Information and location concerning several of the most famous American haunted houses.
In almost every town across the nation there will be an old house the children will tell stories about or dare others to spend the night in every Halloween. Some of these are just abandoned homes and others have an actual record of supernatural happenings.
One such house is a personal favorite of mine because I had a supernatural incident happen to me while visiting it. The house to which I refer is the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana.
The Myrtles has been featured in various magazines such as Life, Southern Living and the Family Circle as well as in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. The U.S. Tourist Bureau lists it as an "authenticated Haunted house" and many consider it the most haunted house in America.
Built in 1796 by General David Bradford it has an unusually tragic history. In 1817 General Bradford sold the house to his son-in-law, Clarke Woodruff. Mr. Woodruff had a house slave named Cloe that was caught eavesdropping on a private conversation and ordered one of her ears to be cut off. Hoping to get back into favor with Woodruff, Cloe devised a plan of mixing poisonous oleander flowers into the birthday cake of the eldest daughter of the family. Her goal was to make them sick so she would be called in to nurse them back to health. The eventual outcome was totally different than her plan.
Mr. Woodruff chose not to eat any of the cake but Mrs. Woodruff and both daughters did. Due to Cloe mixing in too much of the oleander flowers, all three of the family members died. When other slaves found out what Cloe had done, they took her outside and hanged her. Cloe is one of the most common apparitions seen not only by guests of the house but also caught at various times on film.
In the plantation's two hundred year history, there have been a total of ten murders committed inside or within the immediate vicinity of the house. One of the murders was of a young man who was a family member to the owners during the mid 1800s. During a card game in the gentlemen's game room a dispute broke out and the young man was killed. It was in this room my supernatural occurrence happened.
Upon first entering the Myrtles plantation the tour guide told us to please note the day and time of our visits if anything odd showed up in the photos we took to please forward the information and a copy of the photo to the plantation. At that time the Smithsonian was keeping an open file on the Myrtles.
On the day I visited the house I was using a Cannon AE1 programmable with 400-speed film. I used no flash, and the lighting in the room was coming in through the windows. The plantation home itself has many fine fireplaces and I was interested in taking pictures of these. When I developed the one from the game room, there appeared the image of a bearded man standing beside it. Needless to say, I was ecstatic when I realized what a photo I had taken.
The Myrtles Plantation can be found on Hwy 61 (P.O.Box 387), St. Francisville Louisiana 70775
Another haunted house whose history has become a part of our societies conscious memory is in Fall River Massachusetts. It is at this home a family by the name of Borden lived. The same house in which Mr. Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were murdered on Thursday, August 4, l892. Mr. Borden's daughter Lizzie would eventually be charged with the murder but in the end would be acquitted. Almost every child knows the ditty, "Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her father forty whacks."
Mrs. Borden was killed by 19 strikes with an axe or hatchet to the head in a guest room located upstairs while Mr. Borden would be struck 11 times in the head while laying on a sofa in a downstairs sitting room.
The Borden house has since been turned into a bed and breakfast. Its reputation as a "haunted" house has occurred because of the number of supernatural occurrences and ghostly sightings by employees and guests.
It is located at 92 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts 02721.
Another death in Massachusetts spawned a supposedly haunted house to be built in San Jose, California. After the passing of the Winchester Rifle fortune heir, William Wirt Winchester, his wife Mrs. Sarah Winchester began visiting a spiritualist in Boston. This spiritualist convinced Mrs. Winchester that all the people who had been killed by the Winchester rifles haunted her inherited fortune.
Believing this spiritualist, Mrs. Winchester immediately fled Boston for California and purchased an eighteen-room house. Her first act upon acquiring this house was to hire twenty-two carpenters to begin adding additional rooms.
One particular room was Mrs. Winchester's personal "séance" room in which no one was allowed to enter until after her death. It was a secret room that could only be found after a person had to traveled a virtual labyrinth of rooms and passages. Mrs. Winchester feared if anyone other than herself entered the séance room it would be contaminated from that day forth by evil spirits.
Her plan to elude these evil spirits was to build lavish areas for "good" spirits to inhabit while at the same time designing tricks to confuse the evil ones. Some of these tricks included staircases that led nowhere, doors that opened to solid walls and a room full of nothing but balconies of all different sizes. In the end, Mrs. Winchester would spend thirty-eight years building a 160-room mansion with forty-seven fireplaces and thirteen bathrooms.
Listed as a California Historical Landmark, the Winchester house is located at 525 South Winchester Boulevard, San Jose, California and is open daily (except Christmas) for public tours.
These are by no means the only reputedly haunted houses in America. A few other famous ones include:
Ashton Villa
2328 Broadway
Galveston, Texas
77550
Completed in 1859 by Mr. James Brown, it was the first brick house in the state of Texas and survived its share of catastrophes over the years. The Civil War, occupation by Union and Confederate forces during that war and the 1900 Hurricane that swept away between 6,000 and 10,000 Gavestonians. After Mr. Brown's death the home passed to his daughter "Miss Bettie." Through the years employees and caretakers have reported seeing Miss Bettie as well as a handsome, dark haired, bearded man.
The Pirate's House
20 East Broad at Bay Street
Savannah Georgia
Now a famous restaurant, the Pirate's house was once the hangout of men such as Blackbeard, Flint and LaFitte.
The Andrew Johnson Home
1 Mimosa St.
Raleigh, North Carolina
The home in which President Andrew Johnson was born in 1808.
Woodburn
(the Delaware Governor's House)
151 King's Highway
Dover, Delaware
Woodburn is said to be the home of three different ghosts. One is a colonial dressed gentleman, one is a wine bibber and the third is a girl in a red and white checked dress.
While ghost hunting wasn't my intention while visiting the Myrtles Plantation, it has brought about a desire to visit these sites as well as others that can be found in almost every state in the nation.
