real tragedy that was already there. Winter's killer was never caught. Sara Woodruff did bury her children. The house is old and the South has a long memory.