The Myrtles Plantation

by Ghostly Enconter

  That was the solution! I loved the history of the Myrtles, the passion, the intrigue. I loved the antebellum era. I loved to design and sew historic costumes. I loved to entertain. I loved the theater, the creativity, the electricity. I could present a real-life murder mystery from the pages of the Myrtles’ history! Everyone in attendance would be in the costume of the day: hoop-skirted ball gowns for the ladies and topcoats and hats for the gentlemen. We would dance to the music of a string quartet and dine on Victorian delicacies. It would be so much fun!

  I started working on the production right after the Halloween charity benefit, which had become a very popular annual event. For the murder mystery, I selected the life and death of William Winter, Sarah Mulford Stirling’s husband. It was the perfect murder mystery—a real, true, unsolved crime! I set the first production for the weekend of January 26, the very day, at the very hour and minute that William had actually been shot so many years before!

  I would start the production on Friday with the wedding of Sarah Stirling and William Winter in 1852, one of the grandest celebrations ever at the Myrtles. Throughout the weekend, time would progress ten years, through trials and tribulations, the death of their daughter, Cate, and Sarah’s father, Ruffin, and the start of the War, culminating with the day of William’s murder.

  Writing is my passion; I put my heart and soul into this project. I started researching every aspect of the 1850s and 1860s: the food, the music, the costumes, even the politics and conversations of the day. The research helped keep my mind off Jim.

  There were newspaper articles from the Point Coupee Times and the New Orleans Times Picayune about the murder. I tracked down a letter that was written by Eliza Pirrie at Oakley Plantation just after William was shot.

  From my past conversations with Hamp and Mr. Celestine, I had an idea of what Sarah Winter looked like; a fair-skinned, blue-eyed beauty with long blond hair piled on her head. After William’s death she dyed it black. In happier days she sported gaily colored frocks, but after his death she wore nothing but black from head to toe.

  Mr. Celestine’s conversations with Sarah (if they could be believed) offered clues about Sarah Winter’s history and character. He had said that at times he and Sarah were easily able to communicate while at other times, he called Hamp to help him make contact. According to Mr. Celestine, Hamp helped the two star-crossed lovers transcend time and space, creating a relationship he described as “beautiful and passionate beyond words.” I decided to write this supposed lover, whom she called “David,” as William’s murderer.

  After writing the script, there were still many preparations to be made: There were formal invitations and programs to print, menus to plan, costumes to make, flowers to order, and rehearsals to direct. I planned a traditional Victorian wedding feast, and procured a string ensemble with a Victorian repertoire. I made most of the costumes myself, buying marked-down prom gowns and used bridesmaids’ dresses with full skirts, carefully taking them apart and altering them to resemble authentic antebellum ball gowns. As the weekend grew closer, I became busier and more excited.

  I cast the roles of William Winter, Sarah, Ruffin and Mary Catherine Sterling, David Thomas, the Voodoo Queen, the Episcopal priest, and the entire wedding party, right down to the flower girl and ring bearer, using many of the same friends and actors who participated in my Halloween benefit. Some of these characters I based on real people and some were purely fictional: Daisy Davis, the jilted lover from St. Louis, whose reputation was ruined when she went for an unchaperoned carriage ride with William, or Captain Thunder, the captain of the steamboat where William was a regular at the card table.

  My friend Beverly and her new husband Michael, newlyweds themselves, were naturals to play William and Sarah. Beverly sported an uncanny resemblance to Sarah, with her slight build and indigo blue eyes. What was uncanny was that she had dyed her own blond hair jet-black for many years, just like Sarah. I cast my own father and mother, who flew out just for the event, to play Ruffin Gray and Mary Catherine Stirling.

  Even the guests were assigned roles—cousins, travelers, a Yankee peddler, and Ms. Nellie Baldwin, the colorful owner of the whorehouse in St. Louis that, it was rumored, William had frequented when he lived up there. I sent out questionnaires to all the guests to get a feel for which guest should play which character, and I chose the most reticent, shy lady to play Nellie.

  We held two rehearsals in January. The second, in full costume, was ten days before the anniversary weekend. Everyone took their places in the entry hall for the wedding procession. The flower girls came first, sashaying down the stairs, followed by the bridesmaids, and then Sarah. Beverly (as Sarah) looked radiant as she made her way down the stairs to meet William.

  As William and Sarah’s hands touched, the house started to whir. It sounded as if thousands of birds were flying around upstairs. We all looked up, half-expecting to see Sarah herself standing on the landing. It was the same thundering noise we had experienced during the ghost tour rehearsal, and I realized we would have to have another “talk” with “them.” I really needed Hamp!

  Suddenly the little ring bearer cried out, “The ring is gone!” The gold wedding band, which had been tied securely to the ring bearer’s satin pillow a few moments before, had vanished. We stopped the rehearsal and searched everywhere, crawling on our hands and knees. We never found the ring. We eventually reassembled and continued the rehearsal without the ring.

  Just as the priest pronounced William and Sarah “husband and wife,” a loud bang echoed from the next room. I thought something big must have fallen, like a mirror or the Louis XV screen, but when I went to investigate everything was in place.

  The very next day, the entire South was beleaguered by the worst storm in decades. The lush, green landscape was invisible under the dirty white layers of hardened snow and ice. The vastness of the house, coupled with the biting drafts from the walk-through windows, made it impossible to heat during a hard freeze, so I spent my time hibernating in the back bedroom. There were no guests. No one was moving around, or visiting. Even the phone lines were dead. Charles, grumbling about being unable to warm up, moved to a hotel in Baton Rouge and took a reluctant Joanie with him. As terrified as I was to be alone in the house, I didn’t want to leave the house alone. As captain of the ship, I would stay with her. Besides, I still had a lot of work to do on the mystery weekend.

  After several days with no phone (the lines were still down from the ice), I was surprised and delighted to finally hear the phone ring. It was my friend Lizzy! I met Lizzy for the first time when she had been an overnight guest at the plantation, and we became fast friends. She was four decades older than I, but Lizzy and I experienced no generation gap, feeling more as if we were sisters. We seemed to have a special connection that bridged our age difference. I was so happy to hear from her, let alone talk to another human being after days of isolation, that we stayed on the phone for nearly an hour. I asked her how she got through, when all the phone lines were out.

  “I just dialed your number, and it rang,” she replied.

  When we hung up, I picked up the phone to make another call. I had so many calls to make before the weekend. The phone was dead, and remained out of service for several more days. Lizzie’s phone call had truly been miraculous!

  Around noon on the fourth day of the hard freeze, the unthinkable happened—the electricity went out. The house was thrust into a deafening silence. The voices from the television, which kept me company, were silenced. No whirring of electrical devices. Outside there were no birds chirping, no cars full of tourists coming up the drive. The ominous gray clouds outside cast a dark, gloomy haze inside. Everything seemed dead. I waited for a sound, any sound, as if it might save me. My eyes darted around the darkened room willing the lights to go back on. And then, as goose bumps spread from the tip of my toes to the top of my head, I remembered:

  “Whenever all the lights are turned out at the Myrtles, something always happens.”r />
  I wasn’t going to wait around to find out what, I needed to get out of there. Stopping only to grab my coat and purse, I headed for the entry hall to lock the double doors before leaving.

  As I stepped into the entry hall I heard her, softly crying. The voice seemed to come from the upstairs landing, just outside the bridal suite.

  I moved into the hallway and looked up. Oh, my God. There she was. She was dressed in a long, black antebellum gown, and just as Hamp said, with jet black hair piled loosely on top of her head. Her ice-blue eyes seemed to pierce right through to my soul. I shivered.

  “Please, help me,” she cried.

  Part of me wanted desperately to talk to her, to help her, I really did. But as usual, fright got the best of me, and I ran out of the house with Grinch at my heels, not even bothering to lock the doors. I drove all the way to Baton Rouge before I felt safe.

  I was bitterly disappointed in myself for not staying to help Sarah, or at least talk to her. But it’s easy to say what you should do, and quite another to really do it when confronted with a spirit.

  CHAPTER 49

  The ice storm hadn’t let up, and as the mystery weekend was just days away, I was frantic. I stayed with friends in Baton Rouge for most of the week, leaving the house, and Sarah, to fend for themselves. By some miracle power was restored on Thursday, just one short day before the media and all my guests would descend upon the Myrtles. I did all the grocery shopping for the weekend before I left Baton Rouge and carefully made my way down an icy Highway 61 back home.

  Charles and Joanie had returned home as well, and we ran through the chilly house turning the heat on in every room, not only to warm us up, but to heat up the pipes. Although we had electricity, the water pipes running underneath the house and through the walls were frozen solid, so there was still no water and we still couldn’t flush the toilets. Even with every heater in the house on, it was still bitterly cold. We spent the night huddled together, Charles, Joanie, Grinch, and me, trying to keep warm.

  The morning finally brought sunlight, but little warmth and still no water. The guests would begin arriving in just a few short hours! With a full staff in attendance, we ran around trying to complete as many of the tasks as possible in preparation for the big event.

  “Where’s the pig?” Lillie May asked, referring to the whole roast pig, apple in mouth, that was to be the focal point of the wedding feast.

  “Oh, no!” I cried. I remembered I had left it in the trunk of the car. Charles and I ran outside in the freezing cold to haul it in. It was frozen solid, hard as a rock.

  “I can’t cooks no frozen pig,” Lillie May exclaimed.

  “What are we going to do? Everything will be ruined,” Charles grumbled. Once such an upbeat person, Charles now complained about everything.

  “I know,” I offered. “We can thaw out the pig in my bathtub!”

  We carried the frigid pig into my private quarters and carefully placed it in my antique claw-foot tub. Charles turned the knobs on full blast. It was a great idea except for one thing—we had forgotten that we still didn’t have water.

  “Oh, shit,” Charles muttered as he walked out the door and took off in his car. I was sure that he had left out of frustration, but he returned twenty minutes later.

  “I went to the Piggly Wiggly to make this little piggly wiggly,” he joked, his arms loaded with a dozen gallon jugs of water.

  “Eewh,” I squealed, starting to giggle at the situation. Laughing, we pulled out all our largest pots and started heating the water. One by one Charles emptied the pots of boiling water over the very frozen pig. Thank God the pig’s eyes were shut, or I would have been mortified. The very image of that frozen pink pig bathing in my claw-foot tub haunted me, and it would be weeks and many scrubbings later before I finally dared to dip my big toe in to determine if I could ever handle bathing in it again.

  With the pig problem solved, we had a bigger issue to deal with. The guests and media would be arriving very soon, and although the water was restored shortly after we purchased the store-bought water, the plumbing was very slow in coming back.

  “Miss Frances, come quickly!” Lillie May shouted down from the bridal suite. Charles and I ran up the stairs to find water squirting from the walls. Charles ran to turn off the water main, while I helped Lillie May mop up the little lakes of water forming in the uneven crevices of the shiny, worn, wood planks.

  “Miss Frances, the people from the TV station are here,” someone called.

  “Take them to the tavern and fix them a drink,” I called. I ran downstairs and started calling plumbers. I called nearly every one in the phone directory before I was finally able (at a huge price) to convince one to come right over.

  Around that same time my parents arrived from California to play Ruffin Gray and Mary Catherine. My father was obviously shaken by the prevailing circumstances. “You can’t do this,” he kept repeating. “You’ve got to call the people and cancel.”

  But it was too late to turn back, as most of the guests were already on their way in cars and planes. After all, if we had to do without water it would make the weekend that much more historically correct! Of course, I was very concerned about the entire situation, but I kept repeating over and over, “All I can do is all I can do.” The words calmed me down and quite frankly kept me from losing it.

  As the guests arrived, we plied them with mint juleps and brandy milk punch. By eight o’clock the leak was fixed, the water was back on, the pig was partially thawed and roasting, the television cameras were set up, and all the guests felt warm and merry. The anticipation was contagious as everyone assembled in the entry hall for the recreation of the wedding. “Sarah” looked stunning as she descended the formal stairway to meet “William,” beaming, in the hall. After the vows, the string quartet started up in the ballroom, made up of the double parlors sans furniture. Champagne flowed freely as the guests waltzed around the ballroom and through the windows out onto the verandah. It was a sight to behold.

  At the appointed hour, butlers led the guests into the formal dining room where the wedding feast was laid out on the dining table and the sideboards. The focal point for this impressive spread, in the center of the table posed on a huge silver platter, was the crispy, golden brown pig, with cherry eyes and a big red apple in its mouth. No one knew that just hours before, this very pig had been lounging in my bathtub.

  The guests danced on into the night until the stroke of midnight, when the narrator advanced the time eight years to the night of Cate Winter’s death from yellow fever in 1860. In a desperate attempt to save their daughter, William and Sarah summoned the Voodoo Queen from neighboring Solitude Plantation. Guests were invited to witness this dramatic scene as the Queen of Slaves furtively worked over the pale child, chanting voodoo spells and waving her gris-gris.

  On Saturday morning the date was advanced again, to January 26, 1871. The War had been lost, and Reconstruction had taken its toll. The guests went about the planned activities of the day, culminating with the gentlemen in the gaming room and the ladies in the parlor following dinner. Suddenly, a voice rang out from the darkness on the north side of the house, exactly as it had at that very moment, on that very date, many years before.

  “A gentleman to see the lawyer,” the voice called.

  William stepped outside to greet his visitor. As shots rang out, a bloodied William burst through the doors, clutching his chest, staggering through the parlors as he tried to reach his beloved Sarah. The weekend guests ran to the hallway to watch as William, breathless and bleeding, toiled up the stairs toward Sarah. As they met on the seventeenth step, he collapsed and died in her arms.

  The house was instantly stilled as once again it was thrust into darkness. Confused, at first I thought that the electricity had once again failed from the storm. But there was no longer any storm threat. Charles and my father ran outside to the fuse box. Moments later, the miracle of electricity, which wasn’t invented until nearly twenty year
s after William’s death, reilluminated the house.

  Because of the timing of the dramatic scene where William clutched Sarah, the guests assumed that the darkness was part of the script, but staff and cast knew better. At the moment that the lights went out, everyone was accounted for, yet the main switch was off. Very few of the staff even knew that the main switch was located in the laundry room. Was the tension in the air, the intensity of the reenactment, powerful enough to trip the electricity?

  And then we heard gasps as guests wandered through the house. Many of the portraits had been turned upside down. We heard another lady exclaim, “Oh, my God.” She was standing by the harpsichord in the parlor. We ran in to find the lady in the portrait above the harpsichord crying, with real tears running down her cheek! The portraits seemed to be reacting to William’s death!

  The unsettled guests spent the remainder of the evening trying to solve the murder. Everyone was suspect, and nearly everyone had a motive: the ex-girlfriend whose reputation William had ruined, the Madame, the poker-playing riverboat captain, Sarah’s lover David, and even Sarah. I planted a fake ad in copies we gave out of the original Times Picayune newspaper from the day after William’s death, dated January 27, 1871, that read: “Gun for sale. Used once. Please send message.” Several hours of solving later, one of the guests finally answered this ad, and we staged the final scene where Sarah was confronted with the news of who killed her husband.

  “How am I supposed to play this scene?” Beverly asked.

  “Beverly, this is our one big chance to help these spirits. I think Sarah truly grew to love William, but I also think it’s possible that she knew who killed her husband, and that she carried that guilt with her the rest of her life. It was tragic. We can help her now. Play the scene as if you knew David was the murderer all along, but you could never let on. Offer her forgiveness through you. Tell her it’s okay.”