Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

I

THE UNHOMELY

CHAPTER TWO

SHIFTING GROUND

St. Francisville, LA

In her book In the Devil’s Snare, historian Mary Beth Norton argues that one pressing fact lay behind the witchcraft trials and drove the hysteria: the judges and magistrates overseeing the trials were all military and civil leaders who had failed repeatedly to keep Essex County safe from Native American attacks during King Philip’s War and “unable to defeat Satan in the forests and garrisons of the northeastern frontier, they could nonetheless attempt to do so in the Salem courtroom.” The witchcraft trials might have begun with a group of teenage girls, but Norton argues that the town’s leaders quickly seized on this outbreak as a means of exonerating themselves for past shortcomings: they were the ones on trial, and they acquitted themselves.

Norton’s theory reminds us that the Puritans who settled New England were not simply religious zealots but were also actively, constantly engaged in territorial warfare—with the French, with the Wabanaki and other indigenous groups, and with one another. The ghosts haunting Salem must include the casualties of those land wars alongside those falsely accused of witchcraft. As Hawthorne puts it, this curse goes to the very bedrock of the town’s foundations: “The pavements of the Main-street,” he writes in one sketch, “must be laid over the red man’s grave.”

Salem, of course, is far from the only place in the United States whose pavements are laid over the graves of indigenous people. There’s nowhere in this nation that wasn’t already inhabited before Europeans arrived, and there’s no town, no house, that doesn’t sit atop someone else’s former home. More often than not, we’ve chosen to deal with this fact through the language of ghosts.

Fifteen hundred miles to the south, just off Louisiana State Route 61, stands the Myrtles Plantation. Hemmed in by giant oaks that drip Spanish moss, the low-slung plantation sits at a remove from the road, the lace ironwork delicately enclosing the portico beneath the row of symmetrical gables along its second floor. It was built in 1796 by David Bradford, a lawyer from Pennsylvania who’d taken a prominent part in the tax revolt known as the Whiskey Rebellion in the early years of the republic. With a warrant out for his arrest, Bradford fled the nascent United States for Spanish-owned territory, establishing his home in what is now St. Francisville, Louisiana. Even though the Myrtles has undergone expansions and renovations over the centuries, it has none of the haphazard feel of a building like the House of the Seven Gables: everything seems neatly ordered and in its place.

Look closely, though. The keyhole to the front door is upside down, a detail added by Ruffin and Mary Catherine Stirling, who bought the house in 1834 and nearly doubled its size. Based on a folk belief that ghosts who lived in the trees would try to enter the house at night via keyholes, an upside-down lock was a means to confuse the ghosts and keep them out.

Over the years, at least ten murders have taken place on the grounds of the Myrtles, including three Union soldiers who were shot while trying to ransack the plantation during the Civil War; and William Drew Winter, the man who married the Stirlings’ daughter Sarah—shot in 1871 on the portico, and who still roams the house.

The most well-known ghost is that of a slave named Chloe, whose story is beloved by guests and a highlight of the plantation’s tours. When Bradford’s son-in-law, Judge Clark Woodruff, lived on the plantation, in the early nineteenth century, he took a shine to a young slave girl—a light-skinned mulatto no more than thirteen or fourteen—whom he brought into the house and made his concubine. As the master’s mistress, Chloe had far more freedom than the other slaves on the plantation and was allowed to come and go throughout the house as she wished. She used this freedom to eavesdrop on Woodruff, who caught her one day with her ear pressed against the door while he was doing business. As punishment, Woodruff cut off Chloe’s ear—and from then on she wore a green turban to hide her deformity.

Chloe was sent to work in the kitchen but, desperate to win back her lover and owner, concocted a plan to redeem herself. She would secret a mild poison (boiled oleander leaves) into a cake she baked for Woodruff’s children, Mary Octavia, James, and Cornelia Gale—just enough to sicken them—then she would swoop in and nurse them back to health, proving her worth and earning her place in the Woodruff household once more. But the plan backfired horribly—the oleander didn’t just sicken the children; it killed them outright, along with Woodruff’s wife, Sarah, who also ate the cake.

It didn’t take long for Woodruff to discover who had murdered his family; Chloe had run to the slave quarters in hopes that she would be safe there, but her fellow slaves turned her in. Woodruff ordered his slaves to hang Chloe and afterward to throw her body in the river. Killed violently and denied a proper burial, Chloe now stalks the grounds of the Myrtles Plantation, talking to guests, wandering the hallways, and appearing in photographs—always wearing her green turban.

Melodramatic and tawdry, Chloe’s story is also, depending on whom you talk to, either mostly or wholly fictitious. None of Woodruff’s family died from poisoning—his wife, Sarah, and his children James and Cornelia Gale all died of yellow fever just over a year apart from one another in the early 1820s, and Mary Octavia lived until 1889. None of the records of the plantation have turned up a slave named Chloe. This is unsurprising: Chloe’s tale plays up several basic stereotypes common to American folklore and reads more as an amalgamation of stock characters than the story of a real person. It has strains of both the Jezebel figure, a sexually precocious slave who disturbs the natural order of the nuclear household, seeking to supplant the white wife; and the “mammy” figure, a motherly slave who earns her spot in the white household by loving and caring for the master’s children. Appearing in some versions as notably light-skinned, Chloe, as historian Tiya Miles points out, also conforms to the cliché of the “tragic mulatto”: a woman, alluring because of her mixed-race heritage, who seeks entrance into white society but is rebuffed by her white lover. The lack of clear details or historical substantiation means that the legend of Chloe is adaptable: each person who tells her story can borrow from the various stereotypes as needed, emphasizing different aspects over others to suit the telling.

Frances Kermeen had never heard of Chloe or any of the other ghost stories surrounding the plantation when she bought it in 1980, hoping to turn it into a bed and breakfast, but she soon found herself beset by paranormal events of all kinds. During the ten years she owned the plantation, among other things, she saw candelabras float through the air and balls of light hovering about her, smelled inexplicable perfumes whose source could not be found, heard footsteps in the middle of the night and voices that called her by name. Chloe appeared to guests and spoke to them, and the ghost of Clark Woodruff made amorous advances toward young women staying at the plantation. Amid this flurry of activity, a new spirit appeared: a young Native American woman, who would appear naked in the courtyard beneath a weeping willow tree. Reportedly, once spotted, she will turn to face you, holding your gaze for a moment before blurring slightly as she fades away.

This last ghost, Kermeen implied, might hold the key to the Myrtles Plantation and its host of spirits. Writing in 2005, she offered a few different explanations for the surfeit of ghosts at the Myrtles Plantation. One was an Indian burial ground located beneath the parking lot. This land, so her story goes, was sacred to the Tunica, a small Indian band famous throughout the Mississippi River Valley during the Colonial period. Adept at making salt (then a highly prized commodity), the Tunica were sought out by both Spanish and French colonialists as trading partners. According to Kermeen, when Bradford set out to build his plantation, he sought out a hill above the surrounding swamps, inadvertently choosing land sacred to the Tunica, who used hills for their burial sites. It was this ill-fated decision that started all the trouble.

The Anglo fascination with Indian burial lands stretches back at least to the eighteenth century. The Revolutionary poet Philip Freneau was one of the earliest to approach these sacred lands with a mix of exoticism and foreboding. In his 1787 poem “The Indian Burying Ground,” he saw the spirits of vanquished Indians still hunting, feasting, and playing:

Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,

No fraud upon the dead commit—

Observe the swelling turf, and say

They do not lie, but here they sit.

Be wary of the Native burial ground, Freneau warns us, for life still moves there.

In the 1970s this idea reappeared in the country’s imagination, turning malevolent and becoming the foundation for a series of horror movies and stories of haunted houses. Its popularity stems almost entirely from Jay Anson’s 1977 massive best seller, The Amityville Horror, and the genre-defining horror film based on it. Anson’s book, advertised as a true story, was based on testimony from George and Kathleen Lutz, who claimed to have undergone a harrowing experience in the Long Island, New York, hamlet of Amityville. When the Lutzes bought their dream home, they knew it had been the site of six murders: in October of 1974, twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr., shot his father, mother, two sisters, and two brothers in the house. Deciding not to let this factor influence their decision, the Lutzes bought the house just over a year later. But a host of unexplained occurrences took place as soon as they moved in: George began waking up every morning at 3:15, the time that the DeFeo murders had happened, and the Lutz children began sleeping on their stomachs, the same pose in which the DeFeo victims had been found dead. The children began acting strangely and claimed to see a pair of red eyes hovering outside their bedroom. In less than a month, the Lutzes abandoned the Amityville home, leaving their possessions behind.

According to Anson, while George and Kathleen Lutz were trying to find out why their new home was so haunted, a member of the Amityville Historical Society revealed to them that the site of their home had once been used by the Shinnecock Indians “as an enclosure for the sick, mad, and dying. These unfortunates were penned up until they died of exposure.” Anson further claimed that “the Shinnecock did not use this tract as a consecrated burial mound because they believed it to be infested with demons,” but when paranormal researcher Hans Holzer and psychic medium Ethel Johnson-Meyers investigated the Amityville house, Johnson-Meyers channeled the spirit of a Shinnecock Indian chief, who told her the house stood on an ancient Indian burial ground.

None of this has held up under any kind of scrutiny: the Shinnecock lived some fifty miles from Amityville, and according to Ric Osuna (who spent years unearthing the facts about Amityville), the nearest human remains that have been found to date are more than a mile from the house. Nor would the Shinnecock—or any other Native people—have treated their sick and dying in such a callous, brutal fashion. But then, the entire Amityville Horror narrative was, it now seems likely, an elaborate hoax: in 1978 the Lutzes sued two clairvoyants and several writers working on alternative histories of the house, alleging invasion of privacy. In the course of the trial, William Weber, Ronald DeFeo’s defense attorney, claimed that the entire story had been concocted by him and the Lutzes and that he had provided the couple with salient details of the DeFeo murders to substantiate their account.

This sensationalized portrayal of Native burial rites shouldn’t be entirely surprising. What is surprising, then, is how quickly the trope of a haunted Indian burial ground took root and spread throughout the rest of American culture. Haunted Indian burial grounds have appeared in Poltergeist II, in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, and in countless lesser-known films, novels, and TV episodes. It’s a legend that’s become so ubiquitous that it’s something of a cliché, showing up these days as often as not as a punchline in comedies, appearing everywhere from South Park to Parks and Recreation.

Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary is a particularly striking version of this narrative, in part because he describes in great detail the nature and function of the burial ground. Louis Creed, the protagonist, has moved his family out to rural Maine to take a job as a doctor at the local university. When his daughter’s cat is hit by a car on the nearby highway, his new neighbor Jud Crandall takes him to a Micmac burial ground that has the power to bring the dead back to life. They bury the cat, which returns the next day, alive but changed: mean and smelling of death and foul earth. After Louis’s two-year-old son is killed on the same highway, Louis, overcome with grief, attempts to resurrect him in the same manner, with predictably horrific consequences.

At the time the book was published, it was quite topical, as scholar Renée Bergland points out: during the years that King was writing Pet Sematary, the state of Maine was involved in a massive legal battle against the Maliseet, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy bands of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Beginning in 1972, the tribes sued Maine and the federal government over lands to which they were, by federal law, entitled, which amounted to 60 percent of the area of the state. Long inhabited by non-Native Americans in Maine, the land in dispute was home to over 350,000 people who would have needed resettlement had the tribes been successful. Once it became clear that their claim had merit, the government scrambled to find a settlement that wouldn’t involve the displacement of large amounts of nonindigenous residents, ultimately awarding the three tribes more than $81 million, much of that earmarked to purchase undeveloped land in Maine, along with other federal guarantees.

All this history lies in the background of King’s novel. Early on, Louis is exploring the wilderness that is his backyard with his family and his neighbor Jud, when his wife, Rachel, exclaims, “Honey, do we own this?” (a question that will become fraught as the novel progresses). Jud answers Rachel, “It’s part of the property, oh yes”—though Louis thinks to himself that this is not “quite the same thing.” This tension between holding the deed to a piece of property and true ownership of the land continues throughout the book.

Jud repeatedly invokes the very real land disputes happening in Maine at the time, though in King’s book it is the Micmac people fighting for land in Maine (an odd distortion: the Micmac people were never part of the Wabanaki Confederacy and lived primarily in Canada, not Maine). “Now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land,” he says at one point. “Who does own it? No one really knows, Louis. Not anymore. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim has ever stuck.” Jud stresses that the power of the land predates the former owners: “The Micmacs knew that place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they made it what it was. The Micmacs weren’t always here.”

In her account of the Myrtles Plantation, Kermeen follows a similar logic. As she discusses the “sacred Indian burial ground” beneath the house’s parking lot, she hypothesizes that “the Indians chose that spot because it already possessed mystical qualities. The house was reportedly haunted long before a previous owner paved over the graveyard to make a parking lot.” As King does with his pet cemetery, Kermeen attempts to attribute power and mystery to the Tunica burial ground while at the same time downplaying the tribe’s agency and ownership—they, too, were simply temporary lodgers on a land with its own autonomous power.

The narrative of the haunted Indian burial ground hides a certain anxiety about the land on which Americans—specifically white, middle-class Americans—live. Embedded deep in the idea of home ownership—the Holy Grail of American middle-class life—is the idea that we don’t, in fact, own the land we’ve just bought. Time and time again in these stories, perfectly average, innocent American families are confronted by ghosts who have persevered for centuries, who remain vengeful for the damage done. Facing these ghosts and expelling them, in many of these horror stories, becomes a means of refighting the Indian Wars of past centuries.

King’s novel, like the legend of the Myrtles Plantation, works by playing off a buried, latent anxiety Americans have about the land they “own.” If you’re willing to see this conflict over land as the basis of many of our ghost stories, then it won’t be surprising that so much of America is haunted. There’s precious little land in the United States that hasn’t been contested, one way or another, through the years. Americans live on haunted land because we have no other choice.

The land of lower Louisiana is constantly shifting. A floodplain of the meandering Mississippi, the land has evolved and sometimes disappeared without a trace as the river changed course. The land on which New Orleans stands didn’t even exist five thousand years ago. At the end of the last ice age, some eighteen thousand years ago, glaciers that had come down as far as Cairo, Illinois, began to melt and recede, sending a deluge of water down the Mississippi’s alluvial plain. The water was loaded with sediment accumulated from farther north, and it carried this sediment down the Mississippi Embayment (the low-lying basin that runs from Illinois south) until it hit the Gulf of Mexico, where the water slowed and deposited its sediment. Over time, this sediment built up and became the Mississippi River delta—a process of accumulation that was still under way until very recently. While Louisiana had mostly reached its current state by the time the French found it in the early 1700s, the topographical changes continued into the nineteenth century. One visitor to New Orleans, Captain Basil Hall, wrote in 1828 of coasting along “past small sandy islands, over shallow banks of mud,” and on through Lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain, “whose Deltas are silently pushing themselves into the sea, and raising the bottom to the surface.”

The constant evolving of the land around the Mississippi delta is anathema to human habitation, and civilizations that don’t make their mark through massive earthworks and geologic engineering—as New Orleans has—are easily erased by the constant flow and flux of the river and its mud. Finding archaeological material is difficult, since geographical clues in missionaries’ reports or oral histories often no longer correspond to contemporary landscapes.

But the clues are there, if you look closely enough. In 1968 a guard at the Louisiana Penitentiary in Angola began hunting around at the former Trudeau Plantation, a swath of swampland on the east bank of the Mississippi, near the prison. Leonard J. Charrier was not a trained archaeologist, but he understood the land of Louisiana and, in particular, how the course of the river could change over the years. Using historical documents that he researched in his spare time, and comparing those against the changes in the meander of the river, he was able to make a stunning discovery: a lost burial ground.

Using a metal detector, Charrier located the grave of a Tunica chief, Cahura-Joligo, as well as more than a hundred other graves. He excavated hundreds of objects from the fields of the Trudeau Plantation and, having nowhere else to put them, began stockpiling them in his house. Jeffrey P. Brain, a curator at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, was alerted to Charrier’s find and in 1970 traveled to visit him and his priceless artifacts. Objects from the burial grounds were on every piece of furniture, in every closet and cupboard, and covering the floor so thoroughly that only small walkways were left. One walk-in closet had been filled with a four-foot-high pile of kettles, muskets, wire, and other ephemera.

Charrier loaned the objects to Harvard while he haggled over the price, but when Harvard asked for some kind of document from the landowner renouncing any claims to the Tunica artifacts, Charrier stonewalled. A series of lawsuits ensued, involving Charrier, Harvard, the state of Louisiana, and the squabbling heirs of the Trudeau Plantation, each claiming a right to a share of the artifacts that had become known as the Tunica Treasure.

The only parties unable to enter into litigation were the Tunica themselves, because the tribe wasn’t recognized by the United States. The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe had been fighting since the 1920s for federal recognition, but a continual stumbling block had been a lack of clear evidence that the tribe had a history. In a curious twist of fate, Charrier’s discovery remedied this problem, proving beyond doubt that the Tunica had inhabited southern Louisiana; as a direct result, in 1981 the tribe was granted federal recognition. Now it, too, could pursue a claim for the artifacts. After more than a decade of ongoing litigation, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe was finally granted possession of the Tunica Treasure, now housed in a cultural center in nearby Marksville.

Not everyone, of course, was satisfied by this outcome. “I found the thing,” an embittered Charrier told the New York Times when it was all over with, “I spent many an hour digging it up, and if I hadn’t, the Mississippi River would have taken it from us all.”

The land where the Trudeau Plantation once stood is almost twenty miles from the Myrtles Plantation, and the claim that the Myrtles Plantation has anything to do with the Tunica ground that Charrier excavated is demonstrably false. But in the wake of the long-running legal dispute over the Tunica burial ground and the war between the heirs of the Tunica tribe, Harvard, and the federal government, rumors began to circulate that the Myrtles Plantation itself stood atop this contested land, the treasure and its fraught ownership becoming part of the lore of the house.

Over time the Tunica burial ground and the Myrtles Plantation have fused together, one becoming part of the story of the other. Alongside the fictitious story of the slave Chloe and the dozen unsubstantiated murders that supposedly took place on the Myrtles’ property, the plantation has accrued these legends and allowed them to settle, like sediment, about its foundations. Today the plantation is a popular spot for tours and ghost hunts and has parlayed its history into a successful destination for seekers of the paranormal. Like the ground beneath the property, over the years these stories have shifted and changed with the tides and with the tastes of tourists, changing subtly with the landscape.

If you listen closely, the ghost stories of the Myrtles Plantation say more about the tellers than they do about the supernatural. A slave abused by her master, who in response turns murderous; the Indian ghosts whose burial lands have been disturbed—all of these stories, in one way or another, respond to history. Ghost stories like this are a way for us to revel in the open wounds of the past while any question of responsibility for that past blurs, then fades away.