The Myrtles Plantation at St Francisville, Louisiana, has a well-documented place in ghost tourism. That does not make its best-known ghost’s biography well documented. The story of Chloe, an enslaved woman blamed for poisoning a family, and the story of William Winter dying on a staircase both attach alleged manifestations to supposed historical events. Comparing the owners’ history, recorded interviews and original investigations reveals important differences between an experience, its interpretation and the backstory offered to explain it.
The place and the histories written about it
The National Register nomination prepared by Jonathan Fricker describes a raised cottage enlarged during the nineteenth century, with a long frontal gallery, cast-iron supports and elaborate plasterwork. Its significance concerns architecture and David Bradford’s historical association. National Register documentation establishes a historic building; it does not certify a haunting.
Even the written histories require comparison. The nomination gives 1796 in its architectural description and 1797 in its significance section. Its account of ownership and family chronology also differs from the current owners’ timeline. Rather than silently combine all dates into a supposedly perfect account, the secure description is a house of late-eighteenth-century origin with substantial later alteration. The selected sources are being read critically, not treated as equally precise records of every family event.
What the Chloe story claims
In interviews reproduced by American Ghost Walks, former guide Hester Eby tells the familiar story: Chloe is punished for eavesdropping, then uses oleander in a cake that kills members of the Woodruff family. Her alleged appearance is associated with a missing ear and a turban. These are a guide’s transmitted claims, not evidence that the named woman committed a crime.
The same article prints a sharply different explanation from historical researcher David Wiseheart, who says he found no supporting Chloe in the property records he examined and attributes the family deaths to yellow fever. Former owner Frances Kermeen acknowledges that the name came through a reported encounter told by a visitor, rather than historical documentation. The interviews preserve disagreement within the site’s own storytelling tradition. The audio recordings have not been independently checked here; the inspected evidence is the published interview text.
The family deaths and the missing biography
The Myrtles’ current history page places Sarah Matilda’s death in 1823, likely from yellow fever, followed by James and Cornelia the next year from the same illness. It does not present those deaths as a single poisoned-cake incident. The same timeline dates Marjorie Munson’s ghost-inspired song to 1956 and the Moss family’s photograph identified as Chloe to 1992. These statements document how the property currently presents its past.
Troy Taylor’s original historical review, acknowledging David Wiseheart’s research, also contrasts the poisoning legend with deaths separated in time. It traces an earlier family story about an unnamed older woman in a green bonnet, rather than an identified young servant. Taylor accepts that haunting reports may remain interesting while rejecting the biography used to explain them. That position differs from treating every criticism of the legend as a rejection of all reported experiences.
Absence from the records examined is not a complete census of every person who ever lived on the estate. It is, however, a serious obstacle to publishing the poisoning, mutilation and killing story as a real woman’s established life. No original estate inventory or death register has been independently audited for this article. The responsible distinction is between the researchers’ reported archival findings and a new archival investigation that has not been performed.
A bedside figure and a photograph
Taylor records Frances Myers’s account of a 1987 bedside encounter: a woman in a green turban, holding a candlestick, allegedly vanished when approached. The current owners’ timeline separately places Mrs Moss’s well-known photograph in 1992. Neither the earlier encounter nor the later image establishes that the figure was Chloe. Recognising a resemblance to a story is different from establishing a historical identity.
The photograph is not reproduced here. The article does not claim an examination of the original negative, exposure sequence or camera circumstances. Those are the materials needed for a photographic investigation; a caption identifying a figure as a particular ghost cannot substitute for them. The licensed modern photograph shown above documents the house, and must not be mistaken for the claimed evidential image.
Winter’s death and the seventeenth stair
Another story connects footsteps to William Winter’s death in 1871. Kermeen’s interview describes him struggling upstairs after being shot and dying on the seventeenth step. American Ghost Walks also reproduces an excerpt identified as a report in the New Orleans Times-Picayune of 31 January 1871. That excerpt describes Winter being called to his doorway on the evening of the 26th, shot there and dying immediately.
The complete original newspaper issue has not been inspected here; this is a contemporary report accessed through a later reproduction. Even with that limitation, the difference is substantial. Immediate death at the doorway does not support a documented final ascent to a particular stair. The staircase scene remains a later explanatory legend, rather than a detail confirmed by the reproduced report. A reported sound and a story identifying its cause need separate evidence.
What an investigator found in the building
Joe Nickell’s first-person review recalls staying alone at the Myrtles on 14–15 August 2001. He reports an off-centre door that could swing and a loose shutter capable of producing banging. He also rejects the murderous-Chloe narrative. These are specific alternative explanations for particular reported phenomena, rather than a laboratory test of every visitor’s experience.
Nickell contrasts his work with the later television investigation by The Atlantic Paranormal Society, including a moving-lamp incident and a possible ordinary explanation involving its cord. This article has not independently examined the original television footage, so no finding of deliberate manipulation is asserted. The useful methodological question remains whether a proposed ordinary mechanism was adequately excluded before an event was labelled supernatural.
Location and the limits of the record
The map uses an approximate US Census St Francisville locality reference, rounded to 30.784, −91.376, for the wider Myrtles area. It does not locate a photographed figure, a grave or a manifestation inside a particular room. The recorded claim years are 1987 and 1992; the house’s construction, historical deaths and later investigations are not substituted for those dates.
The owners’ tour page openly presents the property’s folklore and ghost encounters. Such interpretation documents a continuing tradition, while historical and evidential questions remain open to checking. Here the sources support a history of claims, conflicting explanations and identifiable investigations. They do not establish Chloe’s biography or a supernatural cause for the photograph, footsteps or noises.