The others went to bed, but I stayed up with Hamp, dying to learn more.
“What about Sarah?” I asked. “What can you tell me about Sarah?”
Ever since Betty Jo, our real estate agent, kept calling me Sarah, way before we ever discussed the Myrtles, I had felt an affinity with her spirit, and I was aching to learn more about her life.
Hamp took both my hands in his and looked me straight in the eye. “I can tell you lots. Where should I begin?”
“Tell me about the love affair between Sarah and Mr. Celestine,” I offered. The last time Hamp was there, he had made a reference to a romance between Sarah’s ghost and the real live Myrtles overseer, and then left without explaining.
“Mr. Celestine managed the place for Arland Dease way back in the late 1970s. He moved into the Myrtles to watch over the place and give the tours. Of course, at that time there were no overnight guests.
“Sarah appeared to Mr. Celestine shortly after he moved in. She was crying, and she begged him for his help. Quite taken by this beautiful feminine presence, he felt strangely drawn to her, and he desperately wanted to help her. Having no idea how to communicate with her, he called me and asked me to help. We used to sit up in the suite for hours talking to her.
“Sarah sometimes called Mr. Celestine ‘David.’ When we asked her why she called him that, she said that was the name she knew him by, that she was so glad that he ‘came back’ to her. She said that although Mr. Celestine had ‘come back’ as someone different, she recognized him instantly from before.
“We asked her to tell us about David. She said that he lived in Woodville, Mississippi, fourteen miles up the road. He used to come down to St. Francisville to find work. She was just a young teenage girl when he did some work at the Myrtles, and she was instantly smitten with him.
“David fought his feeling for Sarah; he knew he was not in her class, and her family would never approve, so their love could never be. In spite of this, he fell madly in love with her, too. When her father found out, he ordered David never to set foot upon the property again.
“When Sarah saw David, aka Mr. Celestine, return to the Myrtles, she was ecstatic. She had tried very hard to make contact, yet he remained unaware of her, until one night he heard her cries.”
“Did Mr. Celestine have any recollection of this supposed past life as David?” I asked Hamp.
“No, not at first, but he was very drawn to her, very attracted to her, and over time their love was rekindled.”
“So why did he leave, if he loved her so much?” I asked.
“Arland sold the house to John L. He stayed on for a while but things were different with John L. owning the place. That’s when he met Miss Elaina Percy and moved to Ellersley. I know it broke his heart to leave Sarah, but it was time for him to go.”
It was a beautifully romantic, yet tragic love story, but how could it possibly be real? Yet it was obvious that Hamp believed every word of it.
CHAPTER 29
One thing that had bothered me about Sarah was that she was seen in the suite upstairs, which didn’t exist when she lived at the Myrtles. Not only had Hamp communicated with Sarah in that room, but John L. had told me when he took me up to the suite my very first night that Sarah had died in that very room. How could she have died in that room if that wing wasn’t added until more than ten years after her death?
The house tour script, based on extensive research required to place the Myrtles on the National Register of Historic Homes, stated that the original house was typical of its day, with four rooms downstairs, four rooms up, with the steep original staircase leading up the center of the home. It wasn’t until the Stirlings bought the home well after Sarah’s death that they extended the house and the suite was built.
Then it dawned on me—could there be two Sarahs? Was it possible that the Stirlings had a daughter named Sarah, too?
There was one place to find out quickly—the cemetery at Grace Episcopal Church. I grabbed my car keys and headed to the cemetery. Extending way behind the church, the meticulously manicured graveyard was dotted with carved headstones and marble angels towering over smaller stark markers. History was laid out in layers, the graves closest to the church dating from the early 1800s, with more recent graves much farther from the church. Earlier tombstones were a status symbol; the bigger, more grandiose, the better. Family plots were framed with the finest French ironwork. I recognized some of the family names in the garden of graves—Bohen, Butler, Thompson—as descendants of these families still resided in St. Francisville.
It didn’t take me long to find the Stirling family plot just a few feet from the church, encompassed with intricately detailed, rusted ironwork. A huge, towering effigy nearly six feet tall presided over the plot, engraved on each of its four sides with the name, date of birth, and date of death of a family member: Ruffin Gray Stirling, Mary Catherine Stirling, his wife, and two of their children, but no Sarah. I walked around the plot reading names and dates of Stirling family members, and I found what I was seeking: Sarah M. Stirling, born July 4, 1832, died October 29, 1887. There had been two Sarahs at the Myrtles—Sarah Mathilda Bradford and Sarah M. Stirling!
It finally made sense! The first Sarah, General Bradford’s daughter, had lived in the original part of the house. She was the one who was said to have been poisoned along with her two little girls in 1824, after catching her husband, Clarke Woodruff, in bed with one of the slaves.
The second Sarah, Sarah M. Stirling, had not even been born yet. That explained why “Sarah” had been seen in the wing built by the Stirlings, and how she died in a part of the house that was not even built when the first Sarah died. No wonder this Sarah claimed that no one understood her. They thought she was someone else!
Now that I knew there were two Sarahs, I wanted to learn everything I could about both of them. Although they didn’t have as much data about Sarah Woodruff and the early 1800s, the courthouse offered a wealth of information about the Stirlings.
It also offered a mystery: I learned that Sarah Mathilda Woodruff had not died on the same day as her children, as the legend suggests. As a matter of fact, the children were not two little girls, as seemed to be the common belief, but a boy and a girl, and they had died of yellow fever within a month of each other. So who were the two little ghost girls who were seen so frequently? Had they lived at the Myrtles? Had they perished at the Myrtles? Why were they still here?
Unfortunately, with so little information from that period, I reluctantly turned my attention to Sarah M. Stirling, and had copies made of her birth and death certificates and her marriage certificate with William Drew Winter.
Armed with this information, including the date of William’s death, I went back to the Democrat and scoured the yellowed newspapers, where I was finally able to piece together the life of the second Sarah and her husband William.
Sarah Mulford Stirling was the only daughter of Ruffin Gray and Mary Catherine Stirling, who bought the house in 1834. She married William Drew Winter, a prominent attorney from St. Louis, Missouri, in 1852. He had one son from a previous marriage, and together they had four more children. Their daughter, Cate, died from yellow fever as a young child.
From newspaper articles I learned that Sarah and William had moved away to Baton Rouge, but returned home to the plantation after the War. They lived there until 1871, when William was brutally gunned down at the Myrtles by a man who rode up on horseback and escaped before anyone could identify him. The governor of Louisiana offered a one-thousand-dollar reward for the capture of his assassin, but he was never found. Sarah never recovered from the shock and grief, and remained in mourning, spending most of her time locked away in her suite upstairs, until her death in 1887.
That explained the black clothes and black hair. Her life had been filled with so much tragedy and despair. The house seemed lighter that night.
CHAPTER 30
One crisp fall morning a pickup truck chugged up the drive, and a somewhat dishe
veled woman tumbled out, dressed in soiled jeans and a man’s shirt, her hair piled up on top of her head. Thrusting out her arm, she sputtered gruffly, “Hi, maah name is Elaina Percy, and Mr. Celestine and I would love to invite you and youah husband to Jawhn us tomohrow at Ellersley foh cocktails.”
“We would love to!” I replied, reaching for her extended hand. Her grip was strong yet awkward.
With that, she hopped back up in the cab of her rickety pickup and chugged back down the drive. Cocktails with Miss Elaina and Mr. Celestine . . . I couldn’t wait! I had wanted to meet this mysterious “Mr. Celestine,” past overseer of the Myrtles and current caretaker at Ellersley, and admitted former lover of Sarah Winters, for quite some time. How would it feel, after all, to be in love with a ghost?
Ellersley was one of the most exquisite plantations in the South, sitting majestically atop a hill, an immense white palace with gigantic Greek pillars. Even with the paint chipped and the plaster worn from years of neglect, the plantation was still magnificent.
Miss Elaina invited us in, not through the front door, or any other door for that matter, but through one of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows. A Hitchcock-style three-story circular staircase ascending nearly to the sky stood sentinel in the entry hall.
“Would you like to go upstairs?” she asked, noticing my fascination with the staircase.
Would I!
Ascending the stairs, she told us about a time when she rode a mule all the way up the three-story staircase to the attic, and her antics became the talk of the town for weeks thereafter. Miss Elaina was a dying breed—an independent, self-made Southern woman, who didn’t need a man to “take care of her.”
Many of the pieces of furniture, including the bedroom suite, had been hand-crafted from bare logs by Miss Elaina’s father, or by Miss Elaina’s own hands! She spoke frequently and wistfully about a long-ago man she loved and adored beyond all others—not one of her three ex-husbands, as one might expect, but her daddy. She worshiped her daddy, and no suitor could ever measure up.
After exploring the three floors, suspended one atop another, we circled down the staircase and out through an open window onto the gallery.
“Where’s Mr. Celestine?” I asked, anxious to meet this person I had heard so much about.
“Unfortunately, he had to go out of town, some kind of family emergency,” Miss Elaina replied. “But I didn’t want to cancel our visit. Bourbon?”
We sat in grayed rockers on her weathered verandah. As we chatted, a group of bees started buzzing around us.
“God-danged bees,” Miss Elaina grumbled, swatting them away. “Where’s my shotgun?”
It was sitting right next to her rocker. Grabbing it, she fired off several rounds.
“That’ll teach them little varmints,” she gloated.
Miss Elaina was a scream. She confided that before Mr. Celestine came, she had no running water, and no indoor plumbing, so several times a month she would head for the creek, laying her clothes carefully on the bank, bathing in the cool, rushing water, releasing her long silver locks to shampoo. She would take her clothes and scrub them on a large rock to get them clean.
A menagerie of animals—cats, dogs, birds, even cows and goats—inhabited Ellersley, passing freely through the huge open windows into the house, which provided creature relief from the hot, humid summer days or crisp, cool winter nights.
When Mr. Celestine first heard about Miss Elaina’s predicament, he had to see for himself. He took her under his wing, cleaning her up, and the house as well. He added a bathroom and fixed up the parlor and several of the bedrooms.
“I know he’s happy here; he’s told me as much,” Miss Elaina admitted. “But I think the Myrtles still has a large piece of his heart,” she added.
Nursing our bourbons and enjoying Miss Elaina, we hardly noticed that the sky had turned a foreboding gray. Jim and I said our “thanks” and “goodbyes” and took off before the torrents of rain began to pour.
By the time we returned home, it was storming outside; the wind was howling like a wounded animal, and relentless drops of rain beat down on the roof like an army. Charles wanted to hear all about our visit to Ellersley, and Joanie followed us around like a puppy dog, afraid of the storm. Jim suggested a game of Scrabble in the gaming room. Even though we were in one of the rooms that I feared the most, we were laughing and joking, and not concerned at all with the ghosts.
I was trying to figure out what to do with the letters I had drawn, Z and J, when I heard Jim gasp. Looking over at him, I saw his complexion change from ruddy to pale. He was pointing at the window behind me. I quickly turned around to see what had captured his attention, and I saw a little girl, holding a candlestick, peering into the window from the back gallery. One hand was lifted to her forehead as she pressed her face to the glass. She appeared to be about five or six years old, with long, blond hair and a granny-style, floor-length dress. I looked back at Jim as he quickly stood up and ran to the window.
“There’s someone outside,” he shouted, as he lifted the window all the way up into the ceiling and ran out onto the gallery. We all tried to stop him as he continued running through the muddy grounds, the rain pounding down upon him.
“No parent is going to let their child out in this weather,” Charles called to Jim.
Finally Jim came back in, dripping wet and covered with mud.
“I couldn’t find her,” he puzzled.
“Of course not. Why would anyone be running around in the rain and mud behind our house on a night like this?” I asked Jim.
“Maybe someone is playing tricks on us?” he questioned.
“Jim, Frances is right. No one would take their little daughter outside on a night like this, especially just to play a trick on someone,” Charles offered.
Jim was so certain that what he had seen was a flesh-and-blood child that even logic could not convince him otherwise. This time he just couldn’t admit that the little girl he had so plainly seen was a ghost.
CHAPTER 31
It was hard to ignore the heavy footsteps that started up the main staircase every night right above our heads. Often, late at night or in the early morning hours, I would get up alone and walk through the house. I was becoming much braver, and as crazy as it sounds, I had become accustomed to many of the not-so-usual sounds. The footsteps, however, were something I could not get used to. Always, in the back of my mind, I wondered if it was a person, or I would be afraid that something might materialize and I would see something. If I were alone in the main part of the house, and the footsteps started up the main stairs, I would fly back into my room and curl up next to Jim, pulling the covers over my head. I did not want to see any floating candelabra again, or worse, an apparition.
One night, I was coming down the stairs when the footsteps started up the stairs! I froze. They kept coming up toward me, closer and closer, until I felt the vibration on the stair upon which I was standing, as “it” passed through me and continued upward, stopping a few steps short of the top. I nearly fell down the remaining stairs.
We noticed that for some reason, the footsteps never seemed to make it all the way to the top of the staircase. One night I counted each step—seventeen in all. The next night they stopped at seventeen again.
I asked Charles if he had come across any information in his research of the home’s history that would explain not only the footsteps, but why they always stopped on the seventeenth step. When he couldn’t explain it, we called Hamp.
“Oooh, I’ve heard them, too,” he admitted. “They are spooky. John L. told me once that it was William Winter. He said William was shot outside on the north gallery. There are still bullet holes in the plaster, and bloodstains on the wall and on the gallery that won’t go away, no matter how hard you scrub. After he was shot he tried to make it into the house and up the stairs to Sarah. He died on the seventeenth step, in her arms.”
Charles and I went out to see if the bullet holes and bloodstains were
still there. I seldom went out to the north side of the house. Sure enough, holes still riddled the plaster on the outside of the fireplace, but there were no visible bloodstains on the wall.
“Look,” Charles spoke, grabbing my arm and pointing to the gallery floor. Aged brown stains stood out through the faded blue paint. “Could that be remnants of William’s blood?”
I got the chills.
Several weeks later, three elderly friends of Mrs. Michaud, all members of her garden club in Minnesota, showed up at the Myrtles to take the tour. Jim immediately ran to get me, knowing I would want to meet them. They told us that Mrs. Michaud had shared some fascinating stories with the garden club, and they had always wanted to come down to Louisiana to see the plantation firsthand.
Wanting to learn more about Mrs. Michaud, I offered to take the ladies on a personal tour. I did not make any mention of the ghosts, hoping that they would bring the subject up themselves. After I finished the tour, they asked if they might see the upstairs. Although it’s not part of the house tour, I gladly obliged. On the way down the main staircase, one of the ladies leaned over and whispered to another. I moved in closer, so I could hear. “Which step is the seventeenth?” she inquired.
They knew about the footsteps! “What did you say?” I asked.
“Nothing,” the lady replied.
“Please tell me. Why did you ask about the seventeenth step?” I pleaded.
The ladies looked at each other, before turning their gaze to me, studying me carefully. Finally, one of the ladies spoke. “Marjorie told us that every evening she would hear loud, staggering footsteps coming up the stairs. She said they would always stop at the seventeenth step, where a man had died.”
I felt an odd sense of empathy with Mrs. Michaud upon learning that she had been haunted by the footsteps, too, and I wondered what else she must have endured, both at the hands of the small-town biddies who mocked and rejected her, and from the ghosts she coexisted with daily during her tenure at the Myrtles.
The Myrtles Plantation Page 13
