That first day in the real estate office, as we were going out to look at the house, the realtor kept calling me Sarah, although I corrected her several times. Neither of us were aware of it, but later I found that two Sarahs had lived here in the 1800s.
When I went into the place for the first time, I heard a woman’s voice calling my name. At first I thought it was the realtor, but she was outside trying the back-door key to be sure that it worked. After I left, I knew I would be buying that house, and I cried some that night as I realized that, from now on, I would be far from my family and home.
As I think about everything that happened, I feel that fate—I prefer to call it God—has played an important part in the events of my life. I also think that places exert a strong pull on certain individuals, and I will always believe that this house chose me.
The first week that I was there, I was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom. I left the lights on, but with the switch set on “dim.” After a night or two, I thought that was silly and that I could sleep with the lights off, so I turned them off. But sometime after midnight I woke up, and the lights were on bright. Half asleep, I thought that I must have left them on, and I turned the dimmer. The room was once more in darkness. Two hours passed, and I was awake again. I found all the lights in the room on bright, just as they had been two hours earlier. I turned the switch 360 degrees and clicked the lights off again. Later I woke up for a third time, and the lights were on once more. That just scared me to death, and I grabbed my robe and blanket to go downstairs and sleep in the sitting room.
All went fine, and I slept peacefully until about five o’clock, when I woke up with a start and had the feeling that someone was looking at me. I stared up into the face of a large black lady whose head was wrapped in a green turban. She wore something that resembled a long, green dressing gown. I was so shocked that I just couldn’t look at her face again. By that time I had begun screaming, but she still didn’t go away. Involuntarily, I struck out with my arm to push her from me, but as I did so, my hand passed through her, and she faded away.
It was a couple of days before the closing on the house, and the current owner was still there. I told her about it the next day, and she said, “That’s ridiculous!” But even on the first night, at about one o’clock, I had heard footsteps outside my door and assumed that it was one of the other houseguests. The next day I learned that everyone in the house claimed to have been dead to the world before eleven.
Later I found the whole town knew that the house was haunted, but they weren’t going to tell an out-of-state person who was thinking about buying it. After I had bought the house, I mentioned the lady in green to the mother of the former owner, and to my surprise, she was absolutely thrilled. Can you imagine? She said, “Why, Frances, you have seen The Myrtles’ most famous ghost!”
I turned the house into a bed-and-breakfast place, and at first I tried to keep the ghostly visitors a secret from the real ones. But during the seven years I have been here, there have been about a hundred reports each year of apparitions or some supernatural occurrence. There were times when I was truly frightened, and the only thing that kept me from going back to my parents was that it would be too embarrassing to tell them that I was leaving because I was afraid of ghosts.
The most common sounds are either those of children’s voices at play or that of a baby crying. But the eeriest of all is the music of a dance going on downstairs. Often people think that another guest’s television is on too loud, but on inquiring they find there is no television set in the room next to them.
Each room has its own unique ghost. One has a wounded Confederate soldier who appears in May and June. A pair of honeymooners stayed here. The groom went upstairs alone to lie down and woke to find a black servant standing beside the bed bandaging his foot. The honeymooners immediately checked out.
The plantation’s most famous murders occurred shortly after its sale in 1817 to a philandering judge named Clarke Woodruff, General Bradford’s son-in-law. The judge grew angry with a slave woman named Cleo for eavesdropping, and he cut off one of her ears as a penalty. For revenge, she mixed poisonous oleander flowers into a birthday cake for the judge’s oldest daughter. His two little girls died, as did his wife. Other slaves hanged Cleo. It is said that she still haunts the house, wearing a green turban to cover her missing ear. Cleo was evidently the ghost who frightened Frances Kermeen during her first week in the house.
Janet Roberts, a psychic who is the treasurer of the Louisiana Society for Psychical Phenomena, believes that The Myrtles has many ghosts. “Walking into the parlor was like walking into a crowded cocktail party. I felt that we were literally bumping into people, and I wanted to say, ‘Excuse me.’” But except for the grumpy ghost who will occasionally hurl a clock or drop a candlestick, they do no harm.
Ms. Kermeen says, “At first I would
