Stories of ghosts and strange happenings at these historic Southern homes—with photos included. Louisiana plantations evoke images of grandeur and elegance, but beyond the facade of stately homes are stories of hope and subjugation, tragedy and suffering, shame and perseverance and war and conquest. After sixteen workers axed most of the Houmas House’s ancient oak trees, referred to as “the Gentlemen,” eight of the surviving trees eerily twisted overnight in grief over the losses wrought by a great Mississippi River flood. An illegal duel to reclaim lost honor left the grounds of Natchez’s Cherokee Plantation bloodstained, but the victim’s spirit may still wander there today. A mutilated slave girl named Chloe still haunts the halls of the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville. In this book, Cheryl H. White and W. Ryan Smith reveal the dark history, folklore, and lasting human cost of Louisiana plantation life.

Welcome to The Myrtles, the most haunted house in America -- and featured in Netflix's #1 TV show Files of the Unexplained. Broken clocks tick...beds rise in the air...paintings fly across the room...locked doors fling open...crystal chandeliers shake...heavy footsteps and eerie piano music sound in the dead of night -- and that's just for starters. Welcome to the Myrtles Long. Recognized as America's most haunted house both by parapsychologists and the media, The Myrtles is a twenty-eight-room Louisiana bed-and-breakfast once owned by Frances Kermeen. In this spine-tingling chronicle, Frances tells the story of how she was drawn to this former plantation mansion, its bone-chilling history, and the incredible encounters of the ghostly kind she had that forever changed her beliefs about the supernatural -- and just may change yours. Along with the sometimes terrifying, sometimes benevolent hauntings, her years at The Myrtles also brought death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, the tragic loss of friends, a catastrophic betrayal, and other personal challenges. And they would all converge with the paranormal phenomena around her into one cataclysmic event...

Inside the "Most Haunted" House in New Orleans The legend of Madame Delphine Lalaurie, a wealthy society matron, has haunted the city of New Orleans for nearly two hundred years. When fire destroyed part of her home in 1834, the public was outraged to learn that behind closed doors Lalaurie routinely bound, starved, and tortured her slaves. Forced to flee the city, her guilt was unquestioned, and tales of her actions have become increasingly fanciful and grotesque over the decades. Even today, the Laulaurie house is described as the city 's "most haunted" during ghost tours. Carolyn Long, a meticulous researcher of New Orleans history, disentangles the threads of fact and legend that have intertwined over the decades. Was Madame Lalaurie a sadistic abuser? Mentally ill? Or merely the victim of an unfair and sensationalist press? Using carefully documented eyewitness testimony, archival documents, and family letters, Long recounts Lalaurie's life from legal troubles before the fire and scandal through her exile to France and death in Paris in 1849. Themes of mental illness, wealth, power, and questions of morality in a society that condoned the purchase and ownership of other human beings pervade the book, lending it an appeal to anyone interested in antebellum history. Long's ability to tease the truth from the knots of sensationalism is uncanny as she draws the facts from the legend of Madame Lalaurie's haunted house.

Discover this Cajun and Creole city where ghost stories abound . . . photos included! The Hub City boasts a multitude of spirits and specters, from those lost in Civil War skirmishes and fever outbreaks to those souls that simply can’t say goodbye. Today, they wander the halls of bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants and linger along back roads and cemeteries. Pirates are rumored to guard buried treasure, and ancient French legends hide in the swamps, bayous, and woods. Join journalist and ghost seeker Cheré Dastugue Coen as she visits Lafayette’s haunted sites and travels the countryside in search of ghostly legends found only in South Louisiana.

In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

The Atlantic Paranormal Society, also known as T.A.P.S., is the brainchild of two plumbers by day, paranormal investigators by night: Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson. Their hair-raising investigations, fueled by their unique abilities and a healthy dose of scientific method, have made them the subject of a hit TV show: the SCI FI Channel's Ghost Hunters. Now their experiences are in print for the first time, as Jason and Grant recount for us, with the help of veteran author Michael Jan Friedman, the stories of some of their most memorable investigations. The men and women of T.A.P.S. pursue ghosts and other supernatural phenomena with the most sophisticated scientific equipment available -- from thermal-imaging cameras to electromagnetic-field recorders to digital thermometers -- and the results may surprise you. Featuring both cases depicted on Ghost Hunters and earlier T.A.P.S. adventures never told before now, this funny, fascinating, frightening collection will challenge everything you thought you knew about the spirit world.