In Brief
At Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, a candlestick reportedly lifted off a table and flew across the room in front of a tour bus of about 35 people. The staff had been logging stranger things for years before the whole group finally saw one at once.
The Full Story
At Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, a candlestick once lifted off a table during a house tour and flew across the room. The story goes that it happened in front of a Gray Line bus of about 35 visitors, with the guide, a man called "Petesy" Dugas, standing right there. No newspaper recorded it; it survives as a told story, passed along on the tours. But it is the one Oak Alley story where a whole crowd saw the same thing at the same time. By then, the staff had been collecting quieter ones for years.
The mansion was finished in 1839 for sugar planter Jacques Roman and his wife Celina, built by enslaved laborers, and named Bon Séjour before the tree-lined approach gave it the name everyone uses now. Twenty-eight live oaks line the drive, mirrored by 28 columns wrapped around the house. The oaks were already there, planted by some earlier settler about a century before the house went up.
The figure people report most is the Lady in Black, a dark-haired woman seen two ways: mounted on a horse in the shadow of one of the oaks, vanishing when anyone approaches, and on foot along the upstairs porches and balconies of the house. Who she is stays unsettled. Some accounts name Celina Roman, who lived in the house and lost her husband to tuberculosis nine years after it was built. Others name her daughter Louise. And some say the identity was never settled at all.
Then there is the drive itself. Tour guides report the clip-clop of hooves and "billowing dust and sound of horse's hooves upon the gravel driveway when there was nothing to be seen." A carriage you can hear and never see.
Staff also report a shadowy woman watching the lawn from an upstairs window, resembling Josephine Stewart, who restored the place in the 1920s and willed it to a foundation when she died in 1972. Whether that watcher is Stewart or the same Lady in Black, no one agrees.
In 2008 a TAPS team filmed an episode of Ghost Hunters here, and the place gave them something on tape. On camera, thermal imaging caught a heat signature moving past a window with no one there, a flashlight switched itself on, and a K2 meter answered their questions one at a time. The candlestick was the moment a busload of strangers all saw at once. The window is the one the camera saw instead.
