San Francisco Plantation

The Marmillion family lost two young daughters at San Francisco Plantation in Garyville, and their ghosts are said to haunt the second-floor children's rooms of the 1856 Creole mansion painted like a wedding cake. Paranormal investigators have tried to identify the spirit as Charles Marmillion, a Confederate veteran who died of illness in 1875 in an upstairs bedroom.

The Marmillion family lost two of their five daughters in the house at San Francisco Plantation. One died at childbirth. Another died at two years old after falling down one of the interior staircases. The grief hit the family so hard that Edmond Marmillion stopped decorating the house after his wife Louise died in 1855 at age forty, leaving the flamboyant blue, peach, and pistachio paint scheme to be completed by his sons. The plantation in Garyville looks like a painted riverboat docked on River Road, and visitors have been asking why it feels so sad since the first tours opened in 1977.

The paranormal reports cluster around the stairs and the children's rooms on the second floor. Objects move. Shadows pass through doorways. Visitors have described small voices in rooms that are empty, and staff have reported the distinct sound of a child's footsteps running down an interior hallway during closed hours. Louisiana Haunted Houses and Haunted Nation both document the same activity pattern across different investigations, and the through-line is always the stairs.

The house was built in 1856 by Edmond Bozonier Marmillon, a wealthy Creole planter. The Marmillions did not call it San Francisco. Edmond's son Valsin inherited the property in 1856 and renamed it Saint-Frusquin, a Creole slang term meaning "without a penny," because he felt the cost of finishing and maintaining the house had ruined him financially. The name was later Anglicized to San Francisco, and the plantation has kept that name through every subsequent owner. Edmond spent roughly 100,000 dollars on the build, which in 1856 money was an outrageous sum even by Louisiana planter standards.

Charles Burguieres Marmillion, Edmond's grandson, is the spirit paranormal investigators have most often tried to identify. He grew up in the house, fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and came home sick with what was likely tuberculosis or a war-related respiratory illness. He died in the house in 1875, still in his twenties, and his final years were spent confined to the second floor where the family could care for him. Investigators have captured what they interpret as his voice on recordings in the bedroom he died in, though the identification is speculative. Sources disagree on whether the house has one male spirit or several.

The paint job is the other thing that makes the plantation strange. Valsin and his brother Achille commissioned the decorative interior painting in the 1860s, with faux-marble columns, trompe l'oeil ceilings, and bright pastel exterior paint that was unheard of for a Louisiana plantation house. The restoration that ran from 1974 to 1977 stripped the house back to the original colors using paint analysis, and the result was the peacock-colored mansion you can tour today. Staff have described the house as feeling warmer and sadder than any other River Road plantation, which is not a specific claim but comes up repeatedly in reviews.

Visitors on tours have reported the sound of children's footsteps running overhead when the second floor was closed to the public. A docent in 2015 described hearing a child call "Mama" from the nursery when she was the only person in the house. Objects in the children's bedroom are sometimes found rearranged the next morning. The toys used for historical display keep getting moved, and the tour guides have stopped trying to fix them.

The plantation is owned by Marathon Petroleum, which inherited the property when it bought the neighboring refinery, and they fund the restoration. It is not marketed as a haunted site. The ghost stories come from visitors and docents rather than the tour script. If the Marmillion family daughters are responsible for what people experience on the second floor, they died before they could leave much of a historical record, and the house is louder about them than any document ever was.