Myrtles Plantation

Myrtles Plantation, historically also referenced as Laurel Grove, is an antebellum plantation house built in 1796 and commonly associated with General David Bradford in multiple published summaries. The property is documented as having been worked by enslaved people during its early history and is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places (since 1978), giving it recognized historic-preservation status. Alongside its documented historical importance, the Myrtles has an extensive presence in popular haunted-house folklore. It has been featured repeatedly in television programs and popular paranormal literature and podcasts, and many sources describe it as "one of the most haunted" or "most infamous" haunted places in the United States. Accounts in ghost-hunting books, television episodes (for example, a Ghost Hunters episode and a segment on Unsolved Mysteries), local news coverage, and podcast narratives present a mixture of first-person investigative anecdotes, tour-based storytelling, and folkloric interpretation of the plantation's past. Media-circulated evidence has been part of the site's modern notoriety; for example, a WGNO news clip later promoted in some circles as showing a spectral image was widely circulated and subsequently critiqued by skeptical commentators (Skeptoid). Sources for the Myrtles' haunted reputation are largely popular media, folkloric retellings, and paranormal-investigation accounts rather than academic historical documentation of specific supernatural events. Where detailed named entities and specific eyewitness dates appear in broader popular lore, those particulars were not present in the supplied source excerpts and are therefore not reported here.