A Critical Ethnography of the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana with Ruminations on Hauntology
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2012 A critical ethnography of The yM rtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana with ruminations on hauntology Holley Ann Vaughn Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Vaughn, Holley Ann, "A critical ethnography of The yM rtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana with ruminations on hauntology" (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3317. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3317 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. A CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE MYRTLES PLANTATION IN ST. FRANCISVILLE, LOUISIANA WITH RUMINATIONS ON HAUNTOLOGY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the Requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Communication Studies by Holley Ann Vaughn B.A., University of North Texas, 2001 M.A., University of North Texas, 2005 December 2012 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project could not have come to fruition without the time, love, commitment and dedication of so many of my friends, family, mentors and colleagues. To my huge, loving family, particularly my parents Devora Vaughn, Greg Vaughn, and Carolyn Vaughn, thank you for your support, patience and constant encouragement. To my aunt and uncle Rhonda and Ed King, thank you for taking me in, opening your home, and providing a space to cocoon and grow. To my brilliant, precious friends Carl Parker, Jon LeBret, Sarah K. Jackson, Jennifer Alford, Raquel Polanco, Benjamin, Haas, Dre Betancourt, Ben Powell, Brandon Nicholas, Danielle Dick McGeough, Lisa Flannagan, Danielle Sears Vignes, thank you for the countless hours of robust conversation and rigorous love. Special thanks to my professors and friends, Kelly Taylor, Rachel Hall, Laura Sells, for their tutelage and their passion for knowledge that continue to illuminate the ways in which I engage the world. I am exceedingly grateful to Ruth Bowman whose stalwart care and brilliant scholarship continue to inspire me. This project would not be possible without Michael Bowman’s guidance, insistence, and indelible insight. I am so humbled by and grateful to Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, who never let me give up and who, in my darkest hour, supplied the light at the end of the tunnel. I am continually overwhelmed by her magnificent scholarship and magnanimous mentorship. I am forever indebted to Jay Allison, who literally changed my life. He opened the door to a whole new world, opened his home, his heart. He is grace personified. Finally, I am so very thankful to my best friend, greatest champion, and partner in crime, Rebecca Walker. Without her love, without her brilliance, without her partnership, without her astounding ability to stand sentry, I would not be able to traverse the world. Thanks seems too paltry a word for the labor of love that all these people have shown me. ii I will never forget all that these folks have done for me. Your words and your wisdom reside in my bones. I can never pay you back. I can only promise to pay it forward. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………..………………………………ii LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………..……………………………..v ABSTRACT………………………………………………………..……………..……………..vi CHAPTER 1 WHERE TO BEGIN?..………………………………….…………………………….1 Organization of the Study ...……………………………………………………..30 2 SUGGESTED ROUTES: BEGINNING AGAIN.….………..……………………...33 3 HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED………………………………………………………...74 4 SURROUNDING THE MYRTLES: GROUNDS FOR CONSIDERATION……..146 5 PERFORMING TOUR GUIDES………………………….……………………….176 Academic Overture…………………………………….……………………….176 Tour Guides: A Movement in Three Parts…………….………………………..189 First Movement: Bri………………………………………………………...189 Second Movement: Robbie…………………………………………………212 Third Movement: Miss Mary……………………………………………….227 6 ROUTE 66: AN EPILOGUE ON BEGINNINGS…………………………………240 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..256 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………266 iv LIST OF FIGURES l. Beginning Again: 466 Miles to Home-ing and Haunting……………………..……….....……44 2. Rebel Rousing in the Felicianas………………………………………………………..……...46 3. In Medias Res: Circuitous Routes to Chloe……………………………………...……..……..93 4. (In)escapable: 2032 Miles toward an Increasingly Haunted Future-To-Come…...…………245 v ABSTRACT This study examines how ghosts perform and are performed in southern Louisiana, particularly in the eclectic Baton Rouge enclave of Spanish Town and at The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville. Although The Myrtles, considered “one of the most haunted locations in the United States,” served as the genesis for this project, I explore the continuities and discontinuities of the histories and historicities of these two distinct places and my journeys between them over a five year period. Using critical ethnography as a grounding framework, the study draws from literature in tourism studies, performance studies, and other related areas of research, to illustrate how these sites figure histories that are simultaneously informed and troubled by ghostly matters. The study is structured as a performative journey. Chapter One establishes an itinerary, explaining the theory and methodological tools employed in the study. Chapter Two explores the performance of tourism and the ways in which it is inevitably bound up in increasingly complicated notions of home. As the beginning of the journey, it contextualizes the places that anchor the study. Chapter Three revisits Highway 61 and utilizes this liminal space to examine elided histories that will serve as a context and provide insight into the primary ghost at the heart of this study, Chloe, as well as the other ghosts she brings with her. Chapter Four provides a thick description of the grounds of The Myrtles and uses the categories of touristic performance to examine how tourists navigate the spaces prior to taking a tour. Chapter Five provides the reader with a tour of the house. Performed by three different guides, this tour illustrates how the guides function as mediums between ghosts and guests on the tour. In Chapter Six, I situate this journey in relation to how other scholars employ haunting and hauntology as a theoretical vi perspective and methodological tool before heading off in another haunted direction that explores implications for future research. vii CHAPTER ONE WHERE TO BEGIN? The willingness to follow ghosts, neither to memorialize nor to slay, but to follow where they lead, in the present, head turned backwards and forwards at the same time. To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its utopian grace: to encourage a steely sorrow laced with delight for what we lost that we never had; to log for the insight of that moment in which we recognize . that it could have been and can be otherwise. (Gordon 57) Billed as one of America’s most haunted homes, The Myrtles is featured in numerous books, TV shows, and has been the subject of numerous paranormal investigations. Like me, thousands of people who come to Louisiana visit The Myrtles in hopes of encountering ghosts. I visited The Myrtles for the first time in March 2007, as part of a graduate seminar on tourism. On that trip, it occurred to me that the performance of enacting ghostly encounters—ghostly matters—at The Myrtles was a complicated affair indeed. Fascinated, I decided to continue studying and began doing ethnographic fieldwork at the plantation that fall. From the start of the project, I knew I wanted to study the site, the tourists and tour guides, and the ghosts as well. Not only did I know that I wanted to study the ghosts, I knew it was necessary. The ghosts matter. They are integral to The Myrtles and, likewise, The Myrtles are integral to the ghosts. Trying to separate the ghosts from the site or vice versa would be like trying to find the beginning or the end of a möbius strip. Although I have been engaged with The Myrtles for over five years, I have had a difficult time pinning down what this study is and has been about. In the simplest terms, this study is about performances, ghosts, and history at one of America’s most famous and most haunted homes. It is about the ongoing performances that emerge with the haunted performative event that is The Myrtles Plantation. It is about the relationship between the work of histories and the work of preservation, with full recognition that every time one makes a decision about preservation, s/he is simultaneously making a choice about what to preserve and what to elide. This study is about tourists and tour guides. It is about a green headscarf, cherubs, puddle drapes, a chandelier made out of Baccarat crystal, upside down keyholes, and trompe l’oeil fire places. It is about a refrain—“took her out to a tree/hanged her by the neck/weighted her body down with bricks and tossed her into the Mississippi.” It is about Chloe. It is about the men who have surrounded her—historical figures like General Bernardo de Gavez, Governor Don Carlos de Grand Pre,