# 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

**Verdict: 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.

Category: Unexplained Phenomena · Era: Antebellum site (built 1796); legends 1950s to present · First circulated: The modern ghost stories date to the 1950s, when owner Marjorie Munson began describing an apparition in a green bonnet; the specific Chloe legend, with the severed ear and poisoned cake, was elaborated by later owners from the 1970s and carried nationally by television and travel writing from the 1980s onward · 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
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/myrtles-plantation

## Summary
The Myrtles Plantation is a genuine historic house near St. Francisville, Louisiana, built in 1796 by General David Bradford and listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978. It is also one of the most heavily marketed haunted sites in the United States, sold to tourists through a cluster of vivid legends: that a favored house slave called Chloe, her ear cut off as punishment for eavesdropping, baked a cake laced with oleander that killed her mistress and two children; that as many as ten people were murdered on the grounds; and that the victims still walk the property, sometimes caught in photographs. This case file keeps two things apart: slavery on the site, a family devastated by yellow fever, and one authenticated 1871 shooting, and the claim it rates, the Chloe poisoning and the ten-murder tally as literal history that produced hauntings. On the evidence, the marketed legend is debunked. It is a twentieth-century invention layered onto a real and often tragic past, and the history of the people actually enslaved there deserves to be told accurately rather than folded into a ghost tour.

## The claim
That 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.

## Origin and timeline
- 1796: General 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.
- 1817: Attorney 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).
- 1823–1824: Yellow 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.
- 1834: Woodruff 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.
- 1871-01: William 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.
- 1950s: Marjorie 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.
- 1970s: Under 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–2000s: The 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–present: Researchers 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.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: A house slave named Chloe poisoned the Woodruff family with a cake made from oleander leaves.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: As many as ten murders took place in the house.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The ghost in the green turban is Chloe, proof the poisoning story is true.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: A famous photograph captured Chloe's ghost standing between the buildings.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The hauntings rest on documented plantation history.
  Evidence: 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.

## Why people believe it
- The site holds real tragedy. Slavery, the yellow fever deaths of a young mother and her children, and an unsolved murder are all true, and that bedrock of genuine suffering gives an invented ghost story an emotional weight that a wholly fictional tale would lack.
- There is a direct commercial incentive to believe. The Myrtles operates as a bed-and-breakfast and ghost-tour business, and the legends are the product; a good, frightening story sells rooms and tickets in a way that a careful historical correction never could.
- Television and travel media amplified it. Repeated rankings as one of America's most haunted homes, and specials built around the Chloe tale, lent the legend a veneer of authority and reach far beyond a single Louisiana parish.
- The apparition motif came first and seeded the rest. A pre-existing story of a figure in green gave later owners a ready hook on which to hang names, dates, and a crime, so the legend felt like an explanation of something already reported rather than a fresh invention.
- People want to believe, and ambiguous evidence obliges them. A dim shape in an old photograph, a cold spot, a creak on the stairs: at a place already framed as haunted, ordinary ambiguity is readily read as contact with the dead.

## Open questions
- 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.

## Sources
- Myrtles Plantation, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrtles_Plantation
- Legends of Myrtles Plantation, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_of_Myrtles_Plantation
- Myrtles Plantation, The Louisiana Anthology (University of Louisiana) (2024): https://www.louisiana-anthology.org/encyclopedia/m/myrtles_plantation.html
- The Myrtles Plantation: Legends, Lore and Lies, American Hauntings (Troy Taylor) (2020): https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/myrtles
- Chloe, Slave Ghost of Myrtles Plantation, Louisiana, The Moonlit Road (2019): https://www.themoonlitroad.com/chloe-slave-ghost-myrtles-plantation-louisiana/
- The Rigors of (In)Fame(y): Myrtles Plantation, Southern Spirit Guide (2018): https://www.southernspiritguide.org/the-rigors-of-infamey-myrtles-plantation/
- William Drew Winter (1820-1871) Memorial, Find a Grave (2013): https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/120976525/william_drew-winter
- The Myrtles Plantation, Visit St. Francisville, Louisiana (2025): https://www.visitstfrancisvillela.com/explore/the-myrtles-plantation/

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