Woodland Plantation

A beautifully preserved 1834 plantation on the Mississippi River, famous as the image on Southern Comfort liquor bottles since 1934. This working sugarcane plantation offers guests a chance to stay in antebellum luxury.

Woodland Plantation was established in the mid-1830s by William Johnson, a river pilot associated with the pirate Jean Lafitte, on the banks of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish. Johnson and his business partner George Bradish used the property as a holding station where enslaved people were housed in four two-story brick cabins, unusual for Louisiana and rarely documented in the state, before being distributed to other plantations. The circa 1855 main house, built in Greek Revival and Italianate styles with gabled roofs and French doors opening onto the river-facing facade, grew into one of the most productive sugar operations in the region. Under Bradish Johnson, who took sole control in 1856 and became a Union sympathizer during the Civil War, the plantation contained one of the largest and best-appointed sugar houses in the United States. The Wilkinson family purchased the property in the early twentieth century and maintained ownership until 1997, when Foster Creppel bought the deteriorating estate at auction and spent sixteen years restoring it. As Creppel has noted, there used to be sixty-five plantations south of New Orleans, and today Woodland is the only one still standing on the west bank of the Mississippi.

The plantation gained unexpected fame when an 1871 lithograph titled A Home on the Mississippi, based on an illustration published in Every Saturday magazine, was licensed for use on the label of Southern Comfort whiskey after Prohibition ended. From 1934 until 2009, Woodland Plantation was one of the most recognized buildings in America, its image gracing millions of bottles worldwide.

The ghosts at Woodland are specific and recurring. The most frequently reported apparition is that of Bradish Johnson himself, seen wearing striped pants and a silk hat and carrying a gold-tipped cane as he moves through the main house as though still overseeing his domain. A young boy has been spotted on the grounds who vanishes whenever anyone approaches him. Two women and a man appear together on the first floor of the main house in what witnesses describe as a scene from another era. Near the site where the original slave cabins once stood, full-bodied apparitions of enslaved people have been reported. The brick quarters were destroyed during a hurricane years ago, but the spirits seem to remain attached to the land where they lived and suffered.

Guests staying at the ten-bedroom bed and breakfast, which now operates on the restored fifty-acre property, report a range of paranormal experiences. Disembodied voices carry through the hallways. Footsteps are heard in unoccupied rooms. Lights flicker without electrical explanation. Some guests have awakened in the night to see figures standing at the foot of their beds before the forms dissolve into nothing. The dining venue, Spirits Hall, is housed in a deconsecrated 1883 Catholic church that Creppel relocated from the nearby community of Homeplace, cutting the structure in half for transport and reassembling it on the site where the slave cabins once stood. The name Spirits Hall carries a deliberate double meaning in a place where history and the paranormal are never far apart.