The Myrtles Plantation — Whiskey Rebels and Ghost Legends

The Myrtles Plantation in Saint Francisville was built in seventeen ninety-six by David Bradford, one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, the western Pennsylvania uprising against the federal whiskey tax of seventeen ninety-one. Bradford fled Pennsylvania ahead of federal marshals, crossed the Alleghenies, and landed here on the Louisiana frontier, where he built a home far enough from Philadelphia to feel safe. He first called the place Laurel Grove.

President John Adams pardoned Bradford in seventeen ninety-nine, but he stayed. The estate changed hands multiple times after his death, and along the way accumulated a dense mythology of hauntings, the most famous involving an enslaved woman named Chloe, whose ghost is said to wear a green turban. Historian Tiya Miles describes such tales as fundamentally stories of violence against Black women, and the Chloe story is told on tours as legend, not documented fact. The house itself, at least, is genuine, a house dating to the Spanish colonial era, now a bed and breakfast that trades on its haunted reputation rather than its actual history. Ruffin Gray Stirling bought the property in eighteen thirty-four and substantially enlarged the house, and the name changed to the Myrtles, for the crape myrtles nearby. A veranda about one hundred twenty-five feet long, with an ornamental cast iron railing, still runs along the front. The house has been on the National Register of Historic Places since September of nineteen seventy-eight.