Woodland Plantation

The plantation on the old Southern Comfort bottle was built in the 1830s by a Mississippi River pilot who partnered with Jean Lafitte to traffic enslaved people taken from pirated slave ships. Ghost stories cluster near the old slave quarters, and Captain Johnson's son Braddish still walks the main house in striped pants and a silk hat.

Woodland Plantation was the picture on the Southern Comfort bottle.

Until 2010, every label of the whiskey liqueur featured a sketch of this 1830s sugar plantation on the Mississippi River, based on the famous Currier and Ives print "Home on the Mississippi." The building still stands about 40 minutes south of New Orleans in West Pointe a la Hache, and if you grew up seeing Southern Comfort bottles on back bars across the country, you've seen Woodland Plantation, even if you didn't know it.

The house was built in the 1830s by Captain William Johnson, a Mississippi River pilot who figured out quickly that piloting paid less than smuggling. He partnered with the pirate Jean Lafitte, who by the 1830s had shifted from Gulf of Mexico privateering to raiding slave ships off the Louisiana coast. Johnson's Woodland Plantation served as a holding station. Lafitte's crews would take Africans from captured slavers, and Johnson would warehouse them at Woodland, then quietly resell them to plantations up and down the Mississippi. It was a sugar operation on paper and a slave trading hub in practice. The plantation's "well-appointed" sugar house, considered one of the largest in the country at the time, sat on ground where the labor was sourced from piracy.

That's the history the ghost stories attach to, and you can feel it in the way the accounts cluster around specific locations on the property. Apparitions are reported most often near the old slave quarters along Highway 23. Visitors and current staff describe the figures of two women and a man on the grounds, never speaking, never interacting, just present. A young boy's ghost has been seen repeatedly. When anyone asks him a question, he disappears.

The inn's signature ghost is less grim and more dandy. Braddish Johnson, the captain's younger son, is the most frequently sighted spirit in the main house. The descriptions don't vary much: striped pants, a silk hat, and a gold-tipped cane. One haunted-travel writer who visited said Braddish looked less like a plantation heir and more like a French Quarter gambler who'd gotten lost. Guests report him in the upstairs hallways and occasionally at the foot of the stairs. He doesn't seem aggressive. He also doesn't seem aware that he's visible.

Cold spots show up on the first floor in rooms guests don't expect. Disembodied voices carry through the house after hours. Footsteps on empty staircases. The usual list of old plantation phenomena, but concentrated enough that several paranormal teams have logged sessions here over the years.

Woodland was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 18, 1998. It's been restored and currently operates as a nine-room inn alongside Spirits Hall, a converted 19th-century church on the property that serves as the dining and bar area. The Library of Congress holds the HABS architectural documentation from the 1930s, which means the building has been studied as a piece of Mississippi River history independently of any ghost claims.

It's worth being honest about what Woodland is. The Southern Comfort label made it look romantic. The actual history is a sugar operation that ran on piracy-sourced forced labor for decades before the Civil War. When people report apparitions near the old slave quarters, they're reporting an atmosphere that the property's own history set up long before anyone started writing it down as a haunting. Braddish in his gold-tipped cane is the colorful ghost the inn puts on the brochure. The women and the man and the boy who disappears when spoken to are the ones that probably belong on the page.