Paranormal Pajama Party
Isn't it weird how often the horrors in our favourite scary stories tend to look a lot like, uh… ladies? Join me as I dig up the social and cultural contexts behind classic ghost stories and legends to challenge the often one-dimensional portrayal of women in horror.
Paranormal Pajama Party
Historical Horror: Chloe, Cleo, and the Myrtles Plantation
Welcome to America's Most Haunted House... or is it? Tonight, we’re partying at the Myrtles Plantation, where the famous ghost of an enslaved girl named Chloe is said to roam the halls.
But as we unpack this classic Southern ghost story, we'll discover something far more unsettling than any supernatural presence – the way America uses ghost tourism to process (or avoid processing) its history of slavery.
From gift shop dolls of murdered enslaved people to invented haunted histories, we'll explore how plantation tourism often makes real historical trauma more “palatable” for visitors – and why that's exactly what we shouldn't be doing. Plus: Why is it okay to run ghost tours at plantations, but not at other sites of historical tragedy?
Get ready for a thought-provoking episode about ghost stories, historical memory, and America's complicated relationship with its past.
Key moments:
- 1:17 - An encounter with Chloe at the Myrtles Plantation
- 6:34 - The Myrtles Plantation's early history
- 8:59 - America's Most Haunted House
- 13:23 - Slavery in the Mississippi-Delta
- 21:11 - The problematic truth about Chloe and Cleo
- 24:08 - How America deals with its dark history
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View all my sources for each episode and read the episode transcipt here.
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Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as discussion of historical slavery and plantation life, sexual violence and assault, violence against women, racial trauma and racism, child abuse/exploitation, murder and death, discussion of lynching, and references to deaths from disease. Please listen with care.
Like a certain famous ghost photo we’ll be talking about tonight, positive reviews can really help put a podcast on the map – although unlike that photo, I promise your review's authenticity won't be questioned by sceptics.
If you're enjoying Paranormal Pajama Party so far, I'd love it if you left a five-star rating and review in your favourite podcast app. Your review helps other listeners find the show and learn why some stories are better left untold... and others desperately need to be heard. Thanks!
The entrance hall of Myrtles Plantation looked perfect in the fading Louisiana sun, light dancing through the chandelier and across the floor. Maggie squeezed Ted's hand as they followed their tour guide through the door and out onto the creaking veranda.
"And now," the guide said, lowering her voice, "I'll tell you about our most famous resident – Chloe."
The group huddled closer as the guide described a young enslaved girl – barely a teenager – who caught the eye of Judge Clark Woodruff, the plantation manager.
"Judge Woodruff gave her a choice – submit to his advances or face brutal work in the fields. She did what she had to do. But when he began pursuing another woman, Chloe grew desperate. She started eavesdropping on his business meetings, worried she’d hear her own name. One day, she was caught."
Maggie felt Ted's grip tighten as the guide continued: "As punishment, the Judge cut off her ear. Chloe took to wearing a green turban to hide the wound. But the worst was yet to come."
The guide's flashlight cast shadows on the wall. "Chloe had been banished to miserable and backbreaking kitchen work. Desperate to regain favour with the family, she baked a cake for the Judge's daughter's birthday, adding oleander leaves to make his two daughters just sick enough that she could nurse them back to health. But poison is hard to work with, and it’s easy to make mistakes."
"When she saw the children and their mother, Sara, take their first bites, Chloe realised her terrible error. She fled to the slave quarters, hiding in terror as screams echoed across the plantation. All three died in agony."
A breeze stirred the Spanish moss as darkness settled over the plantation. "The other enslaved workers, fearing the Judge’s wrath, revealed Chloe's hiding place. He forced them to drag her outside and hang her from an oak tree. When she was dead, they cut her body down and threw it in the Mississippi River. Without a proper burial, her restless spirit returned to these halls."
"In his grief, Judge Woodruff sealed off the children's dining room where they'd eaten the fatal cake, never allowing it to be used again in his lifetime. Some say you can still hear children's laughter coming from behind its locked doors."
The guide clicked off her flashlight with a sudden grin. "I’ve never been lucky enough to see Chloe myself… but you can meet her in two dimensions at our gift shop. You’ll definitely want a postcard, and you can even buy a doll of her wearing her green turban to remember your visit! She's a true celebrity – she’s been on Oprah, you know." A few nervous laughs rippled through the group. "Just... maybe don't accept any baked goods if you see her around."
Later that night, Maggie jolted awake. The antique clock showed 3 AM. Something felt wrong. The air had grown thick and cold, carrying a strange, sweet smell – like cake.
"Ted," she whispered, shaking her husband. But Ted slept on.
A floorboard creaked. Maggie's eyes darted to the corner where a candle flickered – then she remembered they hadn't lit any candles. Behind the flame, a figure emerged from the shadows. A woman in a long dress, wearing a green turban, one gold earring glinting in the candlelight.
The figure turned, revealing a face twisted with grief and desperation. Maggie tried to scream, but no sound came. Chloe’s ghost raised one finger to her lips, then leaned over the bed. Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, heart pounding.
From somewhere down the hall – maybe from behind a locked door – she heard children. Maggie couldn't tell if they were laughing... or crying.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Tonight’s pyjama party is being held in St. Francisville, Louisiana, inside the mansion that the National Enquirer once called “America's Most Haunted House” – the Myrtles Plantation. But I’m sorry to say that the real horrors at the plantation aren't the ghostly apparitions that draw thousands of tourists each year. You guessed that already, didn’t you?
Picture, if you will, a magnificent antebellum mansion perched atop a hill, its sprawling veranda adorned with intricate cast-iron railings decorated with grape motifs. Six brick chimneys rise from its roof, and delicate hand-painted stained glass decorated with the French cross - allegedly to ward off evil - surrounds its double-door entrance. Inside, twenty-two rooms spread across two floors, connected by a grand staircase beneath a crystal chandelier that weighs more than 300 pounds.
The house was built in 1796 by General David Bradford, and originally called Laurel Grove. Bradford, a lawyer from Pennsylvania, played a leading role in the Whiskey Rebellion, in which Americans living on the frontier of their new country rose up in objection over high taxes. President George Washington sent a militia after them, and Bradford fled to Spanish-controlled Louisiana, where he lived alone until receiving a pardon from the next president, John Adams, in 1799. He then brought his wife Elizabeth and their five children from Pennsylvania to join him.
Following Bradford’s death, Elizabeth handed management of the plantation to Clarke Woodruff, a former law student of Bradford's who had married her 14-year-old daughter Sara. Yeah. Fourteen.
The Woodruffs had three children – Cornelia, James, and Mary Octavia – before tragedy struck. In 1823 and 1824, Sara and two of the children died of mosquito-borne yellow fever, a common killer in the swampy Mississippi Delta region.
The plantation changed hands several times after that. Ruffin Gray Stirling bought it in 1834, renamed it "The Myrtles" after the crepe myrtles growing around it, and significantly expanded both the house and the enslaved workforce that ran it. Records show the Stirlings owned 173 people at one time. After Ruffin's death in 1854, his wife Mary, praised in patronising terms by her contemporaries for having "the business acumen of a man" – managed the plantation until the Civil War decimated the family's fortune, which was tied up in Confederate currency.
But we're not here for the architecture or the plantation owners. We’re here for the ghosts. Particularly the ghosts of two enslaved women whose stories made the Myrtle Plantation famous: Chloe and Cleo.
We’ll get to them in a moment, but you should know that these aren't the only spirits said to haunt the Myrtles. There are playful ghostly children, a crying baby, a groundskeeper allegedly murdered on the site, and disembodied footsteps that end on the 17th step of the entrance hall’s stairs, where a former plantation manager named William Winter supposedly died after being shot by a mysterious assailant in 1871.
Visitors smell mysterious scents. They say beds become rumpled with no one in them, objects vanish, and a grand piano plays the same chord over and over until someone comes to investigate. The house even has what psychics claim is a spiritual portal in the middle of the gentlemen's lounge, supposedly connected to the Tunica Indians who lived on the land before European settlement. There’s the ghost of a polite Confederate soldier and tales of three Union soldiers shot and killed in the parlour during the Civil War, leaving bloodstains that can't be cleaned.
But Chloe is the plantation's most famous spirit and the one who put it on the dark tourism map. Her story’s been featured on everything from Unsolved Mysteries to Oprah to National Geographic Explorer, and the Myrtles Plantation gift shop goes hard on the Chloe merch. The story at the beginning of this episode is the most common version of her tale, but there are a few different versions with various explanations for why she was banished from the house, what she was trying to eavesdrop on, and exactly how she met her fate at the end of a rope.
There’s a famous mirror in the house that allegedly contains the trapped spirits of Sarah Woodruff and her daughters. According to many traditions, all of a house’s mirrors should be covered after there’s a death to prevent this very thing, but this one was missed in the confusion following the poisonings. Sarah and the girls sometimes appear as orbs or even ghostly faces in the mirror. There really are handprints with distinct fingerprints on the mirror’s silvering, too, but I feel like I should note that they’re probably just accidental handprints left behind by old-timey workmen.
Then there's Cleo, a supposed voodoo priestess from nearby Solitude Plantation. According to legend, Ruffin Stirling, who bought the plantation from Clark Woodruff, requested Cleo’s services to save one of his children from yellow fever, despite his fear of voodoo and conviction that slave religions could potentially foment rebellion.
Mysterious chants and drumbeats filled the house as Cleo worked her magic in the nursery. Eventually, she emerged and declared the child cured. Stirling was so grateful that he allowed her to sleep in the house’s beautiful ladies’ parlour. But at dawn, he discovered that the child was dead. Enraged, Stirling and his overseer dragged her from her bed and lynched her on an oak tree in the front yard. Her ghost is said to appear hanging in various rooms of the house, and the ghost of the little girl she couldn’t save occasionally puts in an appearance, too.
Chloe’s and Cleo’s stories are definitely compelling, and the photographic evidence the plantation offers to prove Chloe’s existence makes her story even more fascinating. It’s no wonder the ghost tour at the Myrtles Plantation is as popular as it is. But if you stop to think about these stories… they’re deeply troubling.
I want to make a special mention of the book Tales from the Haunted South – Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, by Harvard history professor Tiya Alicia Miles, which was the main source I used for this episode. It’s a really interesting, pretty quick read, and it is also horrifying. Like… up there with Toni Morrison’s Beloved in terms of haunting me forever. If you’re into dark tourism or Southern Gothic anything, I highly recommend it.
To understand the context of these two ghosts, we need to talk about slavery in the Mississippi River Delta region, where the Myrtles Plantation sits. This is the infamous destination people are referencing when they talk about “being sold down the river”.
In this region, enslaved people faced some of the most brutal conditions in the American South. Escape was nearly impossible, with the territory hemmed in by swamps and dangerous wildlife, while armed riders with dogs patrolled the cleared forests with limited places to hide. Even if you managed to escape, you had to make your way to freedom through vast networks of slave owners who all had a vested interest in keeping you in bondage.
On plantations, including the Myrtles, enslaved people lived in overcrowded shacks, wore cheap, threadbare clothing, often worked without shoes, and survived on inadequate rations. If they were caught stealing, they were branded with a fleur de lis. Violent punishment was the norm, and families were routinely torn apart through sales. One historian called it a “vast agrarian torture chamber.”
For enslaved women, these already horrific conditions were compounded by additional terrors.
Harriet Jacobs, who was born into slavery in North Carolina, wrote an autobiography called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She wrote, “If God has bestowed beauty on [a slave], it will prove her greatest curse.”
Enslaved women had no legal protection from sexual assault, and their bodies were viewed as economic assets – white slave owners had a financial incentive to rape them to produce more enslaved workers.
They were stripped and handled by strangers on auction blocks, denied all bodily autonomy, and often forced into “breeding” pairs like livestock. While some relationships between enslaved women and white men were sort of consensual, the extreme power imbalance and context of complete control make the idea of any consent at all deeply questionable. Many of the women in these relationships may have been trying to obtain something – freedom, shoes, enough food – or trying to protect themselves or their families.
In public, white men were generally expected to uphold their marriage vows and maintain racial sanctity, but their sexual assaults on Black women were really only semisecret.
When Jacobs’ enslaver threatened to sell her children if she didn’t have sex with him, she hid in an attic crawlspace that was so small she couldn’t stand up for seven years until she could escape to the North. She recognised that the only reason he hadn’t forced himself on her was because he was afraid his social circle would be critical.
On rural plantations like the Myrtles, far away from judgmental neighbours, enslaved women in Chloe’s position were particularly vulnerable to attack from white men. Louisiana actually had more relaxed attitudes toward interracial relationships, but this just enabled more brutality because there was virtually no oversight or consequence for physical abuse. It’s not like slaves had, you know, human rights.
On the surface, the Myrtle Plantation stories are kind of notable because they’re about Black women. But as Miles writes, they are “fundamentally stories of violence against Black women – sexual violence, physical violence, ideological violence.”
These two stories exemplify some of the most damaging stereotypes about Black women in American culture. Depending on Chloe's ghostly appearance and activities, the narrative casts her as either a Jezebel or a Mammy – two dehumanising tropes that emerged during slavery to justify the exploitation of enslaved women and which continue to influence our culture today.
Miles says the Jezebel trope emerged from 17th and 18th-century European travel narratives about Africa, where men were shocked by African women's style of dress and described their body shapes as “monstrous” compared to the figures of white women. Some even spread rumours that African women had sex with orangutans.
These degrading narratives contributed to the emergence of white supremacy – if Black women and the children they made were “animalistic,” they could be considered less than human.
The Jezebel stereotype portrayed Black women as sexually insatiable temptresses who threatened the safety of white families with their supposedly impure morals. In some versions of Chloe's story, she's described as young and beautiful, “seducing” Clark despite the reality that, as an enslaved woman, she had no power to refuse his advances. Not only that, in some versions of the story, she’s only 13 years old.
Even in death, her ghost is portrayed as pretty and still actively competing with Sarah's ghost for Clark's attention. Her ghost is described as rumpling beds, implying an ongoing sexual rivalry with Sarah Woodruff's spirit.
A romantic variation of the Jezebel trope is the “tragic mulatta” – a mixed-race, lighter-skinned woman who comes closer to white beauty standards but is ultimately doomed by her racial designation. Though Christian, her weakness for sex outside marriage leads to her downfall.
Some versions of Chloe's story take this approach, portraying her as tragically in love with Clark and rising above her station, only to fall back to the kitchen and eventually meet her death.
The Mammy figure is the Jezebel’s opposite. This one was created in the 1830s when slavery defenders tried to deflect abolitionists' criticism of sexual assault under slavery, and unfortunately, it stuck around – think of the Aunt Jemima brand, which only changed its name in 2021.
This stereotype portrayed Black women as darker, older, fatter, and desexualised, completely devoted to serving white families at the expense of their own needs and families. In some versions of the ghost story, Chloe appears as a larger, more maternal figure, eternally wandering the halls with a candle to check that everyone's tucked in at night - still at work 160 years after emancipation.
Cleo's portrayal draws on equally problematic tropes. As a voodoo priestess, sometimes called a "Voodoo Queen," her African-derived spiritual practices are portrayed as primitive, exotic, and dangerous.
Her murder is also disturbingly eroticised in retellings that describe two men dragging her from her bed before lynching her. The “Queen” title itself carries derogatory undertones, similar to the later “Welfare Queen” stereotype that gained popularity in the ’70s.
All of that is awful, but it’s also pretty fucked up that in both stories, the Black women are villains. They were involved in the deaths of innocent white children and so they are somehow complicit in their own murders. For tourists, this narrative device in their stories lessens the moral horror of their killings – they clearly deserved what they got. It distances visitors from having to reckon with the true nature of plantation violence.
So this is all bad. But there's an even more fundamental issue at play in this case, and it’s this: Neither Chloe nor Cleo actually existed. There is no historical record of anyone by either name at the Myrtles Plantation. Judge Clark Woodruff was not known to be unfaithful, and although his wife and two of his children did die early, it was because they contracted yellow fever. Contrary to the legend, his surviving daughter Mary Octavia lived to an old age.
Chloe and Cleo’s trauma is horrific… and it’s invented. These stories weren't created to educate people about historical injustices – they were made up to titillate tourists with a glimpse of darkness, but also enable them to conveniently ignore or gloss over the parts of the stories that reveal more about America’s history of corruption, violence, and slavery.
These stories turn real human suffering into entertainment, letting tourists have their poisonous oleander cake and eat it too. I wish I’d written that line, but that was all Miles. I told you her book is good.
The Myrtles' ghost story started simply enough. In the 1950s, new owner Marjorie Munson inherited a harmless tale from the previous occupants about the most benign ghost imaginable: an elderly white French woman in a green bonnet who would tiptoe through rooms looking for... something. No one quite knew what. But this gentle haunting was just the beginning of what would become a much more complicated story.
In the 1980s, a woman named Frances Kerneen converted The Myrtles into a bed and breakfast. That's when the ghost stories took a darker turn, with Black enslaved spirits entering the narrative. Kerneen added her own splash of drama with a memoir claiming a Haitian voodoo curse was behind everything from her personal troubles to her husband's wandering eye.
But the plantation's ghost mythology reached new heights in 1992 with the famous "Chloe photograph," which purportedly shows the spirit standing still on the edge of the veranda. An article I read in a sceptic magazine points out that the original negatives for this photo have conveniently disappeared. Funny how that happens.
Today, the Myrtles markets itself as "The Home of Mystery and Intrigue" – its email address is even chloe@myrtlesplantation.com – and welcomes about 60,000 visitors every year. The Chloe merch at the gift shop demonstrates how kitsch can be successfully used to make dark tourism more palatable—and profitable.
I know I’m an expat and I know a few people won’t believe this – and sometimes I can hardly believe it myself – but I love the U.S. I really do. I love that giant mess of a country. And a big part of why it’s a mess is that it has dealt with a truly haunting past in an extremely weird and American way.
The United States is built on two awful, foundational crimes – Indigenous removal and racial slavery. And as Americans, the way we’ve decided to deal with this pain and trauma is… to turn it into a tourism attraction.
You cannot understand the South as a region or an idea without understanding slavery, but when Miles was writing “Tales from the Haunted South” in 2013, she noted that most of the plantation tours available at the time focused largely on the rich, white families occupying the homes in the antebellum period, and all but ignored the slave labour that built their lavish lifestyles.
I hope that’s changed in the decade since she wrote her book, but 11 years ago, ghost tours were one of the only ways for the harder truths to sneak in – even if they did it in historically incorrect period costumes.
Many historical venues have mastered the art of turning tragedy into a tourist trap, but this raises awkward questions about which horrors we're willing to turn into entertainment. Where is it ok to learn about the pinnacles of human suffering, and then buy a themed keychain to remember it by?
Miles describes a panel discussion about ghost tours at a National Parks conference in which one historian asked a question that I think makes the case very clear: “What are the boundaries of what is acceptable? Can we imagine a ghost tour of the Twin Towers? Or of a Native American massacre site?”
Ghost tours are playful by nature. They’re a bit silly. That’s why we like them. But some parts of history are too dark for silliness – it dishonours the lives lost there. This selective sanctification of some tragedies and not others, though, says a lot about America's hierarchy of historical pain. There’s really only one explanation for why we cringe at the idea of a 9/11 ghost tour, but turn around and say plantation ghost tours are fair game, and it starts with an R and ends in an “acism”.
But ghost stories are important. I mean, obviously I would say that on my ghost story podcast, but I’m not alone. Miles writes, “Ghosts are the things that we try to bury, but that refuse to stay buried.” The beauty of scary stories is that they’re designed to make us feel uncomfortable and consider dark deeds. We don’t like talking about these things, so that often means the only way we talk about them is by including them in ghost stories.
The ghost stories we tell are chock-full of some pretty obvious metaphors. There’s a reason cursed burial grounds are a trope in American horror and even in the Myrtles Plantation lore – those are literally the skeletons in America's closet.
So if they're done right (and yes, that's a big “if”), ghost stories and ghost tours can actually make invisible histories visible again. They can help us see past the supernatural window dressing to the very human stories underneath. It's not about the spooky special effects—it's about remembering the real people who lived and died in these places.
The Myrtles Plantation tells us something important about how America deals with its past: We're willing to face our historical demons, but we're still figuring out how to do it respectfully. Yes, there's something really, really weird about selling souvenirs of historical trauma, but maybe it’s just our way of working through massive historical baggage.
Sociologist Avery Gordon wrote, “Ghosts are characteristically attached to the events, things, and places that produced them in the first place; by nature they are haunting reminders of lingering trouble.” So maybe it's time to stop looking for fictional ghosts and start confronting the real spectres of our history.
[MUSIC]
Steph: It's time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. To learn more about the history of the Myrtles Plantation and the broader context of dark tourism in the American South, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today's episode, including the Chloe photograph and pictures of the Myrtles and its grounds.
I'll be back in two weeks with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don't forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
