In Brief
Woodland Plantation in West Pointe a la Hache, Louisiana is the mansion drawn on the old Southern Comfort label. Guests report a man in a silk hat and striped pants, and a boy who disappears the moment anyone asks him a question.
The Full Story
At Woodland Plantation in West Pointe a la Hache, Louisiana, guests keep meeting a man in striped pants and a silk hat, a gold-tipped cane in his hand. They take him for Bradish Johnson, the son of the family that built the place. On the first floor people report two women and a man, cold spots that come and go, footsteps and voices in empty rooms. And there's a boy. He turns up, and the moment anyone asks him a question, he's gone.
You'd know the house even if you've never been. It's the mansion in the 1871 Currier and Ives lithograph "A Home on the Mississippi," and from the 1930s until a 2010 rebrand, that drawing sat on the Southern Comfort label. For roughly 75 years it may have been the most-reproduced building in America, and almost no one knew its name.
The picture is pretty. What's underneath it isn't. Woodland was an 1830s sugar plantation built by Captain William Johnson, a river pilot and a partner in the domestic slave trade. By the inn's own history, Johnson worked with the pirate Jean Lafitte, who raided ships offshore and brought captives up Grand Bayou, a shortcut to the Gulf, to be held in four two-story brick slave quarters. By the 1850 census, 181 people were enslaved on the property. The plantation had one of the largest sugar houses in the country; only foundation ruins remain. The brick quarters stood until Hurricane Betsy leveled them in 1965.
The house itself nearly went the same way. Of roughly 65 plantations that once stood south of New Orleans, Country Roads Magazine reports Woodland is the only one left on the river's west bank. When Foster Creppel bought it at auction in 1997, it was a ruin. "The home was in ruins when my parents and I bought it at auction," he said, and he spent years restoring it into a country inn.
For the dining hall he had an 1880s church cut in half and trucked 14 miles from another town, then reassembled it on the property. It sits on the exact ground where the slave cabins once stood. He named it Spirits Hall, half a pun on a bar, half something darker.
The man with the cane keeps to the main house. So does the boy who vanishes when you speak to him. But the staff say the other ghosts are out in Spirits Hall, on the ground where the cabins stood. There, people report seeing the enslaved.
