“So what does he do? Does he say anything?”
“Well, not really,” she stated. Then, after a long pause: “We have sex.”
My God, what was she saying?
“Yeah,” I replied, as calmly as possible. “What do you mean, you have sex?”
“Well, every night, when I go to bed, he comes in. He starts kissing me and stuff. You know.”
Her words quickly sobered me up. “What do you mean, ‘and stuff’?”
“You know. He starts feeling me and stuff.”
“Feeling you where?” I managed to choke out.
“You know. My boobs, and down there,” she said, pointing below the table.
That was it! I sat up straight in my chair and faced her directly. “Joanie, I need to know exactly what goes on, what he is doing to you,” I said in a serious tone.
“You said you wouldn’t get mad,” she pleaded, mistaking the change in my demeanor, my grave concern, for anger. “You promised,” she cried, grimacing.
“Sweetheart, I’m not mad at you, I promise,” I assured her, stroking her hand. “I want to help you. But you need to tell me everything.”
The child was barely nineteen. I had no idea if she was sexually active or not, or if she even knew what was happening to her. What would her mother think if she found out that while staying with me, her young daughter was being molested—by a ghost?
“Well, we do ‘it.’”
“You mean intercourse?”
“Yeah.”
The weight of her words hit me. “Joanie, I can’t allow you to stay in that room for one more night! I don’t even know if you should go back into that house!”
Joanie looked up at me, and then shrugged. “But I like it!” she boasted.
Oh, my God! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Joanie, you have to promise me that you will not stay in that room again ever. I mean it. I don’t even want you going in there during the day, for any reason. This is serious.”
I loved Joanie like a family member and I knew I had to somehow protect her. I even suggested that maybe it was time for her to move back to California, but she vehemently protested. I seriously considered taking her to a psychologist, because I was afraid this could be really harmful to her psyche, but how would I tell a counselor that she was being molested by a ghost?
Joanie’s story was outrageous, and I had to consider the possibility that this was a bid for attention, or an attempt to shock me; yet if there was even the remotest of possibilities that she was telling the truth, the reality at the Myrtles was a lot worse than I had previously thought, and I had to save her at all cost.
It wasn’t long after Joanie’s innebriated confession that others came forward with the same story, first from one guest, and then another, and another, who had stayed in that room: that the ghost of a man had appeared during the night, and had raped or seduced them, depending upon who was telling the story and how they felt about it. It never happened to married women, only to young single girls, and it was only in that one bedroom—the old nursery.
Hearing these reports confirmed my deepest fear: Joanie had been telling the truth about her encounters with the judge. She was having sex with a ghost.
CHAPTER 41
That spring we got a call from a reporter in New York who wanted to write about our inn for a national publication. I was happy for the publicity and agreed to put her up for the night, along with a photographer. When I asked which magazine she wrote for, she hedged, but she assured me that it had wide exposure. I assumed she was writing about the rich history and architecture, but almost immediately she started asking about the ghosts.
I wasn’t sure I wanted the article to include any mention of the ghosts. Enough had been written about them in the past. Yes, I had done a Historic Halloween tour that brought several of the ghosts to life, but that was local, and it focused more on history and historical customs. I didn’t want to risk my chance of success by scaring off potential customers, and I told her so.
“We will downplay the ghost aspect,” the writer assured me.
I let my guard down as we wined and dined our literary guests in the formal dining room. After a while, I noticed that she kept filling our wine glasses. We were having so much fun that I had forgotten that they were reporters. We sat up late telling one story after another.
In the morning the photographer pulled me aside.
“Wow, you won’t believe this!” she gushed. “The bed lifted up in the middle of the night!”
Yeah, right. It sounded to me like too much spirits with dinner, but she was a guest, so I placated her. “Weren’t you scared?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was pretty trippy. I had just gone to bed when it started vibrating. The next thing I knew it lifted up in the air and was floating about a foot from the floor. I pulled the sheet over my head.”
“Too much,” I replied. I didn’t buy a word she was saying.
A few weeks later, a couple spending the night pulled out a copy of the National Enquirer. On the cover blared the headline: “Inside America’s Most Haunted House.” I winced. How could that happen? In the very center of the magazine were two full pages about the Myrtles and the ghosts, as well as photos of Jim and me. I was devastated.
“Too late now, the word is out,” I thought, concerned for my business. But over the coming weeks I noticed a strange anomaly. More and more people started coming to the Myrtles because they had read about the ghosts.
“What should we tell them?” Jim asked.
“I still don’t think we should tell anyone about the ghosts, especially if they don’t already know. Let’s not bring it up on the tour unless they ask.”
It became harder and harder to keep the ghosts secret. More articles followed: a chapter in Richard Winer’s book Houses of Horror, a cover story in Life magazine, The Star, USA Today, Glamour magazine, Playboy, the Los Angeles Times, and even The Wall Street Journal. Although there had been numerous articles written in the past about the ghosts, and CBS ran a special on the Myrtles when the Michauds owned it in the 1970s, there had been little mention of the ghosts in the years before we bought the place, and just like John L., I had hoped to keep the ghosts a closely guarded secret.
It’s hard to keep a secret like that, especially in a small town, where word spreads like wildfire. One employee of the gas station directly across the street from the Myrtles was complaining to Charles that I had allowed my two little girls to play outside in the rain. When he asked what they looked like, she described them as two little blond girls, about four and six years old, dressed in little white smocks. She said she had seen them playing outside before, and that I should know better than to let them go out in the rain. After Charles told her that the children were ghosts, she walked off the job and never returned. An older black gentleman who tended the gate on weekends likewise walked off the job when he saw a woman dressed in an antebellum gown strolling through the garden. I had my hostesses dress up in period costume for the tours, so he thought nothing of it, until the woman disappeared into thin air.
Tourists experienced their share of sightings as well. People frequently sent letters about their ghostly encounters, or enclosed photographs with strange images. Several times a month, we would receive a phone call from a puzzled tourist.
“When are you open?” they might ask, or, “What are your hours?” When we tell them that we are open every day except Christmas, from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., they seem confused.
“We were just out there,” they would reply. “The old man told us the house was closed.” Upon further questioning they all described a man who looked to be around sixty, dressed in khaki pants and a flannel shirt, who had approached them and told them to leave. John L. had told me that in the 1920s or 1930s the overseer had been shot during a robbery. Could that be him?
On rare occasions, one of our guests would flee the house in the middle of the night. One of the spookiest occurrences involved a young couple f
rom Kenner, who planned to spend their honeymoon in a romantic antebellum plantation. They had not heard about the ghosts, and, as was our strict policy, we didn’t enlighten them. They checked in early and we didn’t see them again until the candlelight dinner, after which they immediately disappeared back into their room. The next morning when they didn’t come down for breakfast, we assumed they were still upstairs, until we got a phone call from a very shaken young bride. Jim took the call:
“We left last night, and we won’t be coming back,” she said, offering no explanation. “If it’s not too much trouble, could you please have someone pack up our things and bring them to us at the Holiday Inn?” she requested, her voice shaking. When Jim asked her if there was a problem with their room, she stated hastily, “I have to go.”
Now very curious, Jim gathered their belongings, which were strewn about the room. It was obvious that they had left in a hurry, without stopping to pick up any of their personal items or even their clothes and valuables. He met the bride in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.
“Please tell me why you left,” Jim asked, perplexed.
She glanced over her shoulder to be sure her new husband wasn’t within earshot before answering, carefully selecting her words. “My husband is the one, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. From what he said last night, as soon as he fell asleep he started dreamin’. He was havin’ the craziest dreams about the War, and about being chased. He said he had never felt so afraid in his entire life. What woke him up, he said, was that he felt someone tuggin’ on his foot. He thought it was me, foolin’ with him, but when he sat up, he saw a black lady in old-time clothing sitting at the foot of the bed, washin’ his foot from a water bowl. He looked down at his foot and it was all bloody. That was enough for him. He woke me up and screamed at me that we had to get out of there. He didn’t even take time to get dressed. He ran down those stairs and out to the car half-naked hollerin’ for me to hurry. I grabbed my robe and followed right behind. By the time I got down, he was already in the car with the motor runnin’. I’m surprised he didn’t wake everyone up, what with the hollerin’ and the car screechin’ down the driveway. Look, I’ve gotta run. If he knew I told you, he’d kill me. Thanks for bringin’ our stuff.”
When Jim got back he relayed the story. He said that he could tell from her voice that she was seriously shaken, and that she believed her husband had, indeed, seen a ghost. Jim seemed a little shaken himself.
We became astounded as one guest after another told us that the bed in the bridal suite had floated in the air with the guests in the bed along for the ride. I remembered the photographer from the National Enquirer who had been the first to report this. I attributed these wild stories to the spirits in the bottle, not the spirits in the house, until a sweet retired couple stayed with us for several days. They were having the time of their life visiting all the old plantations and Civil War battlegrounds. They never knew about the ghosts. On the third morning of their stay, I joined the wife on the verandah for a cup of coffee and a biscuit.
“You know, I don’t know if I should bring this up or not. I feel pretty silly telling you this, as you probably won’t believe me,” she confided. “But in the middle of the night last night the bed started shaking, and it lifted right up off the floor with both of us in it.”
I suddenly knew better than to discredit anyone’s story ever again, no matter how outrageous. At the Myrtles, anyway, it seemed anything was possible.
CHAPTER 42
It is pretty amazing that spirits can be captured so easily in photographs, especially when “they” aren’t visible to the naked eye when they are present. Since I had been at the Myrtles I had seen a lot of remarkable photographs. Every few weeks, it seemed, one of our guests would send a ghostly picture they had taken during their stay.
“I took this photograph of my husband in the dining room. We were alone, but when the photo was developed, there are two little girls standing next to him,” one person wrote.
“This is a photograph of our school class, taken outside. The little girl standing in the front, in the white dress, is not part of our group,” a teacher wrote.
So I was curious when Hamp called to tell us about a couple he had met when they were guests at the Myrtles. They called him because they had taken some photographs that they wanted him to see. Hamp agreed to meet them at the Myrtles that night.
The first picture they showed us was taken by the piano in the tavern. Standing behind and to the side of the piano, very clearly, were two little girls. They looked to be about four and six years old, with long, straight, blond hair. It almost seemed they were enjoying the piano music with the rest of us.
There were several pictures that showed white swirls across the room. The swirls were fairly defined, but formed no definite shape or pattern. In a few of these, the swirls seemed to gravitate toward Hamp. The last picture was of Hamp standing next to the piano. The white swirls were directly above his head, and clearly formed the year 1967.
“What is that white filmy stuff?” they asked Hamp.
“It’s spirits caught on film,” he explained. “Like ectoplasm.”
“What do you think that means? Why do these white swirls gravitate towards you?”
“I don’t know,” Hamp replied honestly.
“What about the 1967?”
“That’s the year I was born,” Hamp confirmed.
“Wow, that’s freaky. What does that mean?”
“That I can’t tell you,” Hamp admitted, though I could tell he was spooked.
Just after 10:00 a.m. on April 11 I made a quick trip to the bathroom inside my private quarters. The reason I know the exact time of such a mundane act was that a bus tour was scheduled that morning at 10:00 a.m., and I waited to go to the bathroom until after they arrived so I could first meet with the tour host.
I don’t really know how to describe this, but as I walked out of the bathroom into the tiny hall outside it was as if I entered The Twilight Zone: I stepped out into a fog, suspended in time and space. I didn’t know where I was; it certainly wasn’t the hall. I looked up and saw my own grandparents on my mother’s side, who are both dead, reaching out for me. I say I looked “up,” and it was “up.” They seemed to be floating beyond and above me. I “went” to them, and they embraced me. I was so happy to see them, I was crying, and hugging them. We stood there embracing in this reunion for what seemed like quite a while, just holding on to each other. I was truly ecstatic.
From out of nowhere, I heard a deep male voice that said, “This is wonderful, don’t ever be afraid.” I had no idea who he was or what he meant. Gradually my grandparents faded away, and I was back alone in the hall outside the bathroom, dazed, but feeling uplifted and at peace. I don’t know how long I had been in that suspended “space.”
I couldn’t wait to tell Hamp that I had seen my grandparents, who had been dead for years. But Hamp didn’t call me from his job at the zoo that day at noon as he had nearly every day for a year.
Around 2:00 p.m., Ozelle called. “Frances, sit down,” she said. I could tell by the tone of her voice that something was wrong.
“Why?” I asked, holding my breath.
“Hamp died just after ten o’clock this morning,” she said softly.
My head spun. Hamp had become one of my closest friends. After all, I was the only one who could call this six-four hunk “baby” and get away with it. He was my baby. I could confide so many things to him that I couldn’t talk about with anyone else. I loved him so much. Without Hamp, I didn’t know how I could handle everything.
“How?” I managed to choke out.
Ozelle went on to explain that Hamp was driving on I-10 when an eighteen-wheeler passed him on the left, came over into his lane, and knocked his truck into a ditch. Because of the recent storms and flash flooding the ditch was full of water, and Hamp drowned. The driver of the eighteen-wheeler never even slowed down. Oh, my God, Hamp drowned. He had always been so afraid of the water.
I lay alone in my dark bedroom, too stunned to get up. Unbelievably, the Baton Rouge TV news kept showing morbid videos of the police dragging Hamp’s limp body out of the water, his hand flopping out from under the black plastic body cover. I felt heartbroken.
Then it dawned on me that the voice I heard just after ten that morning had been Hamp’s!
“This is wonderful,” he told me. “Don’t ever be afraid.” He must have been telling me goodbye, and letting me know that he was okay. But I wasn’t afraid to die. I wanted to be with Hamp. I felt so despondent after his death that I would imagine the “white light,” and tried to “go to it,” hoping I, too, could die.
Hamp’s funeral was three days later. Jim went, but as much as I wanted to say goodbye, I just couldn’t bring myself to go. It was open casket, and I had never seen a dead body, except on TV. At age eleven I had been all dressed up to go to the wake for our neighbor. As I got into the car my mother became hysterical, screaming that a child should not see a dead body, and she forbade me to go. That experience turned something natural into something fearsome. I didn’t want Hamp to be the very first dead body that I ever saw. I didn’t want to remember him that way.
I wanted to remember him laughing, or cooking up a recipe he dreamed, or talking to his friends in the spirit realm. I wanted to remember his special visit when he stopped by in spirit to tell me goodbye.
CHAPTER 43
Although an outsider might have been alarmed by the changes going on within our little family at the Myrtles, they happened so slowly that those of us on the inside hardly noticed. Charles had become increasingly bitter and was drinking constantly. Joanie, too, had been withdrawing into a shell, and in spite of my warning to stay out of the old nursery, I had caught her coming down the back staircase on several occasions. I felt heartache and fear as I watched Jim change from a supportive, loving husband into a man I hardly knew. And my beloved Caesar had passed away. I was beside myself with grief for both Hamp and Caesar. I felt lonely and scared.
The Myrtles Plantation Page 17
