NOTTOWAY PLANTATION PARANORMAL ACTIVITY INVESTIGATION

It was a dark and stormy night when I arrived at Nottoway Plantation, eager to get to my room, unaware of the ghosts.

Western Louisiana was flooding. Roads were washed out, hotels in short supply. I had pointed my rented Jeep toward one of the few places with a room, a mansion by the Great Mississippi River Road 30 miles south of Baton Rouge that’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

It was about 1 a.m. when I finally passed sugar cane fields surrounding the plantation on Bayou Goula, cane so tall and thick you could walk a foot into it and disappear. Out of the lush fields and the darkness rose the 40-room plantation, which bills itself as the South’s largest antebellum house, an Italianate-Greek revival built in 1859 with 22 white columns, the “White Castle of Louisiana.”

The night security manager, Jim Denis, insisted on carrying my bag up to Room 14, the only one available.

The massive door was nearly as tall as the 15-foot cypress walls, and Denis opened it to reveal a mahogany canopy bed, draped in a heavy red and gold bedspread with matching drapes that pooled on the floor.