The Myrtles Plantation is one of America's most haunted homes, where a slave named Chloe poisoned her owners and as many as ten murders left restless spirits behind
Where the evidence lands: ContradictedThat a house slave named Chloe, punished by having an ear removed, deliberately poisoned the Woodruff family with an oleander-laced cake; that as many as ten murders occurred in the house over its history; and that these violent deaths left the site genuinely haunted, with the spirits of Chloe and other victims appearing to visitors and in photographs.
Believed by: A broad paranormal-tourism audience: guests of the bed-and-breakfast, ghost-tour visitors, and viewers of the many television specials that have ranked the Myrtles among America's most haunted houses
The full story
What is documented
Start with what the record actually supports, because at the Myrtles the real history is dramatic enough without embellishment. The house was built in 1796 by General David Bradford, a man who had fled federal troops after the Whiskey Rebellion, and who called the place Laurel Grove. Like the plantations around it, it was worked by enslaved people, whose labor made the estate run and whose lives are only partly captured in the surviving census and estate records.
When Bradford's son-in-law, the lawyer Clark Woodruff, ran the plantation, tragedy arrived in the form of disease. In 1823 his wife, Sara Mathilda, died of yellow fever; in 1824 two of their young children, James and Cornelia, died as well. A third child, Mary Octavia, lived on into old age. Decades later, in 1871, a man tied to the family by marriage, William Winter, was called to the front porch and shot dead; his killing was reported in the press, arrests were made, and no one was ever convicted.
That is the documented Myrtles: slavery, an epidemic that killed a mother and two of her children, and one unsolved murder. The question this file weighs is whether the far more colorful story sold to visitors, of a poisoning slave named Chloe and a tally of ten murders, is history or invention.
The legend as it is told
The tour version is worth stating in full, because it is genuinely compelling and because its power is part of why it endures. In the story, Chloe is a favored house slave of the Woodruffs. Caught eavesdropping on the family, she is punished by having an ear cut off, which she thereafter hides beneath a green turban.
To win back favor, or in some tellings out of revenge, she bakes a birthday cake laced with oleander, a genuinely toxic plant. Sara Woodruff and two of her children eat it and die. The other enslaved people, fearing they will all be blamed, are said to have hanged Chloe and thrown her body in the river. Ever since, the story goes, she walks the property in her green turban, and the poisoned family lingers with her, joined by the victims of as many as ten murders said to have happened in the house.
It is a near-perfect ghost story: cruelty, revenge, a hidden wound, a poisoned cake, a lynching, and a river. Every element lands. That is exactly what should make a careful reader pause.
Told well, on a dark evening in an antebellum house, the legend explains the real deaths, supplies a villain and a victim in the same person, and even gestures at the brutality of slavery. Its believability is not an accident; it is a story built, over decades, to be believed.
Where the legend breaks down
The trouble is that almost none of it survives contact with the record. Begin with Chloe herself. There is no known documentation of an enslaved woman named Chloe, or Cloe, owned by the Woodruffs, even though the records that do survive count the people they enslaved. A house slave central enough to poison the family and be executed for it has left no trace in any contemporary source, which is not how documented people behave in the archive.
Then the deaths themselves. Sara Mathilda Woodruff and her two children did not die together at a birthday party. They died across 1823 and 1824, of yellow fever, during fever season, and a third child survived. A single poisoned cake does not kill people months apart, and it does not selectively spare one child. The real cause of these deaths is both documented and, tragically, ordinary for the time and place.
The ten murdersfare no better. Only one killing on the property is documented: William Winter's in 1871. The rest of the tally has no corresponding bodies, no court records, and no newspaper accounts. It is a round, frightening number, not a count of verified deaths.
Finally, the ghost gives the game away. The earliest apparition stories, from the 1950s owner Marjorie Munson, describe only a woman in a green bonnet, with no name, no severed ear, and no poisoning. The identity of Chloe and the whole poisoning drama were attached later, in the 1970s and after. The legend grew backward onto a vague earlier ghost; the ghost did not confirm the legend.
The real history under the story
It matters to say plainly what the Chloe legend displaces, because the invention is not harmless. Real people were enslaved at this site. The census counts them without always naming them, which means the genuine historical task is to recover who they actually were: their lives, their labor, and their fates under bondage.
The Chloe story does the opposite. It takes the one enslaved figure the site chooses to foreground and makes her a murderer of children, invented for entertainment. A fictional poisoner in a turban stands in for the many real people whose names the tour does not tell. Treating that substitution as history flattens the actual violence of slavery into a spooky anecdote, and it is worth naming that cost rather than passing over it.
William Winter's murder, likewise, was a real crime with a real, unnamed victim of violence and a killer who was never brought to justice. It deserves to be understood as an unsolved historical homicide, not repackaged as one entry on a haunted-house body count.
None of this requires denying that visitors have unsettling experiences, or that an old house at night is an atmospheric place. It requires only keeping the documented past and the marketed legend in separate hands, and refusing to let the second overwrite the first.
Why the legend took hold
A story this durable succeeds for reasons that have little to do with whether it is true. The first is that it sits on a foundation of genuine tragedy. Because slavery, the fever deaths, and Winter's murder are all real, the invented parts inherit a borrowed authenticity; the listener senses that terrible things happened here, which they did, and extends that credence to the cake and the turban.
The second is incentive. The Myrtles is a business. It operates as a bed-and-breakfast and sells ghost tours, and its haunted reputation is the product on the shelf. A vivid legend fills rooms and books tours in a way that a sober historical correction never will, so there is little commercial reason to let the story fade.
The third is amplification. Television specials and travel writing repeatedly ranked the house among the most haunted in the country and built segments around Chloe, lending the tale a national reach and an air of authority that a local ghost story could never generate on its own. A blurry photograph promoted as Chloe gave audiences a concrete image to point to.
And the fourth is simply that people want to believe. “Something happened to me at the Myrtles” is a more thrilling souvenir than a corrected date, and at a place already framed as haunted, every creak and cold spot is pre-interpreted. The legend gives ordinary ambiguity a name.
Where the evidence lands
Hold the two things apart, as always. The Myrtles is a real, historically significant house with a past that includes slavery, a family devastated by disease, and an unsolved murder, and it is entirely reasonable to find that history moving, or an old house at night eerie. But the specific rated claim, that a slave named Chloe poisoned the Woodruffs, that ten murders occurred in the house, and that these events are documented history behind the hauntings, is contradicted by the record. No enslaved Chloe appears in it; the deaths were yellow fever; only one murder is documented; and the legend is traceable to the 1950s and later, not the antebellum era. On that claim the verdict is Debunked.
This is not a ruling on whether ghosts exist, and it is not contempt for the people who feel something on the tour. It is a refusal to let an invented crime stand in for real history, and in this case the substitution has a particular cost: it turns the site's enslaved population, real people whose names deserve recovering, into a fictional villain built for a scare.
The honest posture is to keep the ghost story labeled as what it is, a twentieth-century tale, and to give the documented past, the slavery, the epidemic, and the unsolved 1871 murder, the accuracy and dignity it is owed. The difference between those two registers is the whole of this case.
What's still unexplained
- The identities of the people actually enslaved at the site are only partly recorded. The census counts a household's enslaved population without always naming them, so recovering those real individuals, rather than the fictional Chloe, is genuine and unfinished historical work.
- William Winter's 1871 murder was never solved. Arrests were made and at least one trial was contemplated, but no conviction is recorded and the killer's identity remains unknown; that is a real open question, distinct from any ghost story.
- Why a fabricated legend persists so strongly after being publicly documented as unsupported is a question about tourism, storytelling, and how sites profit from a haunted reputation, more than a question about the Myrtles itself.
Point by point
The claim: A house slave named Chloe poisoned the Woodruff family with a cake made from oleander leaves.
What the record shows: No known record documents an enslaved person named Chloe (or Cloe) owned by the Woodruffs, despite surviving census and estate records that count the people they held. The deaths the story attributes to poison are documented as yellow fever: Sara Mathilda Woodruff died in 1823 and two of her children in 1824, during a fever season, while a third child, Mary Octavia, survived to adulthood. A deliberate poisoning that killed a mother and two children but conveniently spared a third, and that left no trace in any contemporary record, is the shape of folklore, not of a documented crime.
The claim: As many as ten murders took place in the house.
What the record shows: Only one killing on the property is documented: the 1871 shooting of William Winter, reported in the contemporary press. The larger tally, repeated on tours and in television segments, does not correspond to death records, court records, or newspaper accounts. Inflating a single verified murder into a round number of ten is a hallmark of a site marketed for its hauntings rather than a claim grounded in the historical record.
The claim: The ghost in the green turban is Chloe, proof the poisoning story is true.
What the record shows: The green-clad apparition predates the Chloe story. The earliest accounts, from the 1950s owner Marjorie Munson, describe a woman in a green bonnet with no name, no severed ear, and no poisoning. The identity Chloe, the mutilation, and the cake were attached later, in the 1970s and after. A vague earlier apparition being renamed to fit a story invented decades afterward is evidence that the legend grew backward onto the ghost, not that the ghost confirms the legend.
The claim: A famous photograph captured Chloe's ghost standing between the buildings.
What the record shows: The image most often cited is an ambiguous figure in a blurry snapshot with no chain of authentication and no way to establish who or what it shows. Indistinct shapes in low-quality photographs are read as ghosts at haunted attractions the world over; that pattern is well understood and does not verify a specific dead person, still less one for whom no record exists.
The claim: The hauntings rest on documented plantation history.
What the record shows: The documented history is real but tells a different story. Enslaved people did live and labor at the site, the Woodruff family did suffer sudden deaths, and a man was murdered on the porch in 1871. None of that documents a poisoner named Chloe or ten killings, and researchers who have compared the tour narrative to the records have found the dramatic specifics unsupported. The genuine history is one of slavery, disease, and a single unsolved shooting, not of a proven supernatural crime spree.
Timeline
- 1796General David Bradford, a fugitive from the Whiskey Rebellion, builds an eight-room house on land near St. Francisville and names it Laurel Grove. Enslaved people work the surrounding plantation, as on neighboring estates.
- 1817Attorney Clark Woodruff, who had studied law under Bradford and married Bradford's daughter Sara Mathilda, comes to manage the plantation. Census records later confirm the household held enslaved people (five recorded in 1820, more by the 1830 count).
- 1823–1824Yellow fever sweeps the household. Sara Mathilda Woodruff dies in July 1823, and the couple's children James and Cornelia Gale die in 1824. Their daughter Mary Octavia survives, later marries, and lives to old age. These are the deaths the poisoning legend would later claim as murders.
- 1834Woodruff sells the plantation and the people he enslaved to Ruffin Gray Stirling. Under the Stirlings the house is enlarged and renamed The Myrtles, for the crape myrtles on the grounds.
- 1871-01William Drew Winter, a lawyer connected to the family by marriage, is called to the front porch and shot with a load of buckshot, dying almost instantly. Contemporary newspaper reporting documents the killing. Arrests are made but no one is convicted; the murderer is never established. This is the only documented murder on the property.
- 1950sMarjorie Munson, a widow who buys the house, begins telling of a ghost, reportedly a woman in a green bonnet. Accounts from this period contain no slave named Chloe and no poisoning story; the apparition is simply an unexplained figure.
- 1970sUnder later owners the tale grows into the familiar Chloe legend: a house slave, an eavesdropping punishment, a severed ear hidden by a green turban, and a poisoned birthday cake that supposedly killed Sara Woodruff and two of her children. The story is grafted onto the real 1820s deaths.
- 1980s–2000sThe Myrtles opens as a bed-and-breakfast running ghost tours. National television specials and travel writing rank it among America's most haunted houses, and a widely circulated photograph is promoted as an image of Chloe between two of the buildings.
- 2000s–presentResearchers and local historians publicly document the gaps: no record of an enslaved Chloe, yellow fever rather than poison, and a single documented murder. The legend continues to draw visitors regardless, now the site's main attraction.
Contradicted. The Myrtles, in St. Francisville, Louisiana, is a real 1796 house with a real and painful history: enslaved people lived and labored there, several members of the Woodruff family died of yellow fever in the 1820s, and a former owner, William Winter, was shot dead on the property in 1871. The rated claim is different. It is the marketed ghost story: that a house slave named Chloe poisoned the family with an oleander cake, that as many as ten murders happened in the house, and that these events produced documented hauntings. That composite legend is debunked. There is no record of any enslaved person named Chloe there; the family deaths were yellow fever, not poison; only one killing (Winter's) is documented; and researchers have traced the Chloe story to the 1950s and later, not to the antebellum era. What remains genuinely unresolved (who exactly was enslaved on the site, and who killed Winter) is a matter of incomplete records, not of proven ghosts.
Sources
- 1.Myrtles Plantation, Wikipedia (2026)
- 2.Legends of Myrtles Plantation, Wikipedia (2026)
- 3.Myrtles Plantation, The Louisiana Anthology (University of Louisiana) (2024)
- 4.The Myrtles Plantation: Legends, Lore and Lies, American Hauntings (Troy Taylor) (2020)
- 5.Chloe, Slave Ghost of Myrtles Plantation, Louisiana, The Moonlit Road (2019)
- 6.The Rigors of (In)Fame(y): Myrtles Plantation, Southern Spirit Guide (2018)
- 7.William Drew Winter (1820-1871) Memorial, Find a Grave (2013)
- 8.The Myrtles Plantation, Visit St. Francisville, Louisiana (2025)
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