It was this quest that brought my husband and me to the small town of St Francisville, Louisiana for a night’s stay at the notoriously haunted Myrtles Plantation. It was an appropriately ominous start to a night spent at a haunted house. And here we were more than a little surprised to find that the property didn’t quite live up to the stereotypical haunted house of our imagination. A relatively compact one-and-a-half-storey clapboard structure with seafoam-green shutters and delicate ironwork railings, it appeared less haunted mansion and more quaint country cottage. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025)