After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Ghosts of the Deep South

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

The Deep South is a haunted landscape where dark tourism thrives, supplying spine-tingling thrills to eager visitors. But is there a darker truth behind these tales? Maddy and Anthony's guest today is Tiya Miles, author of Tales from the Haunted South. Tiya reveals how ghost tours exploit and distort the true history of slavery for profit, feeding troubling narratives.Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her latest book is Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin 2024).Edited by Freddy Chick. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

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In this episode, we find ourselves ghost hunting in the southern states of America. We're going to be delving into stories of enslavement, assault and abuse. So please proceed with caution. Now, let's journey to the east coast of the United States, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the fertile ground of North America. The southern states of America stretch out in a huge expanse of farmland, scrubland and fertile valleys and dense forests. Each town has its own colonial history, not least the seaport city of Savannah,

the oldest city in the state of Georgia. Among its green squares and cobbled tree-lined streets, on the intersection of West Harris Street and Bull Street, a massive burnt orange Greek Revival mansion stands in a state of deterioration. Paint peels from its western veranda and the pillars flanking its front door. This is the Sorrel Weed House. In the shadows, to the back of the house, off a small court is the Carriage House. Venture inside and, so the story goes, one can't help but be overtaken by a chill.

Once we get our bearings, the wooden stairs creak as we venture to the upper floors, led by an animated guide. They gesture to us to enter one of the rooms, but something, in the white walls, weighed down by thick wooden beams, repels us. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And today we are joined by Professor Taya Miles. Now Taya is the Michael Garvey Professor of History and the Radcliffe Alumni Professor at Harvard University. She's the author of numerous books, including the nonfiction, Tales from the Haunted South, Dark Tourism, and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era,

and excitingly, the novel, The Cherokee Rose, a novel of gardens and ghosts. Taya, welcome to After Dark. Thank you so much, Maddie. Can I just say, Taya, all that she carried is perhaps one of my favorite history books ever. I know that's not what we're talking about today, but I just want to say, while we have you, wow. And we're not talking about it today, I know, but go and find that book if you haven't read it. It's just the most spectacular thing. So thank you for that. Well, I appreciate that very much, Antony. And I do want to say that that's not our focus

for today, but it is the same landscape. Yeah, that's a really great starting point, I think, to think about place and the history that we're going to talk about as well. I'm always so excited to have guests on who are trained historians working as professional historians, but also work with fiction as well. And in your case, write amazing novels. And I always think this is such an exciting approach to history and I think that's going to come across in the conversation that we have in terms of your approach to storytelling and what you ask these histories to do for the present moment, I think.

Let's begin thinking about the place though. For anyone who's listening who maybe isn't familiar with the deep south of America, can you give us a little bit of sense of what it is like and also why it's said to be so haunted? Well, the southern states in the US carry a burdened, heavy emotional history and that is because they are the place where the enslavement of Black people, and also in an earlier period, Indigenous people, lasted for the longest period of time. All the colonies here in the States did practice slavery, racialized slavery. Many of the States

did. But the Northeast abolished slavery relatively soon after the American Religionary War. The South became the place where slavery stuck and where the residents who owned people there, began slavers there, vehemently defended slavery and tried to extend slavery across the whole of the land that would become the US. So the chattel bondage of human beings is most closely associated with the South. Horrific, terrible things occurred under this system. So we have the history, we have the politics, and, Maddie, we also have the landscape. Because the South is a place that is drenched in sunlight and heat, surrounded by water, coastal lands, cut through with waterways, rivers, streams, incredibly humid. It's kind of a subtropical climate in many areas with gorgeous plants

and trees and flowers. It is a difficult environment to live in because of the heat and the humidity and the water. There are many dangers wrapped up in that. But also a gorgeous place to live, which has led people to romanticise it. These various elements come together to make the South seem like a particular set-apart, discreet region of the US. What we're left with is this background and this historical context that you're talking about, Taya, of brutalization of enslaved peoples and the juxtaposition of this romantic thing that people create down there as well. And so what has kind of come about then is this idea of dark tourism linked to that romanticization often or linked to some

of the associated stories rather than histories. So in your mind and in your work, how did those two things add up? Do they sit comfortably or is this an uncomfortable match? I mean, yeah, it feels like it should be nonsensical, right? I think we're talking about a place where horrible violent things occurred and also about a place that has been highly romanticized in American culture and media and even global culture media because those images and ideas are projected around the world. I mean how could this be the case? Interestingly, I think that contradiction begins to occur way before our current time period. It exists within the slaveholding period proper because many of the people who were wealthy and lived these southern lifestyles that are romanticized and represented,

could only reside in these gorgeous mansions and have beautiful textiles and wonderful China that they ordered in from Europe because of their ownership and brutalization of the people they owned. These two aspects of Southern history and culture were deeply interconnected. You don't have Southern wealth, Southern luxury, Southern grandiosity without Black poverty and Black suffering, the two go together. And people have complex ecologies. Those are the kinds of things

that it's very difficult to reconcile. And so shifting into a highly defensive, romanticizing kind of mode, I think it made it more possible for some aware enslavers at the time to face this reality. It makes it more possible for many tourists who visit these places today to deal with this reality. Mason Hickman One of the things that we always this reality. One of the things that we always hold close when we're talking about historic ghosts or ghostly storytelling or historic true crime is that we, and we say this quite a lot, is that we want to make those things work harder in the context of this podcast.

So that they're doing more than just titillating. They're doing more than just, you know, giving tingles down the spine. And actually, one of the stories that we're doing more than just, you know, giving tingles down the spine. And actually, one of the stories that we're going to turn to, we're going to cover three today, but one of the ones that we're going to cover in Savannah, the Sorrel Weed House, really does act as a way to make those stories work harder. Can you tell us first of all, Taya, what the ghost story is? So what's the very basic ghost story that's attached to this house? I can, and I want to. But first, I really want to respond to your comments about making these stories work harder. This is largely what I tried to explore in the book. How these stories work culturally and politically and relationally

for us in the present day. Because I do think that they are doing quite a heavy lift. But Savannah, Georgia is a place that is very popular in the tourist industry, generally speaking. It's, as you described earlier, just a gorgeous city, a very old city. It really has a fair amount of a sense of British and even Caribbean aesthetics in it. You see all kinds of wrought iron, you see all kinds of color, there are gorgeous squares that are built with beautiful live oaks and dripping Spanish moss. Just one of these iconic places. And Savannah has been romanticized and described as the most haunted city in America. And much of that sense of hauntedness comes from the fact that

Savannah was a huge slaving port. Its gorgeous architectural environment is based upon the wealth that came from, especially the cotton industry at that time. The Sorrel Weed House is one of these beautiful urban manor homes sitting on an incredibly elaborate square that is said to be haunted in our present day. If you go to the Sorrel Wheat House, if you visit it right now, you can go on a historical tour during the daytime

and a haunted tour at night. These tours aren't 100% separate because during the day tour, you'll get a teaser about the hauntings and the frightening things that supposedly occurred there. And at night, you will get the full-blown story of how this place is supposedly haunted. And the story is that Francis Sorrel was a cotton businessman in Savannah in the early

19th century. And he had moved there from Saint Domaine, so in a press day painting. And he built up a great deal of wealth over time. In the 1840s, he had this splendid manor house built for him. He lived there with his wife, a white woman, you know, who was from the state, named Matilda. He owned a number of enslaved people. And I want to remind listeners that this is the story connected to this house. And while he lived there, he became sexually involved with a very young enslaved girl or young woman,

maybe a teenager named Molly. Over the course of their sexual relationship in this house, something went awry and terrible things happened. Frances Sorel's wife found out about this supposed quote, affair and jumped to her death in the courtyard of the estate. And his, according to the story, quote, mistress, the young enslaved girl. This is a terrible scene in the story. She was found hanging from a noose, from a rope, in the slave quarters, a separate building right behind the manor house. So this is a story about the very gory deaths of two women who were supposedly involved in kind of a quote

love triangle with this very wealthy cotton merchant. And during the tour people are invited to look at the courtyard where Matilda's body crashed to the ground. They're encouraged to walk into the room where Molly's body was supposedly found hanging from the ceiling. And both of these women are said to still haunt the place today. There's so much in this story to unpack, isn't there? And I'm not quite sure where to begin. I suppose you've got racialized politics, you've also got the power dynamics of the domestic space and class as well and patriarchy. Then you've got the ghost tour

being performed to visitors who are coming into a historic space that really did include, and we'll talk about the real history in a moment, but that really did include these people, some of these people in the story at least, and where real violence was enacted on a daily basis. where real violence was enacted on a daily basis. Yet there's this compulsion in the modern day to layer extra violence or imaginative violence onto that. It's really hard to reconcile it, and yet it's a compulsion that we all understand and especially people who love history, I think. The feeling of proximity to the past is something that really drives people's interest in history. But the reality is often so much more complicated and so much darker actually than the stories that we tell.

So Taya, maybe the best place to start, I think, with this would be for you to tell us a little bit of what the real history is. What do we actually know about these people? And this scenario that we've been given, this ghost story that ends in these two terrible deaths, does that have any basis in the archive? When I first went on this tour, quite by accident because I was visiting historic homes in the area as part of research for different projects and trying to get inspired for a different project and I was beckoned over by a person outside of the Sorrel-Weed house encouraging me to

take the tour. I heard the story of Molly and I am someone who in my research specialized in the histories of Black enslaved women. And so I was just incredibly disturbed, upset, saddened by the story of Molly that I heard on that tour, and especially by the way that it was told. Because yes, we do know that historically enslaved Black girls and young women and older women, any black female who was enslaved was subject to sexual exploitation and abuse at the hands of any enslaver. That could be the person who owned her, it could be the person down the way, it could be relatives of the person who owned her. This is quite evident across all the primary

materials that we have about slavery. So as you were saying, I mean, it's bad enough. The history is bad enough. But I was quite disturbed by how the story was told, as if this was some kind of romantic relationship, a quote, affair that this young woman, Molly may have chosen to enter into with the man who owned her. And so I determined I was going on that tour because of my own incredibly negative reaction to it, my own deep concern about what was being told at this place

that I wanted to research it and get to the bottom of it. I felt very strongly that I wanted to find out who Molly actually was, to understand her story as fully as I could, and to restore respect and dignity to her. Because I felt that the Molly who had gone through all these horrible things in her lifetime was being exploited and abused and sold again in our moment through this ghost tour. So I determined then it doesn't matter what I'm working on right now, my other research, my other projects, I am going to figure out who Molly was and I'm going to restore her dignity through this research. But what I found was something that I did not expect. Call me naive. Call me, you know, really unfamiliar with how ghost tours function

because I was at the time. There was no Molly. There was no Molly who could be found and supported by any existing piece of documentation. When I first couldn't find Molly, I wasn't so sure because it could have been that she was somebody who maybe moved in and out of the household temporarily or never ended up in a record. But based on my previous research and all that I had learned about which enslaved people tend to be written about in the records, it seemed that Molly should have been one of these people.

She was clearly a major character, I will say, in this family story, as highlighted in the Ghost Door. She was someone who was, according to the story, tied to a very dramatic event. If one wealthy white woman dies in the courtyard and an enslaved black girl or teen dies by hanging on the same estate, your neighbors are going to notice. And these Savannah neighbors were very chatty. We have records of

what they said about one another. And if Molly was such a favorite, she should have come up in the family papers, but she didn't come up by name. No one came up by the same age and the same sex. That would have indicated that some, you know, perhaps more anonymous black women could have been the figure that the story was based on. There was just nobody. And in addition to that absence, Maddie, there was also the presence of an untruth in that story and that is having to do with Matilda because we do have records about Matilda, Princess Rell's life and how she died. The Savannah Historical Society has information about it. I walked through the doors of that society and looked

at documents that tell us how she died. And there's no record that she died through a suicide. She instead died from a health condition. So that glaring fabrication would also suggest that there could be others in the story. So let me just take this one step further so that your listeners can hear this point. And I will tell you that for years, the people who own this property kept telling the story, sort of continued and doubled down on the idea that this had happened. Until a couple of years ago when a team from This American Life, which is a radio program here in the States, wanted to do a story on this and I had read my book, interviewed me, and went down to talk to them.

And apparently, the owners of the home did tell the team from This American Life that they had made up the story of Molly. And so now finally, I can say that the research that I did, which suggested there is no Molly, has now been backed up by the owners of this haunted house, this supposed haunted house themselves. What you're saying there about your initial gut instinct to try and restore some dignity to Molly, despite the fact that this is an invented story. You still achieve that because the dignity is wider spread, but it's still achieved because it shows the ways in which the diabolically violent institution of slavery is still being romanticized. And it's still being used to concoct a narrative wherein love is possible within the institution of slavery, where this

enslaved woman can fall in love with the master of the house. And that's a huge indignity to millions of enslaved women. So the dignity goes back in there. And it's also being used to uphold the local economy, right? People are presumably paying for the ghost story and the ghost tour, and it's part of that tourism. And in that way, there's a direct through line really from the system of slavery and the economy of that kind of tourism that is building on those histories, the real histories and the fabricated ones? I mean, that's right. A grave disservice has been done to all of the young girls and women who were enslaved, who experienced sexual abuse and exploitation by this business, which

is the historic home of the haunted house, taking their stories and applying them in a case where they don't actually fit, where they cannot be historically substantiated, and then packaging them for sale. That is what has happened here. The historical expectation of black women and girls has been repackaged for sale to make this tour more appealing, to make it more frightening, and to make it more titillating. And, you know, quite honestly, I think to bring in a sexual nature and aspect to their tours, because sex sells, right? Ha to come and visit your site. I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast where every week we'll be delving into the real-life history that inspires the locations, characters and storylines of the

legendary Assassin's Creed franchise. Join us as we explore the narrow streets of Medici-ruled Florence, cross sand dunes in the shadow of ancient pyramids, climb the rigging of 18th century brig sailing across the Caribbean, and come face to face with some of history's most significant individuals. Whether you're a history fan, a gamer, or just someone who loves a good story, Echoes of History is the podcast for you. Make sure to catch every episode by following Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by HistoryHit, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an ad by BetterHelp. What comes to mind when you hear the word gratitude? Maybe it's a daily practice, or maybe it feels hard to be grateful right now. Don't forget to give yourself some thanks by investing in your well-being. BetterHelp is the largest online therapy provider in the world, connecting you to qualified professionals via phone, video, or message chat. Let the gratitude flow. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.help.com. So we've had Savannah now and we've looked at what that particular ghost story there is giving the local community, the local economy, but we're going to go somewhere else now. We're going to head to New Orleans for another story that I think is doing something really fascinating in terms of engagement with history and the questions that it raises.

So Anthony, give us the next story and we will get into it together. From Savannah, Georgia, we move westward, crossing Alabama and Mississippi to reach Louisiana. Next stop, New Orleans. Here the air is thick, humid, oppressive even. In the French Quarter, the Spanish colonial buildings evoke a different time, a different space. One and two storey buildings of every shade and colour line the narrow streets and alleys. Voices and jazz riffs filter from open windows and over intricate cast iron railings. So too do the smells, fired beignets,

and chicory coffee mingle with jasmine, diesel fumes and sweat. As the night sets in, we reach the intersection of the Rue Royale and Governor Nicholls Street. in, we reach the intersection of the Ruroyal and Governor Nicholls Street. A townhouse sits squarely on this junction, its three storeys painted a dull grey. It looms above its neighbours. In the light cast from the neighbouring houses, it's impossible to imagine this house as it was in 1834. Downstairs, partially ruined, windows darkened by soot, wooden beams smouldering from the recent fire, and on the upper floors, solid iron shutters, iron hooks on a doorway, the lock now hanging off. But what event, natural or supernatural, has caused such destruction? such destruction. Taya, once again we find ourselves in a place that is all about the place. We have such

a keen sense of this built environment and the people who occupy it today and indeed its layers of history. But talk us through this particular ghost story. Tell us the details. So, yes, now we're in New Orleans. New Orleans is viewed as being this really kind of special, different atmospheric city. This stems in large part from the layered cultural and political histories of the place, because New Orleans was for a time French, it was for a time histories of the place because New Orleans was for a time French, it was for a time Spanish, it is now American, but those previous governmental imprints and cultural imprints are still very much a part of the place. So people go to the French Quarter to experience this sense

of a different kind of America. And there's a romantic kind of lens that people are looking through as they stroll those French Quarter streets. And there is a romantic kind of lens that people are looking through as they stroll those French quarter streets. We also have in New Orleans, going back for generations, a very interestingly layered and mixed kind of population. People from many different European ethnicities. People who have partnered across lines of race and color and religion in ways that was less common

in other parts of the U.S. And we have a community that's known as the Creole community, to which different meanings have been applied. The actual historical meaning of that term is that Creole residents were people who could trace their ancestry back to original French or Spanish colonists or residents. So Creole members of the French quarter of the New Orleans community were really European in a way. They were mixed culturally and sometimes they appear to be mixed kind of physically, but there's a set of partners about them as a community within this American city. So we zoom in on the French quarter in New Orleans, and we have this figure named Madame Delphine LaLaurie. Her story takes place

in the same general time period of the Sorrel family. We're looking at the early to mid 19th century. And Madame Delfine LaLaurie was Creole. She was very wealthy and she had a number of enslaved people who were under her charge in this urban manor house in the French Quarter. As the ghost story goes, she was an incredibly violent person, maybe even a sadistic person, who carried out strange unspeakable acts against her enslaved people, did experiments on them or had experiments done on them, who tortured them, mistreated and abused them in all kinds of startling ways. Supposedly there are stories from the time period that she lived of neighbors seeing her involved in fiendish activities or seeing

terrible things happening. And at some point in the history, according to the story, when other figures in the community realized just how terrible things were in her home, they basically ran her out of town and set the home on fire. So Delphine LaLaurie supposedly had to run for her life to escape an angry mob of people in her city who had determined that her level of abuse and violence was really, really far beyond anything that they could accept, even though many of them were also enslavers who committed violence against the people they owned. So the Madame LaLaurie home is said to be haunted today,

said to be haunted by the spirits and the ghosts of enslaved people who were tortured and abused so terribly, also said to be haunted at times by LaLaurie herself. And her house, it features prominently on walking tours in the city. It is not a home that you can buy a ticket for and tour like the Listerle Weed home, but it is a home that people buy tickets to walk by it. So we have this situation with Molly's history or invented history that we spoke about in the last story.

What intrigues me about the history, so we're going to move on to that now, where we take that story and look at what the archive can tell us, but remarkably, and quite shockingly, there is something in the archive that can shore up some of this history. Isn't that right, Taya? Well, there is something. There is a little bit here. So LaLaurie was a real person. Let us say that there are records that can identify her and that can describe her. She did live in this home. She did own enslaved people. She most likely did abuse enslaved people. There are indications

in the record that she may have been someone who was a violent, uncaring kind of owner of the people that she owned. So all of that is grounded in reality. But what we do not have any records about would be the extremities of the kinds of things that she was said to have done, things like experiments and mutilations. We also don't have in the history an indication of the accusation that she was insane, that she was mad, that we get in the ghost stories, or the representations that we get in the ghost stories, that she may have had some kind of romantic or sexual relationship with her enslaved black coachman. I mean, this comes up in the ghost stories as well in descriptions of her as being just far, far, far beyond

the pale of acceptable behavior for an elite woman of her time. It's interesting, isn't it, that a lot of the elements of the first story are repeating themselves here in terms of the strange and violent domestic space and the abuses and crossing of various boundaries there. Then we've got this sexual element as well, potentially creeping in with some kind of romantic or at least sexual affair. Again, thinking about those power structures within that, do you think that she survives though Tyra as such an ominous figure because she's a woman operating in this time period? What's going on there?

Tyra In the time period in which she lived, it was unusual for a woman to act in such independent ways and to be in the public view in the way that she was. To be viewed as somebody who sort of had control over their own husband, over their own spouse as she was viewed. So she would have stood out in her time for those characteristics of being kind of a strong, independent minded woman. And in our time, gender is very much a feature in these haunted stories. So the fact that she was an outlier in her own day carries over into our day such that people can look at her and think that she was out of control

and operating beyond the bounds of not just acceptable behavior in our society when it came to enslavement, but also when it came to what a woman should be doing. There is still a very real sense, a carried-over sense of gender-appropriate behavior that we live with today. And she is someone who did things in her own life and who does things in these ghost stories that do not align with our sense of what it should mean to be a southern

lady or a southern belle. You know what's striking me as well? And I mean, this might be a very obvious observation, but it hadn't occurred to me before we were having this conversation. And that's that in both of the stories that we've covered so far, we're just about to turn to one final one. But in both of the stories we've covered so far, the fictionalization of these ghost stories implies that the cruelty that was inflicted upon enslaved people at the time, the actual history of it is actually not enough because in the fictionalization, it becomes more brutal

and more violent. And there's something very unsettling about that that I hadn't quite picked up on before until we started having this conversation. Yes, yes. I mean, the stories are exaggerated, which on the one hand shows us something about this touristic market, what it is that people want to pay for.

On the other hand, it also shows us how far people are willing to go, those who manufacture these tours, and also those who perhaps attend these tours, in their imaginings of the abuse of Black people in the past. I mean, I felt conflicted myself when I was writing this chapter on the Lowry because of things that she is said to have done. I mean, they're just so, they're monstrous. They're monstrous. I wasn't sure that I should put those things down on the page and in doing so kind of reproduce

the representations of these horrific episodes. I did it because I really wanted to make the very point that you are suggesting right now, Anthony, which is this is what people are paying to participate in. What should that tell us about the meaning of racial histories today, the reality of interracial or cross-difference relationships today, when we see how willing people are to not only listen to but to enjoy stories of the abuse and mutilation of people who were owned by others and had very little ability to defend themselves.

What does that tell us about who we are? It is very disturbing. I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast where every week we'll be delving into the real-life history that inspires the locations, characters and storylines of the legendary Assassin's Creed franchise. Join us as we explore the narrow streets of Medici-ruled Florence, cross sand dunes in the shadow of ancient pyramids, climb the rigging of 18th century brig sailing across the Caribbean and come face to face with some of history's most significant individuals. Whether you're a history fan, a gamer or just someone who loves a good story, Echoes of History is the podcast for you. Make sure

to catch every episode by following Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by HistoryHit, wherever you get your podcasts. inclusive workplace that benefits everyone. Find the tools and resources to help you hire persons with disabilities at Canada.ca slash right here. A message from the Government of Canada. I think this question of what these ghost stories are doing in our present moment and the way that we can see them as so paramount here Tyra, as you've obviously laid out so wonderfully for us, let's go to our last story because as someone who grew up in Britain and who is not familiar with the South, this is in the sort of cultural imaginative version of this history. This is the setting that I imagine that I associate with this time period with

the system of slavery and that is on the edge of a plantation in Mississippi. So, Anthony, take us there and we'll head to our last story. Let's make one final journey. This time up the Mississippi River from New Orleans through Baton Rouge to St. Francisville. through Baton Rouge to St. Francisville. Here, a grand creole cottage rests beside the old Myrtle plantation. It appears peaceful.

White rocking chairs on the long veranda facing out towards oak trees, sturdy in the breeze and Myrtle trees, after which the property is, of course, named. Let's make our way inside, up to the second floor, where the floorboard slant and the rooms

seem alive with the movement of the breeze through the house. This house, though apparently picturesque, holds unanswered questions and perhaps restless souls. Now, Tyra, after the last story, I'm sort of afraid to ask what this one's going to be, but could you just talk us through the final story that we have today for listeners? One thing all these stories show together that I want to emphasize before we go into the third is the vast and changing landscape of slavery. You said, Maddie, that now we're coming to a place that you imagine the South in the Antebellum period, and that is a rural plantation area. Many of us do have that kind of image in

our minds when we think of slavery in the States. But rural slavery coincided with, existed alongside of urban slavery. These different localities were connected through the ways in which their economy was dependent upon the ownership and labor exploitation of human beings. So now, the Riddles is an actual plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. So it's a rural part of the state where we have just been in an urban part of the state. It was a working plantation in the 19th century, owned by a wealthy family who were able to acquire it through a Spanish land grant. And it was a place where a man who worked as a judge lived as,

at the time would be understood as the patriarch of this family with his spouse, his wife and his children, and numerous enslaved people, many of whom worked on the fields of this plantation. And so the Myrtles has been preserved in terms of the land that you can see around it in terms of the old plantation big house that people tend to imagine and also some of the outbuildings on the place. It is a location where when you go to visit, you do have this sense of being transported back in time to the place you imagine as the antebellum south.

Stay Forever And within that imagining comes a ghost story then. And can you tell us a little bit about that imagination, that imagining that comes to life there? Molly Well, I didn't know about the Myrtles before I began the research for this book. research for this book, researching Mali, it led me to becoming fairly obsessed whether or not there were more examples of enslaved ghosts at tourist sites in the South. And I started researching them, trying to figure out where were these places? How did they function? What was their business model? And that's how I learned about the Myrtles Plantation and trying to identify, are there more Maliies out there? Basically, it turned out that the Myrtles plantation is quite a famous place for people who are interested in haunted sites. It is

one of the most popular haunted houses in the region. The most popular story there, very much like Molly story, centers around a young enslaved girl or teen who is supposed to have been, is said to have been, sexually involved with the owner of that place, with her enslaver. Okay, I'm going to tell this, but please, everybody listening, remember, this is the ghost story. And there are elements in this story that are romanticized to a terrible fault, but I'm going to just tell this. So in the story, the judge who owns the place is out looking at his fields and he sees a young girl who catches his eye. Her name is Chloe and he decides that she is going to be a person that he is going to have a sexual relationship with. So he does, he becomes sexually involved with Chloe.

They enter into an affair and Chloe is then moved into the big house. He brings her into the plantation house to be closer to him. During this time, when Chloe's in the big house, she at one point is listening at the door when the judge is having a conversation about politics or business or something like this. She is caught in the act of stepping out of the bounds of her so-called place. And when this happens, the punishment that the judge has in store for Chloe is that she's going to have to have one of her ears cut off. So she loses an ear for listening in. Chloe is kicked out of the home and supposedly she's attempting to get back into the good graces of this man. And so she bakes a special birthday cake

for one of the children of the judge. The cake, it turns out, has an ingredient in it, a plant, which is poisonous, and one of the judge's child ends up dying from eating the cake. Afterward, the judge encourages a sort of corporate punishment of Chloe and the enslaved people on the plantation end up taking her life and she is thrown into the river.

So this is the story of Chloe and she is said to haunt the plantation home to this day. The story that is told about her is romanticized in much the same way as Molly's story had been romanticized. There are additional twists to the romanticization that are quite unbelievable. One of them is that because Chloe supposedly had her ear cut off, that people who visit the plantation today as tourists might find that one of their earrings is missing or that they see earrings in strange places on the grounds because Chloe still haunts those grounds and might be taking earrings for remembering her lost ear. And people report sightings of Chloe today. It's a really difficult story to digest. And I think it's one that's going to stay with

me. I think it has, again, so many layers of power and storytelling and so many anxieties and concerns of the era in which it's set, but equally those that have been layered on afterwards. One thing that really strikes me about all of these stories, Taya, is that there's such a focus on real and added in suffering and violence. Often the way that these stories are told actually are reinforcing power structures while seemingly criticizing them. I'm thinking explicitly in this story of the naming practices of the characters even. We've got the judge and then we've got Chloe being called Chloe speaks to a whole history of

the naming of enslaved people by enslavers. It's almost doubling down on those structures, those inequalities, that violence. I just wonder what you think the value in ghost storytelling is when it comes to sites like this, if there is a way to override some of these stories, to tell different ones, to move away from reinforcing some of those real histories. Not to look away from them, not to override them, but to offer different narratives and to actually give power and voice back to people like Chloe. Well, it is a doubling down. And I think one of the reasons that these various sites and businesses do that is because they recognize that these story patterns already exist in the awareness of people who are going to be visiting their sites.

People already have a sense of illicit sexual relations in the South, of cross-color lines, of violence, of betrayal. And so they come to these places wanting to hear more about stories they have associated with the South and sites, businesses, the people who own and run them recognize this. So they offer up those stories just magnified and compounded to get people in to satisfy what they expect the tourists who come to those places want to see. They're creating for their audiences. They're creating out of a shared imaginary of what slavery was.

And they're doing so in a way that in my view is gravely irresponsible because these tellings simply reinforce negative stereotypes. They reproduce reprehensible images of black people and their lives. They minimize the very real suffering that black people experience at the hands of enslavers. So we can imagine that a person going on a tour like this could leave the tour where we haven't talked about this yet, Matt and Anthony, but you know, these tours are often jolly kinds of experiences. People are excited. They're hyped up on some of the tours I took. People were drinking beforehand and sometimes they were encouraged to drink during the tours.

So we have people who are under the influence of alcohol. They're coming straight from parties. They're leaving the tours and going to parties. So individuals enter into these environments, hear these truly dehumanizing, atrocious stories, and they leave thinking what? Maybe thinking that, oh, oh, right. The story that I had in my mind about Black people and perhaps

their inferiority was, it was onto something. It was based on something that I have just had reinforced and told to me again. Or the story that I had in my mind about how it's okay that Black people had been abused and exploited because they are a different kind of human being. They're a kind of human being who can withstand this and can reappear. I mean, look at this, here's Chloe, treated horribly in her time, but now she's playing pranks as a ghost on the plantation.

They could also leave with an impression that people who have some kind of foreign element to their character are the ones who commit the most atrocious crimes. So by this, I mean to say that tourists could leave these experiences thinking that individuals who are a little bit different, somewhat foreign, are actually the worst among us. Remember, Francis Sorrell came from Haiti. This is actually true. This is part of his history. That Haitian background is absolutely reinforced and augmented in the tour. You even hear about him perhaps engaging in, quote, voodoo practices. There

is an exalicization in a negative way of Black spiritual beliefs there. Adam and Laury is Creole, so of Spanish and French ancestry. And so her atrocious deeds can be ascribed to her differentness, her foreignness. I mean, she's not a real American, right? The real Americans around her in the ghost story cannot stand for her behavior, which is out of bounds. Yes. I mean, that's definitely something that has really come out during our conversation for me actually is that the people committing the atrocities in these stories who then trigger the haunting usually through murdering their victims and then it's those people, the murdered,

the enslaved who then rise up from beyond the grave. The responsibility is placed with these individuals as though they're anecdotal examples and as though they're not part of a wider system. I think possibly then going on a tour and hearing a story like that, you might come away with a sense of, yes, a terrible thing happened in this place, but it was a one-off and it was so unique and it was so violent that it has somehow torn through this veil between life and death. It's that powerful and that's why it's remembered when actually the history is far worse and far more permanent and long lasting and its impact is still written across our world.

And having to come to terms with that shared responsibility, that feels like the true haunting to me, but one that it's obviously a lot harder for people to face and not as commercially viable potentially. That's right. I mean, I think that think you put your finger exactly on the issue. These stories are told as if they are very unusual, you know, bizarre examples of horrific things that occurred when really the actual history, which is widespread, is just as awful in a more everyday way. And people don't want to face that reality. They may want to think in terms of these kinds of stories, where you have somebody like the judge, this awful man who is willing to go, you know, look across his fields and kind of hand

pick the girl that he is going to abuse. But I do think that there is an opportunity for us in the attraction that people have for ghost tours. And this goes to your last question, Maddie. I mean, what do we do with all this? What's being done now is mostly unfortunate, in my opinion. But the attraction to ghost stories isn't necessarily bad. It doesn't have to take us to the places that these tours take us.

I think that we're attracted to ghost stories in large part because we are fascinated by history, by things that have happened in the past that we sense have shaped who we are in the present. We're fascinated by place, the lands on which we dwell. We're interested in the connection between those two. I mean, ghost stories are about past and place, right? Someone who lived in the past coming back to a place and staying there because they have some kind of message to get across. We could take positive advantage of people's interest in that intersection. We could use that interest as a way to teach people more about history and more about these places. We could try to encourage them to see the true and complex humanity in historical figures.

And we could tell ghost stories in a way that are more grounded in what we know about the proven history of slavery in the South. We can go to the documents that we have. We can go to the oral histories that we have and pull out stories related to haunting and tell them in a way that actually illuminates complexity, illuminates humanity, inspires a sense of connection and empathy, and encourages people to leave those tours, recognizing that yes, bad things happened here. We see what those things are. And we want to do something that is radically different in our own relationships and in

our own politics in the present day. We don't repeat those stories. We want to renew our relationships to past and to place and to one another. And that, I had another question, but that is the call to action that we're finishing on today because that is, I think that's the perfect place to leave it. Tyra, I will just say this. We want you back. If you're happy to come back, we would love to have you back because I want to talk about

your fiction work and I want to talk about the African ghost stories that inform some of this landscape as well. I think there's so much more that we can discuss there. But for today, I think that's such a perfect place to leave it. Thank you so much for coming and speaking to us and thank you listeners for joining us in this important and necessary conversation. I'm so glad that we were able to have it today. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please do let people know about it. to the following month, every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca.

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