True History vs. the Legend of Chloe
Along the banks of the Mississippi River near St. Francisville, Louisiana, The Myrtles Plantation has spent decades marketed as “America’s most haunted house,” with a body count and ghost story so elaborate that it’s been featured on national television and in countless “most haunted” roundups. It’s also one of the clearest examples in American ghost lore of a story that grew far larger than the documented facts behind it.
That doesn’t mean The Myrtles isn’t worth writing about, quite the opposite. The real, documented history of the plantation is genuinely significant, and understanding where the famous legend of “Chloe” came from, and why historians say it doesn’t hold up, makes the site more interesting, not less. Here are both sides of the story.
A Plantation Built by a Fugitive
The Myrtles Plantation was built in 1796 by General David Bradford on 600 acres of land that, at the time, sat within Spanish West Florida rather than the United States. Bradford named the property Laurel Grove. He wasn’t an ordinary settler: Bradford had fled to the area to escape prosecution for his role in leading Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion, an armed uprising against a federal tax on whiskey in the early 1790s. He lived alone on the property for several years until President John Adams granted him a pardon in 1799, after which he brought his wife, Elizabeth, and their five children down from Pennsylvania to join him.
After Bradford died in 1808, Elizabeth managed the plantation herself until 1817, when she turned control over to Clark Woodruff, one of Bradford’s former law students, who had married the Bradfords’ daughter, Sara Mathilda. The Woodruffs had three children together, Cornelia, James, and Mary Octavia, before tragedy struck the family in the early 1820s. In 1823 and 1824, Sara Mathilda and two of her three children died of yellow fever, a disease that swept through the Mississippi River valley repeatedly in the 19th century and killed thousands of people across the region, plantation owners and enslaved people alike.
Like most large Louisiana plantations of its era, The Myrtles operated on the forced labor of enslaved people. Federal census records show the property held five enslaved individuals in 1820 and 32 by 1830, real people whose specific identities and individual stories are, unfortunately, largely absent from the historical record, a common and troubling gap across plantation history in the American South.
The home changed hands several more times over the following century and a half. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978 and today operates as a bed and breakfast and event venue offering both historical and ghost tours.
The Only Documented Death by Violence: William Winter
Amid a legend that claims multiple murders happened at The Myrtles, historians point to exactly one documented act of violence connected to the property: the killing of William Drew Winter. Winter, a lawyer who lived at the plantation, was shot and killed on the evening of January 26, 1871. According to contemporary newspaper accounts, he was called to his front door by an unknown person and shot with a double-barreled gun as he appeared in the doorway. He left behind a wife and five children.
Four Black men and one white man were arrested in connection with the murder in May 1871, but none were ever convicted, and newspaper records show that at least one suspect scheduled for trial never had a recorded outcome. Winter’s killer was never identified or brought to justice. It’s worth noting that even this real, documented crime has been embellished by popular legend, which claims Winter staggered up the main staircase and died on the seventeenth step, a detail contemporary accounts don’t support. Winter died on the porch, where he was shot.
The Legend of Chloe, and Why Historians Say It Doesn’t Hold Up
The story most associated with The Myrtles today centers on a figure known as “Chloe,” an enslaved woman said to have been the mistress of Clark Woodruff, who allegedly poisoned a birthday cake with oleander in an attempt to punish him, accidentally killing Sara Woodruff and two of her children instead, and who was then supposedly lynched by other enslaved workers on the property to avoid mass retaliation. It’s a dramatic story, and according to historians who have researched the property’s actual records, it appears to be almost entirely fabricated.
No enslaved person named Chloe (or Cloe) appears in any census record, plantation inventory, or contemporary document tied to The Myrtles. Sara Woodruff and her children didn’t die from poisoning at all; they died of yellow fever, a well-documented and devastating disease in the region during that exact period. And the legend’s own details don’t match the historical record: one of the two children the story claims died in the poisoning, Mary Octavia, actually lived well into adulthood.
Historians generally trace the Chloe legend to the 1950s, when the plantation was purchased by Marjorie Munson, who is widely credited with developing and popularizing the story, reportedly building on an older, vaguer local tale about a “woman in a green turban”, as the property increasingly leaned into ghost tourism. In the decades since, the story has been repeated so often across ghost tour scripts, television specials, and online listicles that it’s frequently presented as settled history, even though no primary source supports it.
This matters for a reason beyond accuracy: the Chloe legend assigns a specific, violent crime to an enslaved person who, as far as the documented record shows, never existed, while the real enslaved people who lived and worked at The Myrtles remain largely unnamed and unrecognized in the property’s own marketing. Several historians and writers covering the site in recent years have pushed for grappling honestly with that gap, rather than continuing to center a story with no documentary basis.
What Visitors Report Today
Whatever the historical basis for any individual story, The Myrtles has a genuine, long-running reputation for reported paranormal activity, reinforced by decades of guest and staff accounts. Visitors describe hearing the sounds of children playing when no children are present on the property, sudden cold spots, particularly near the staircase and in rooms associated with the Woodruff children, and unexplained figures caught in photographs taken around the house and grounds.
The plantation’s most famous piece of “evidence” is a photograph taken in 1992 during a routine insurance appraisal, which the property says shows the outline of a figure between two of the home’s buildings, despite the area being empty when the photo was taken. The image, along with an antique mirror said to bear a recurring mark shaped like a handprint that reappears even after resilvering, remains central to the property’s ghost tours today. As with virtually all photographic “evidence” of this kind, these images have never been independently, scientifically verified as depicting anything paranormal, and should be treated the same way as the rest of the site’s ghost stories: as reported experience and marketed legend, not documented fact.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Chloe a real person who worked at The Myrtles Plantation? There’s no historical evidence that she was. No enslaved person by that name appears in any census record, plantation document, or contemporary account tied to the property. Historians generally trace the character to the 1950s, decades after the events she’s associated with supposedly took place.
How did Sara Woodruff and her children actually die? Historical records indicate they died of yellow fever in 1823 and 1824, not poisoning. Additionally, one of the two children often named in the poisoning legend, Mary Octavia, lived well into adulthood.
Is any part of the Myrtles ghost story historically documented? Yes, the shooting death of William Drew Winter on the property’s front porch in 1871 is a real, documented, and unsolved crime, confirmed by contemporary newspaper accounts, even though later legend has added inaccurate details to how he died.
Visiting The Myrtles Today
The Myrtles Plantation remains one of the most visited historic homes in Louisiana, offering both daytime historical tours and evening “mystery tours” built around its ghost stories. It’s a rare case where the honest version of events, a fugitive founder, a family lost to disease, an unsolved murder, and a marketing era legend built on top of it all, is arguably more compelling than the simplified version told on the tour.
Have you visited The Myrtles or experienced something you can’t explain there? Share it in the comments below.
Sources consulted for the historical details in this post include the Myrtles Plantation entry on Wikipedia, the Legends of Myrtles Plantation entry on Wikipedia, American Hauntings’ research into the property’s legends and lore, and contemporary newspaper accounts of the William Winter murder cited via Find a Grave.
