Friday, February 23, 2007

We saw dead people!... sorta.

posted by The Vidiot @ 3:42 PM Permalink

This is a long post with pictures.

So, as I mentioned in an earlier post, Mr. Vidiot and I decided to spend a night at a haunted plantation in a town north of Baton Rouge. The plantation, called The Myrtles, is in St. Francisville. If you go to their website, you'll see that it's a lovely old plantation house that's surround by Spanish moss and old oak trees. Classic really.

We pulled up to the entrance and started to get excited. We checked in and were given keys to the John Leake room which is in the upstairs of the main house. (There are cheaper rooms off to the side of the house, but we wanted the real deal.) We dumped our stuff in the room and ran downstairs to catch the 4pm house tour. They give a tour every hour of the business day and on weekends, they do a spooky tour. Anyway, on the way to the tour, we bumped into some people who had overheard us saying we were in the Leake room and they proceeded to tell us some of their story about staying in that room.

Seems that a confederate soldier had died in that room of gangrene after his leg had been amputated. Some say they can sometimes smell a strong oder of cigars when they're in there. The biggest 'complaint' about the room is that when you're sleeping, you'll feel someone rubbing your leg. They said they had accidentally been locked out of the room next to the Leake room and had to be placed in the Leake room because a locksmith wouldn't be able to open the door until the next day. So, they stayed in the room. The husband was sick and doesn't remember much. (Lots of people get a little ill when they stay there. There's was an accidental death... or two or three... due to arsenic in some birthday cake.) Anyway, the wife said that she had a hard time sleeping because her legs were fondled all night. The next morning, they said they climbed up on the roof to see if they could get into the locked room that way and saw someone sleeping in there. When the locksmith finally got there, not only was the door easy to open, but there was nobody in the room. (Cue the spooky music.)

So, great, dead guy in our room, leg fondler, no biggy.

We took the tour, saw the weird mirror (talked about on their website), found out who killed whom and who died where and that was that.

The biggest story was about Chloe the slave girl. Seems Chloe was the mistress of the master. She got a lot of perks because of that. But at some point, she fell out of favor. So she took to spying on the master in the hopes of gaining some leverage over him. Unfortunately, she was caught, and for punishment, had part of her left ear lopped off and she was banished to the kitchen. While there, she got the bright idea to 'lightly poison' a birthday cake, thinking she would just make a few of the kids sick, nurse them back to health and get back in the good graces of the master. Unfortunately for Chloe, she put in too much poison, killed two of the master's kids and his wife. The other slaves were so freaked out that Chloe's bad behavior would be the death of them all that they took Chloe and hung her themselves. So, obviously, Chloe is one of the BIG ghosts. The kids are too.

There was also another fella who was shot and then died in his wife's arms on the stairway. A few others died of yellow fever and I can't remember the rest of them. (Oh yeah, and don't forget the Confederate soldier.)

So, we wait until night and then we start to take pictures like this.
And this:

Not too unusual. You might notice some round glowy light thingies. We didn't think much of them, but I guess the ghost hunting types call them orbs. Here's a closeup of a few from that picture.


So, we're out back of the house, near what looks like an old slave's quarters or something. Snapping away. And we're seeing orbs everywhere. Now, we've used this camera all over the place, New York, Europe, wherever and we've never seen these sorts of things on our images.

Here's one over my shoulder.
Here's one over Mr. Vidiot's shoulder.

So, snap snap snap (aren't digital cameras great?!) and I snapped this shot and nearly FREAKED out.

I mean, what the hell is THAT thing?!

I did some reading on the web about orbs and things and one of them said something like the orbs are spirits, sometimes individual, sometimes groups, and as long as they're flitting about, they're round. The minute they stop they turn into ectoplasm.
Excerpt: We teach that a spirit is represented in an orb configuration pattern. When the spirit is moving about, its shape is an orb, but when it comes to rest, meaning that it is no longer in motion, the spirit energy that is compressed within the orb is released and this spirit energy expands into what we call Ecto-Vapor or Ectoplasm. Often an orb will contain more than one soul and when its spirit energy is released, multiple orbs flow forth from the single orb. The orb may be observed as a small white sphere shooting through a room and through a wall. When recorded on film, the orb size is often confused because the photo is only 2D and its size is dependent on how far from the lens the orb is when captured by the camera.
So, near as I can tell, maybe some of orbs were just dust. But honestly, I blew a few of them up and a kid you not, they had faces on them. And then there was that ecto-vapor thing.

All too creepy.

So then, after a fabulous meal, we retired to our haunted room.

See? There's an orb in the upper left area. (The square on the right is just a reflection from mirror.) I snapped a shot right after that and the orb was gone.

So we went to sleep. And a fitful sleep it was. Both of us had nightmares. At one point, Mr. Vidiot felt like someone was pressing down on his chest and keeping him from me. He had to break free of it in order to roll over towards me. Later, in his mind, he saw his hand choking me, and then his had started to move up to my neck and it was everything he could muster to pull it away.

For me, I for some reason couldn't stop shaking him. I felt like I was being rocked from behind and I was holding on to him. Neither one of us felt rested the next morning. And I felt a very light pressure on my legs.

Truly odd.

Now, whether or not all the talk of ghosts and the atmosphere of "ooooo, ghosts" had anything to do with anything, I don't know. I do know that if the people who run the Myrtles aren't creating the orbs or contributing to any of the other weird experiences and stories we heard while we were there, then something is definitely going on there.

If you're ever down that way, you should go there. It's very creepy. I guess the ghosts are really active in October. Oh, and keep in mind that some people, many actually, are unable to spend the entire night. More than a few times, the workers have come in for the morning and found the keys to a room near the office door, only to find out the people had fled the night before.

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