This episode contains discussions of enslavement, violence, racism, and murder. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people.
My name is Halley, and this is the morbid curiosity podcast. The Murdle's plantation has stood as a silent witness to over 200 years of history in one of the deepest parts of the American South. It is a relic marked by the horrors of slavery, murder, and tragedy. Many real things occurred there.
Today, it's known as one of the most haunted places in America, featuring on hundreds of paranormal websites, books, TV shows, and YouTube channels. I admit the first time I heard of the Murdle's plantation was the premiere episode of the second season of the original Ghost Hunter's TV show. But is there any truth to these ghost stories? Let's discuss the stories, then we'll dive into the history.
The Murdles has long been known for its ghost stories. One of the first accounts of ghosts at the Murdles was noted in 1948 in Clarence John Lawlin's book, Ghosts Along the Mississippi. Then the Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industries 1960 publication, Louisiana Plantation Homes, cemented its reputation by reporting that the Murdles was, quote, reputed to have at least one ghost, end quote. The Murdles was then heavily marketed as haunted, resulting in it being named America's most haunted hotel by the National Enquirer, an infamous tabloid newspaper in the 1980s.
Today, the most well-known ghost haunting the Murdles is Chloe. According to the ghost tours held at the plantation, which are free with every stay, in the 1800s, the owner of the plantation, Judge Clark Woodruff, had an affair with Chloe, a young enslaved woman who worked in the house. When Judge Woodruff began an affair with another slave, Chloe feared that she would lose her place in the house and be sent out into the fields to do back-breaking work. She started listening in on the judge's conversations through keyholes, but was caught one night listening at the door of the gentleman's parlor.
The judge punished her severely by cutting off one of her ears and sending her to work in the kitchen's behind the house. Afterwards, Chloe wore a green turban to cover up this injury. Even more worried that she'd be sent to the fields, Chloe devised a plan to gain the judge's forgiveness. She baked a cake and poisoned it with oleander, a toxic flowering plant.
She hoped to make the judge's children sick and then nurse them back to health, securing herself as a necessary part of the house. However, her plan backfired. The children died. Chloe fled to the slave quarters to hide.
In fear of being seen as accomplices, Chloe's fellow slaves either gave her up and watched the judge hang her or dragged her out into the garden themselves in the middle of the night and hung her from a tree. Once she was dead, they threw her body in the Mississippi River. Her ghost, having died violently and not buried properly, is said to wander around the house and has even been supposedly captured on film. Other versions of the story state that Sarah Woodruff, the judge's wife, cut off Chloe's ear out of jealousy and that the poisoned cake was meant as revenge on Sarah, but the children ate it too.
Sometimes her name is Cleo, not Chloe. There is another ghost supposedly called Cleo as well, who was a voodoo priestess who was called upon to treat the judge's children who were dying of yellow She tried to cure them, but they died, and the judge had her dragged from the house and hanged. Her body was then thrown into the river. Both Cleo's ghost and the ghost of the child she couldn't cure are said to wander the house and grounds of the Myrtle's plantation.
Both the ghostly priestess and the child are said to practice voodoo on unsuspecting guests during the night. A mirror in the house is also said to be haunted by the spirits of poisoned Sarah Woodruff and her two deceased children. The legend goes that the Woodruff family followed the suspicion that mirrors should be covered up after a death in the house in order to avoid the spirits becoming trapped in them. But on this occasion, they forgot to cover up the mirror in the hall.
Therefore, the spirits of the poisoned Woodruffs were trapped in it and occasionally can be seen in the mirror or leave handprints on the glass. There are also several ghost stories unrelated to the poisoning. One is of the ghost of William Winter, the man who owned the plantation after Judge Woodruff. The story goes that Winter was in the sitting room when a voice called him to the porch.
He came out and was shot in the chest. He was able to crawl up the stairs, making it to the 17th step, only to die in his wife's arms. Other versions of this story say he had been teaching Sunday school at the time of the murder. Still others say that several Civil War soldiers came to ransack the house and a gunfight ensued with Winter and three of the soldiers dying in the fight.
The house is also said to have been built on Native American burial grounds, causing the ghosts of Indigenous peoples to wander the area. The stories of Chloe and Cleo are quite similar and there are many different versions of both, which is an established feature of urban legends. Urban legends, also known as urban myths or modern legends, are the folklore of the present. They usually surround unusual or scary events that many people believe to be true but are actually false.
They are meant to entertain and enthrall and often try to make sense of societal anxieties or act as a moral lesson. In the past, urban legends were mostly spread by word of mouth, but today they spread like wildfire thanks to social media, news outlets, TV and film. The ghost stories told at the murdles do involve real history, but they paint a very sanitized version of it. They gloss over the very real suffering and brutality of slavery in Louisiana and present in idealized almost romantic tragedy These legends obscure the actual history, which is far more morbid.
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The Myrtle's Plantation House didn't start out as the opulent estate it is today. It began as a small shack, part of which still exists on site. The original small house was built in 1796 by David Bradford, a lawyer and deputy attorney general for Washington County, Pennsylvania in 1783. The reason he moved to St.
Francis, Louisiana and built the house was to avoid arrest. In 1791, Bradford became part of a protest against taxes on whiskey, which were raised in order to pay off war debt from the American Revolutionary War. By 1794, Bradford was one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, promoting violent protest against the tax. Instead of waiting around to be arrested by the brand new American government under President George Washington, Bradford fled south to what was then known as Spanish West Florida.
Once he completed the house, a one and a half story building with six bays and three dormers on its roof, his wife Elizabeth and their five children traveled to join him there. They called the estate Laurel Grove. Bradford was eventually pardoned by President John Adams in March of 1799. He then returned to Pennsylvania in 1801 to sell his old house.
I found records on Enslaved.org, an online archive containing thousands of digitized historical records and registers of enslaved peoples and enslavers in the United States that Bradford owned two slaves, Hercules and Hester, when he was living in Washington County. For context, before the American Civil War, more than half of America's millionaires lived on vast plantations between New Orleans and notches along the Mississippi. Their homes reflected the wealth and opulence afforded by owning such plantations, but the owners did not do the work that made the money. The farming, weeding and other backbreaking work necessary to bring in that money was done by unpaid enslaved peoples.
Slavery was present in the United States since its founding in 1776. Enslaved peoples, usually African or African Americans, were treated as property that could be bought, sold and given away. By the time the American Revolutionary War in which the 13 original British colonies rebelled against Britain to form the United States, the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized. Slavery was a contentious issue during the writing of the Constitution, and after the revolution, abolitionist or anti-slavery laws were passed in most northern states.
Slavery was abolished in most northern states by 1808. However, the rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the deep south greatly increased the demand for cotton harvesting and the dependence on slave labor in those states. Polarization over the issue also deepened, with the south eventually seceding from the United States to form the Confederate States of America, kicking off the American Civil War. David Bradford died in 1808 and his wife Elizabeth continued running the plantation until 1817 when she sold it to Clark Woodruff, one of Bradford's former law students and husband to her daughter, Sarah Matilda.
Woodruff expanded the holdings of the plantation, adding 650 acres or so of indigo and cotton. There are U.S. census records of Elizabeth owning 24 enslaved people and Woodruff owning five enslaved people in 1820. By 1830, 33 enslaved people were registered under Woodruff's name and 10 in Elizabeth's, but none of them were named Chloe or Cleo.
Paranormal historian Rebecca Pitman's book, The History and Haunting of the Mertils Plantation, states that by 1830, around 480 slaves worked 6,000 acres of the Mertils Plantation, but I was unable to find any documented evidence to support either of these numbers. The Woodruff's had three children, Cornelia Gale, James and Mary Octavia. Unfortunately, Sarah Matilda died in 1823 of Yellow Fever, a mosquito-borne virus that ravaged the area during the summer months, killing thousands. James and Cornelia died the following year, 1824, also of Yellow Fever.
Thanks to the Yellow Fever vaccine, which was developed between 1912 and 1939, this horrific disease no longer exists in the United States. Elizabeth, who was still living at the house, died in 1830. There are records to corroborate all of these deaths. In 1831, Clark Woodruff and his surviving daughter, Mary Octavia, moved to Covington, Louisiana, leaving a caretaker in charge of the plantation until 1834, when he sold it and the enslaved people working there to roughen grey sterling.
Sterling had come from East Baton Rouge, had five enslaved people registered to his name in the 1819 census, George, Stevens, Nancy, Harry and Lucy. According to Pittman, Sterling and his wife, Mary Catherine Cobb, owned 173 enslaved men, women and children, ranging in age from infancy to 70 years old. Again, I wasn't able to find any documentation to corroborate this number. Sterling and Cobb remodeled the house, nearly doubling its size and filling it with expensive imported furniture from Europe.
They also changed the name of the estate to the murdles, after the crepe murder trees that grew all around the house. Together, they had nine children, however, five of them died quite young. Sterling himself died in 1854, leaving the plantation to his wife. The American Civil War broke out in 1861.
New Orleans, only two days traveled by foot from the murdles, was a strategically important port city and was captured early on by the United States in 1862. Enslaved people near union-controlled positions, such as New Orleans, began escaping plantations on mass. I couldn't find any records of escapees from the murdles, but it's likely at least some of the enslaved peoples fled toward New Orleans. During the four years of intense combat, the murdles was ransacked and robbed of its lavish European furnishings.
In April of 1865, the Confederacy surrendered and the Civil War ended. With the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, slavery was officially abolished, freeing approximately four million enslaved African Americans. The Reconstruction Era, which lasted from 1865 to 1877, aimed to establish a new southern society where freed slaves could exercise their newfound freedoms. However, it was marked with violent resistance from white supremacists, voter suppression, and political corruption.
Many former slaves turned to wage labor to support themselves. Some wealthy land owners allowed freed slaves to work their land in exchange for a share of the crops, a system known as share cropping. Unfortunately, share cropping often left freed slaves in debt to their former slave owners and depended on them for their livelihood. I was unable to find out the ultimate fate of the newly freed at the murdles after the Civil War.
It does seem like the plantation ran into financial trouble, however. Mary Cobb Sterling hired her son-in-law, William Winter, who was married to her daughter Sarah to help manage the murdles' plantation. The family fortune was lost due to being tied up in Confederate currency, which was no longer valid, and the winters were forced to sell the plantation in 1868 before repurchasing it two years later. In 1871, William Winter was murdered on the front porch of the house.
There is documentation of the incident from a local newspaper written two days after his death. He died on a Thursday, not a Sunday, shot once with a buckshot round, which embedded five to six pieces of buckshot in his body. He died instantly on the front porch. The newspaper accused a man named E.
W. Webber of the murder, but there are no follow-up articles about any arrests. Theories suggest the murder was politically or economically motivated. William's wife, Sarah Winters, remained at the murdles until her death in 1878.
Mary Cobb Sterling died in 1880, and the plantation passed to her son Stephen, who then sold it to settle the plantation's debts. It was sold several more times before Harrison Milton Williams bought it in 1891, and eventually divided up the land among his heirs. In the 1920s, rumors of ghosts at the murdles began to circulate. In the 1940s, the plantation became part of a local pilgrimage tour, showcasing its historic significance.
In the 1950s, the house was sold to Marjorie Munson's, who began restoring it. A newspaper article about the restoration efforts was the first publicized mention of any ghosts, and there was no mention of a ghostly enslaved woman. In 1956, Munson wrote the song, Peer Through a Silver Keyhole, said to be inspired by the legends of the murdles. A gift shop was added to the property in the 1960s when it hosted the Feliciana Music Festival for a few years.
The house changed hands several more times before being bought by James and Francis Cermine Myers in the 1980s, who turned it into a bed and breakfast, complete with historical tours. The haunted reputation of the plantation grew, with the national enquirer naming it the most haunted hotel in America. In 1992, Francis Cermine published her book, The Murdles Plantation, The True Story of America's Most Haunted House, further cementing its reputation. John and Tita Moss bought the property in 1996.
It was Mrs. Moss who took the now iconic photo of Chloe's Ghost. The mosses continued to run the bed and breakfast, as well as tours. Murdle's plantation now includes a restaurant, a variety of overnight accommodations, and both historical and mystery tours.
In 2005, the ghost hunters investigated the plantation and had experiences they couldn't explain. They declared that they thought the house was truly haunted, bringing even more publicity and making the murdles the ghost hunting destination it is today. In all this history, there is tragedy, enslavement, war, and murder, but there is no evidence to support the legend of Chloe. The history actually reveals many issues with the legend.
First, there is no documented evidence of anyone enslaved or free named Chloe, associated with the plantation. There is also no evidence of any incidence of poisoning. Official Death Records state that Sarah Woodruff and her two children, James and Cornelia, died of yellow fever. Also, Oliander did not grow in Louisiana at this time.
The plant was only introduced into the United States in 1841 in Galveston, Texas. It's never grown around the plantation. So where did the legend of Chloe come from? Author and ghost investigator Karen Stolznow visited the murdles in 2014 in search of finding documentation surrounding Chloe.
She wrote about her experiences in her book, Haunting America. Historian T. O'Miles also investigated the murdles and wrote about it in her book, Tales from the Haunted South. Both investigators discovered that the legend of the ghost that is known today as Chloe can be traced back to the 1920s and was first mentioned in print in the 1940s, but the story has drastically changed since then.
In pamphlets from the murdles dated to 1941, there is mention of the ghost of a French lady in a green bonnet. In a 1945 flyer, more details about this ghost were given. She was a little old French lady in a green bonnet who tiptoed through the rooms at night searching for someone. A 1961 book called Ghosts Along the Mississippi by Clarence John Lallen also mentions the old French lady.
Marjorie Munson, who owned the place in the 60s, mentioned the ghost, but instead of an old French lady, it was now a mixed race French governess or au pair, originally from Canada, who wore a green beret to cover the scar from when she lost her ear to frostbite. Munson wrote another song called The Green Beret about her. Miles points out that these early stories appeared during Reconstruction and then the Civil Rights Era, a time when racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans was being dismantled through civil disobedience and nonviolent protests. Ghosts of black enslaved people would not have been especially alluring to white tourists who were the main audience of plantation tourism at the time.
It was during the 1980s the post-Civil Rights Reagan conservatism era when the ghostly French woman morphed into a ghostly enslaved woman. This is also when stories of Clio the voodoo priestess appeared, adding local Louisiana flair and an element of exoticism, as voodoo was seen as strange and spiritually dangerous. Miles suggests that black ghosts were now more appealing, as they were both discomforting and somehow quaintly comfortable at the same time. It was Francis Carmine who bought the murders and turned it into a full-scale bed and breakfast business.
It was in Carmine's book that the ghostly enslaved woman was first mentioned. In fact, most of the ghost stories about the murders come from this book. Carmine also achieved national press coverage of the murders, boosting its popularity. The name Cloe didn't come until a psychic visited the murders in the 1980s and claimed she sensed a ghost named Cloe.
That name was then added to the scripts used by the tour guides, and as they say, the rest is history. Cloe has since been described as either young, slim and beautiful, or older and heavy set. Miles states that these two descriptors embody two of the most prominent negative reconstruction era stereotypes of African-American women, the Jezebel and the Mamie. The Jezebel was sexually insatiable, morally impure and manipulative, tempting white men in her bed and threatening the sanctity of the white family.
Mamie was the opposite, a portly old black woman who diligently served the white family with love. Cleo also represents a reconstruction era stereotype, that of the voodoo priestess, which Miles suggests has been used time and again enslaved ghost stories to suggest African primitivism and Christian taboo-breaking. She does a very in-depth analysis of these ghostly stereotypes in her book, which I highly recommend reading. Cloe's ghost story glosses over the fact that if Cloe had existed, she was enslaved.
She would have had little to no agency over her own body. Any relationships with white enslavers would have been achieved through coercion or violence. Mississippi River Delta plantations in the era of the cotton boom were places of extreme brutality and deprivation for the enslaved. The threat of violent punishment and familial separation was constant.
Women were particularly vulnerable, with no protection from masters, guests, overseers or any other male. Enslaved women that did engage in short or long-term relations with white men were trading their bodies for promises of stability. The choice was a gamble, as the promises or threats could be recanted at any time. Miles states that Cloe's legend doesn't inform visitors about the injustice experienced by many enslaved women.
It only hints at the shadowy side of plantation life, undercutting any serious analysis of the very real brutalities and power dynamics between slave and master that occurred in most Mississippi River Delta plantations. If Cloe wasn't a real person, then who appears in the famous Myrtle's ghost photo? The legend of the photo goes like this. Tida Moss was tasked with taking some photos of the property in order to get insurance on the place.
She took several photos of the buildings and then sent them to the insurers, but got a call that one of the photos wasn't usable because there was a person in it. Tida didn't remember there being anyone around when she took the photos, but sure enough, when she reviewed the images, there was a shadowy figure standing between two of the outbuildings who appeared to be wearing a turban. Despite the original photo being a high-quality color image, the one that is sold as a postcard at the Myrtle's and has circulated all over the internet is a low-quality black and white image. It's hard to see what the grainy photo is showing.
The shadow appears to be slightly transparent, but not completely. The original photo is now nowhere to be found. While investigating, Karen Stalzno went to the spot where the photo was taken and estimated that the shadow was between four and five feet tall. She also spotted a large machine around the corner, an old-fashioned laundry roller, the kind made from two cylinders that pull wet clothes through them and squeeze out all the water.
When viewed from an angle, the roller forms a shape similar to a human, with curves for the shoulders and an ornamental topper where a head would be. The height also matches up well at between four and five feet tall. Stalzno discussed this discovery in a two-part episode about the Myrtle's on the podcast Monster Talk. I highly recommend listening to it if you're interested.
Other paranormal legends, such as the Mirror, can easily be debunked. Mirrors, especially old-fashioned silvered mirrors, are highly susceptible to degradation from oils, solvents, and humidity. Any of these can cause permanent discoloration and streaking to appear behind the glass. This sort of distress can build up over time, making odd shapes appear all over the mirror.
Our brains do the rest, mistaking discoloration and other physical damage as faces or figures in the darkness, thanks to peri-idolia, a brain response in which humans perceive images or sounds in otherwise random stimuli, especially when they're primed for fear, such as after a ghost tour. You can hear more about peri-idolia in our Psychology of Fear and our Midnight Games episodes. Finally, the assertion that the house was built on Native American burial grounds, apart from being an overused, racist horror cliche at this point, is not true. The Tunica people did live in the Mississippi River Valley, but the area they were forced to relocate to by colonists was near Marksville, Louisiana, over 100 kilometers or 62 miles away from the Myrtle's.
Through reading reviews of the Myrtle's, I noticed that sleep isn't the easiest to get when staying there due to myriad amateur ghost hunters wandering the halls and scaring each other all night. It seems few people go to the Myrtle's for anything other than the ghost, despite the real history being far more morbid than the ghost stories, such as the case with many dark tourism locations. Some researchers think dark tourism is a crossroads. While some locations do provide a respectful and well-researched exploration of a grim subject, many others commodify and exploit the pain of past peoples to draw in tourists and cash.
These inauthentic experiences also attract tourists using elements of real events to tell romanticized versions of tragic incidents. However, the commercialization and commodification of the site can also ensure that the event it explores stays in the public memory. This is the double-edged sword of dark tourism. Either way, with research, analysis, and respect, both the reality and the fiction can be used to learn from the past.
This is the case for the Myrtle's, whose difficult past, albeit a sanitized, romanticized version of it, is captured in the story of Chloe. The true history is far more haunting than any ghost story, and it's my hope that this discussion of that history has sparked your curiosity. The Morbid Curiosity Podcast is produced by H. Lloyd.
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My name is Halle, and until next time, thanks for listening.