In Brief
The St. Maurice Plantation in Winn Parish, Louisiana had a ghost that came up from the family cemetery in the front yard. A child, locals said, who flipped the calendar pages and rushed past people in empty halls. Then the mansion burned, and the legend named who did it.
The Full Story
The ghost at the St. Maurice Plantation in Winn Parish, Louisiana was a child, and the child is the one the legend blames for burning the house down.
He came up from the cemetery, the story goes. The graves sat right in the front yard — the Prothro family headstones that gave the place its other name, the Prothro Mansion — and locals who grew up nearby said a small spirit rose out of them and wandered into the house. He made sudden noises. He knocked things over. People walking the empty hallways felt something small rush past. And he had one quiet habit they kept coming back to: he liked to flip the pages on the calendar overnight, turning it to a new month while everyone slept.
The house he wandered was a Greek Revival mansion built in the antebellum era, sited on a hill near the Red River about six miles east of Natchitoches. William Prothro came from South Carolina and settled there in the 1840s. Around 1850, yellow fever swept the family. Prothro, his wife, several of their children, all dead in one season, buried in those front-yard graves. The cemetery the ghost child was said to climb out of was the family's own.
The mansion outlived the people who built it, and it outlived the war that came to its doorstep. On April 14, 1864, six Union gunboats came up the Red River and were attacked by Confederate forces in a battle you could watch from the front steps of the house. The mansion survived it only because it sat on the far bank, on the wrong side of the river for the fighting.
By 1970 the place was falling apart, until three Winnfield men bought it and put architecture students to work rebuilding it by hand. They relaid over 21,000 bricks and whittled wooden pegs and latches with pocket knives, putting the mansion back almost exactly as it was.
Then, around 1980, it burned to the ground.
No source found says how the fire started. But the blame folded neatly into the story that was already there: a child who didn't want to share the house. The mansion is gone for good now — delisted from the National Register in 2019, because there was nothing left to list. The grounds are private, closed to visitors. The house burned, the graves were knocked down years ago, and the only thing that outlasted all of it is the small ghost that started the fire.
