Myrtles Plantation

The house has a long gallery, but its most famous story begins at a door.

In the legend told about the Myrtles, an enslaved woman named Chloe listens to a conversation she is forbidden to hear. She is punished, loses an ear, and conceals the injury beneath a green head wrap. Later, she puts poison into a cake. The story says she means to make members of the household ill and restore her place by nursing them. Instead, they die. Other enslaved people kill her, fearing the consequences for themselves.

It is a story with motives, a weapon, and an ending. Those details make it easy to remember. They do not make it documented history.

Investigator Joe Nickell, who visited the property and examined the account, reported that he found no evidence establishing Chloe's existence or the poisoning. His published investigation describes the tale as a modern invention and points to illness, rather than murder, in accounts of the family deaths. A visitor may encounter Chloe in the plantation's folklore; that does not establish that a woman with her biography lived here.