The Myrtles Plantation

by Ghostly Enconter

  Father Sinet was the rector at Grace Church. It surprised me when I learned that he had called the rector of my old church in Saratoga, California, to verify that I was truly Episcopalian! I wondered if that was standard practice, or if he had been put up to it. Maybe someone thought I was “faking” being Episcopalian and wanted me exposed.

  I was thrilled when Jim and I received invitations to join several of St. Francisville’s most prestigious social clubs. In a town with no movie theater, no bowling alley, and no opera house, these social clubs took on a magnified importance and it was considered a huge honor to be extended an invitation. So I was shocked and disappointed when Jim absolutely refused to join.

  “I’m not playing any silly games just to fit in and be accepted,” he stated firmly.

  “It’s not a silly game,” I pleaded. “The people here are really nice. You haven’t even given them a chance. Besides, we are trying to start a business here. It would make it infinitely easier if we had the support of the people in town. It’s critical that we don’t offend them.”

  “No way. I am not joining any social clubs,” Jim stated adamantly.

  I pleaded with my husband to reconsider. It was the only time since we had been together that he fought me on any issue. It must have seemed like a slap in the face to some of the locals, who felt that an invitation to their club was the ultimate prize. Since these clubs were for couples, I couldn’t go ahead and join alone. This one stubborn stand of Jim’s really hurt us, both socially and professionally.

  We did make some great friends in town however. Bill and Dawn Caldwell took us under their wing and introduced us around. Bill worked at the mental institution in Jackson, Louisiana, and he was also an accomplished violinist. Dawn was an artist. They owned a cute pink antebellum house across from the old high school. Bill played John James Audubon in the annual Pilgrimage. He and I got together regularly to play violin.

  We also got to know John and Marguerite Rarrick. Judge Rarrick had been the local congressional district representative to the U.S. Congress and was the presidential candidate for the Independent party after George Wallace. They hardly seemed like a couple we would bond with, and yet as politically far apart as we were, I respected John’s wit and intelligence, as well as Marguerite’s caring nature. You could say we appreciated each other’s differences.

  John and Marguerite were fairly new transplants to St. Francisville, having moved there from Indiana just twenty years before. “You are just not accepted in this town unless your grandparents were born here, and even then, you still might be considered a newcomer,” John once complained. When he found out we were doing historical research, especially at the newspaper office, he laughed.

  “The joke around here with all the attorneys is that Libby Dart, president of the Historical Society has rewritten the town’s history to her liking. It’s common knowledge that she “borrowed” original editions of the St. Francisville Democrat, and if she did return them at all they were full of holes where she cut out column after column.”

  “She thinks she owns this town,” Marguerite added. “But word around here is that her family is actually from a line of carpetbaggers who settled in Zachary.”

  The Rarricks had also been friends with the Michauds and had lots of stories to tell about their previous visits to the Myrtles.

  “Mrs. Michaud was very hurt and bitter, because no matter what she did for the community, they never accepted her, since she was from Minnesota,” Marguerite told me once. “Her only sin was that she was from out of town.”

  Marguerite also told me about many of the ghost experiences that the Michauds had encountered at the Myrtles—lights going on and off, footsteps, voices, and a black mammy who tucked people in at night. Obviously not much had changed.

  When my parents came to visit, John and Marguerite suggested a crawfish boil.

  “What’s a crawfish?” Jim asked.

  “Mud bugs. Crawdads. They look like tiny little lobsters,” Marguerite explained.

  “Oh, crawdads,” Jim responded. “We used them as bait.”

  “You’ll love ’em,” John assured Jim.

  That Monday (our slow day) Jim brought over a huge fifty-pound bag of the critters, and a big aluminum pot to boil them in. He simmered them in spicy Cajun seasonings, along with corn on the cob, red potatoes, lemon slices, and whole cloves of garlic. We set up long picnic tables on the back gallery, covering them with newspaper. John dumped the spicy contents on the newspaper and we began to feast.

  “How do you eat them?” Jim finally asked, sitting there starving.

  “It’s easy,” John explained. “You snap off the tail, squeeze it to break the spine, peel it open, and pop out the tail. Then you suck the heads.”

  “Suck the heads? Gross!” Jim winced, making a face. He never did master peeling crawfish, so he had no choice but to fill up on the potatoes and corn, spicy hot from the crawfish broth. My dad and I became masters at peeling the critters. At a crawfish boil, you either peel fast or starve!

  Jim made friends on his own as well, falling right in with the “good old boys” crowd—the mayor, the police jury president, and the judge. These men were goodhearted family men who loved their wine and women a little too much, but would do anything for you. The blue-haired ladies at the Historical Society, however, did not accept us and were openly hostile toward us, so much so that tourists reported that they had been told not to visit the Myrtles. It was bad enough to be a newcomer; to buy one of “their” historic homes was the unforgivable sin.

  Even some of our peers, people our own age, treated us with animosity. Cheese Hamilton, who got his nickname when he opened “Cheese’s Cheeseburgers” across the street from the Myrtles, often stopped by for a beer or to shoot the bull with Jim. That is, until he married Anne Butler Poindexter Hamilton, and he was forbidden to set foot upon our property.

  “Anne says they are not blueblood enough,” Cheese confessed to one of our hostesses when she asked him why he hadn’t been back over to the Myrtles. “It’s a shame,” he added. “I really like those people.”

  If anyone in town had the right to be snobbish, it was Miss Maimie Thompson. As one-time heir to both Oakley and Rosedown, and owner, along with her sister Sadie, of Catalpa Plantation, she was as blue-blooded as they come. Yet she, and her entire family, embraced us, and frequently invited Jim and me over for lunch or just to sit on the verandah conversing for hours. A decanter of sherry or frosty martinis with an aromatic twist of lemon peel were always waiting for us when we arrived.

  Miss Maimie’s house tours were famous, not just because of the incredible family history and treasures she shared, but because when she reached the dining room, she always offered a glass of sherry to everyone on the tour. Being the gracious hostess she is, she wouldn’t think of asking her guests to drink alone, so she would pour herself a glass as well. By the end of the day, after several sherrys, her stories became even more animated.

  Miss Maimie could weave a story and keep listeners spellbound for hours. She talked about how on Sunday her family used to dress up in their prettiest dresses and make a four-hour buggy trip to Rosedown (just eight miles away) to join her cousins and aunts and uncles for Sunday supper. “In those days, children were to be seen and not heard,” she told us. During the War, her grandmother toted all the silver at Catalpa out to the pond, where she buried it under layers of murky water and mud to hide it from Yankee looters. It’s the same silver the family uses today.

  As gregarious and charming as Miss Maimie was, her husband Jim was the total opposite, and he never did understand why Miss Maimie gave tours of their home. When a tour bus arrived, Mr. Jim would sit on the front gallery, sometimes in his pajamas, grumbling about the “damned tourists”!

  One time, after sipping a couple of martinis on her verandah, Miss Maimie asked Jim and me how we were coping with our “ghosts.” I was surprised, but glad she had brought it up. I certainly never would have.

  “Oh, you
know, the usual creeks and groans,” Jim replied.

  “And footsteps and voices . . .” I added, smiling.

  She leaned over closer to us, and in a hushed voice, as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear, she confided, “One naaaht, yeahs ago, we drove past the Myrtles aftah dahk. Back then you could see the home through the trees. I heard strange laughts coming through the windows, and we could make out people dressed in old-time clothing, dancing around the parlors. It was strange, because Ah knew that no one lived the-ah at that tahm.

  “But then, of co-ahs, everyone knows that there is no such thing as ghosts,” she added, with a wink.

  CHAPTER 25

  Snuggling next to Jim’s sultry body at night made me feel warm and protected, and it was almost easy to forget my worries and concentrate on him.

  Once, not long after he arrived, lying next to him, I watched in amazement as the room was filled with a kaleidoscope of fluttering lights. At first, I thought it must have been the leaves on the trees outside, casting shimmering shadows through the window and onto the walls, but I realized the trees were much too far from the house, and there was no lighting behind them to create a shadow. It looked like hundreds of tiny bubbles, in various shapes and sizes, bouncing around the room. At times, they grouped together and almost seemed to take on dimension and color. Jim’s slow, steady breathing told me that he was already asleep, so I watched in silence, not wanting to wake him. With my backside pushed against him, our legs intertwined, I watched the show until I peacefully fell asleep.

  I was amazed that even in the light of day the shadows were still dancing around the room! I watched them for a little while, then fell back to sleep. When I woke up again Jim was already up and giving the tour to the overnight guests. I didn’t think much about the light show until later in the afternoon, when I overheard Jim telling Elaine about the dancing shadows he had seen! He told Elaine that he had tried to reproduce the lights by moving different objects outside the window, to see if they made shadows, but nothing he tried would recreate the images.

  “You saw them, too?” I asked. Each of us was surprised to learn that the other had seen them. We really didn’t make anything “ghostly” out of the experience, just unusual, and we never could figure out the cause.

  Some time later, Charles suggested we rent the movie Poltergeist just for fun. Living in a haunted house, I wasn’t crazy about watching a movie about poltergeists, but Charles enticed me with promises of buttered popcorn.

  “Oh, my God,” I gasped, as hundreds of tiny lights on the screen that looked just like the lights we had seen proceeded down the stairs and “developed” into filmy images of people, spirit people, just as the late Heather O’Rourke, who played the precocious blond little girl in the film, uttered her famous words, “They’re here!”

  “Whoa! Someone else must have seen shadows like those before, too,” Jim commented. “Otherwise, how would they think of putting them in the film? Do you think our lights were spirits, too?”

  That incident started to make a believer out of Jim, but he still hadn’t seen a full-fledged ghost. That all changed in very short order. Jim gave most of the tours at the Myrtles, and his shyness and reticence was soon replaced by an animated and confident demeanor. You could tell he was having fun. Most of the tours consisted of “walk-ups,” a term we coined to designate that rather than being on a scheduled tour bus, “walk-ups” arrived in small groups by car throughout the day. Rather than make people wait for the current tour to end and the next to begin again in the entry hall, we joined the newcomers with the tour in progress in whichever room they had reached, and let them continue with the next tour to the rooms they had missed.

  Jim was with a group of walk-ups in the French bedroom, where he had a clear view of the front yard. He looked out and saw a family halfway up the walkway: a couple, followed closely by two little girls. As he finished his spiel in the French bedroom he waited a few minutes for the family to get to the front door and join them before he resumed the tour in the dining room. When the doorbell rang, Jim greeted the family, and the couple entered. Jim stood in the doorway, looking out. When the wait became awkward, he turned around and asked the couple if their children would be joining the tour. Surprised, they replied that they had come alone, and their children were all grown anyway.

  Jim nervously proceeded with his tour, but the moment he finished he ran to find me. With eyebrows raised high, he related what happened.

  I was thrilled that he had finally seen something. “What did they look like?” I asked.

  “How do I know?” he retorted. “I didn’t know they were ghosts, so I didn’t pay much attention.” He went on to describe the two small girls as being around five to seven years old, with long blond hair, wearing long white dresses. “Do you think they were the two little ghost girls we’ve heard about?” he added.

  “From what you’ve described, they are,” I answered.

  “I swear they were every bit as solid as the couple they were with!” he claimed, looking intently at me as if I might be able to explain it to him. I couldn’t.

  Once Jim saw his first ghost, and was forced to deal with their reality, he wanted to learn everything he could. For the first time since we had been at the Myrtles he asked me questions and initiated conversations about them. He also stopped teasing me when I recounted an experience.

  On another occasion, Jim was giving a tour to a group of people, several from St. Francisville, when one of the ladies wandered off into the French bedroom. Jim found her there talking to space. She told him that when they were in the gentlemen’s parlor, she felt dizzy, then confused, as she seemed to be in a different time. She heard a woman crying in the French bedroom, so she went to investigate, still trapped in this other realm. She found a mulatto slave dressed in green frock with a green turban wrapped around her head whimpering in the corner, so she went over to comfort her, asking her name and how she could help. The slave told her that her name was Chloe and that she had just learned that her father was white, although she didn’t identify him. Chloe spoke for several minutes until Jim approached and jolted the lady back to the present day.

  After hearing her story, Jim asked the lady to wait right there, and he ran to find me. Since I had seen the ghost in the green turban, he wanted us to compare notes. There were certain characteristics that I hadn’t revealed about the ghost, so when so-called psychics told us that they saw the “beautiful young slave girl in the green turban” I knew they had either read about her in articles about the Myrtles and the beautiful mulatto ghost written before we took ownership, or they were making it up.

  I asked the woman to describe the ghost in detail.

  “She was a large, homely woman with a very square jaw,” the lady described. I knew from her description that she had seen the same ghost as I had. Now we had a name for the ghost in the green turban—Chloe.

  CHAPTER 26

  There were only two places to buy groceries in this small town—Piggly Wiggly (which everyone referred to as simply “The Pig”) and IGA—so Jim and I made a trip to Sam’s Club in Baton Rouge to stock up on items for the inn, and then out to dinner at Don’s Seafood. We returned that night to find two bodies sacked out in the entry hall. We were expecting Pete, but not Joanie.

  “Why didn’t ya’ll just find a couple beds somewhere and make yourselves at home?” I asked.

  “No way, Jose. I’ve heard enough about your so-called ghosts, you couldn’t pay me to go inside any farther than this,” Pete responded.

  Joanie and Pete had both rented apartments in one of my Victorian properties in San Jose. Pete, a professional Sheetrocker, had taught me everything I knew about floating and taping, and he worked alongside me on several of the houses I had restored. Since he had kinfolk in Savannah, he volunteered to drive my truck out for me and spend a few days doing some work at the Myrtles before continuing to Georgia. Joanie, apparently, had stowed away. “She wouldn’t get out of the car,” Pete professed.
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  Joanie was a sweet, troubled eighteen year old girl, whom Jim and I sort of “adopted” in San Jose. The daughter of a physician and a nurse, she had been in and out of institutions for her academic handicap and behavioral problems. When she moved into one of my apartments, she clung to us like a frightened child. We befriended her, and she never once exhibited bad behavior in our presence. Since she didn’t have a car, we took her with us occasionally on outings to the flea market or the beach. She sobbed when we told her we were moving away to Louisiana, and my heart went out to her.

  “Can’t I come with you?” she had pleaded. I tried to explain to her why that was impossible, but I worried about who would look out for her after we left. Now, here she was. It was still impractical for her to stay, for many reasons.

  The four of us sat up talking for a short while, and then I offered to show Pete and Joanie to their respective rooms.

  “Oh, no way. We are staying with you in your room,” Pete quickly replied. “I’m not afraid, but I’m not sleeping alone up there, either.”

  They ended up staying in their sleeping bags on our bedroom floor.

  Pete bolted upright in his sleeping bag shortly after we turned out the lights.

  “Who is that?” he demanded about the heavy footsteps going up the stairs. “I know you don’t have any guests. I think you have a prowler!”