The Myrtles and the mirror nobody will replace

The Myrtles sits under live oaks in St. Francisville, Louisiana, built in 1796 by General David Bradford, who had fled north Pennsylvania after the Whiskey Rebellion. The house grew over the next century into a long low sweep of veranda and ironwork, the kind of place that photographs like a postcard and feels like a held breath.

Its most famous object is a mirror in the entrance hall.

Southern custom held that after a death the mirrors of a house were covered, so the spirit would not be caught in the glass. The story told at the Myrtles is that after deaths in the house one mirror was missed. Since then, staff say, handprints appear inside the glass rather than on it, small ones, at the height of a child's reach. The mirror has been re-silvered on more than one occasion. Guides will tell you the marks returned each time.

The rest of the house has a long inventory of stories, most famously a version involving an enslaved woman named Chloe, poison in a birthday cake, and children who died. Historians have picked that legend apart for decades. Records do not support most of it. What records do support is grimmer and less theatrical, which is the pattern with plantation houses. Ten people are said to have been murdered there in local legend. Documented violent deaths at the house number closer to one.

The place is now an inn, and the tours lean hard into the ghost material, sometimes at the cost of the actual history of the people enslaved on the property.

Still, stand in that hall in the late afternoon, with the oaks moving outside and the glass gone slightly cloudy, and you will understand why nobody on staff has ever suggested simply taking the mirror down.