A Tale of Two Spirits

Recalling the bootlegging days of Prairie Ronde, and the ghosts that were left behind

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Drive through any part of rural south Louisiana and you’ll witness remnants of the past intermingled with the present. Modern homes and metal buildings dot the landscape of highways and byways, broken up by the occasional dilapidated barn or abandoned sharecropper’s shack. 

The small farming community of Prairie Ronde is one such place. A pastoral tableau etched into the northwestern corner of St. Landry Parish, it appears quiet and sublime. Yet beneath the surface is a history that belies today’s quaint, still veneer. This hamlet, whose French name means “Round Prairie,” was well known as a hub of some of the most significant moonshine operations during the Prohibition years of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was a time when the hush of night was broken by the clandestine bubbling of stills, the sweet scent of corn mash soaked into the air. 

During that tumultuous era, drinkers from the surrounding communities of Mamou, Ville Platte, Chataignier, and Plaisance imbibed on Prairie Ronde’s famous “white mule” whiskey, as it was known. The liquid rotgut put money in pockets of those who dared to manufacture and sell it, and sent more than a few bootleggers behind bars.

A famous federal raid in the fall of 1927 captured what was then the largest still in southwestern Louisiana. Over one hundred barrels of moonshine, 471 gallons of buried whiskey, and equipment including boilers, oil stoves, and tools worth thousands of dollars were unceremoniously destroyed. Two years later, another large still in the area was raided by federal agents.

One of those moonshiners was my great-grandfather, Ludeau Pitre. He was in his early twenties when the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution passed in 1919, prohibiting alcohol from being sold and consumed throughout the country. For him, like many others eking out a subsistence in farming, the restriction gave way to opportunities to earn handsome sums of money by making and trading the illicit elixir.

[Read this: "White Lightnin' Still Strikes in the South—Moonshine: As American as apple pie" ]

Growing up, I was regaled with tales from my father about “défunt papa,” like the one where he rolled whiskey barrels into the pond behind his house after getting a tip from Sheriff Daly Joseph “Cat” Doucet that the Feds were coming through the area to bust stills. It was also alleged that Doucet would release him and other bootleggers from the parish jail at night to manufacture, keeping them behind bars during the day to keep up appearances.

Aside from a single newspaper clipping of his arrest in 1928 for “possession and sale of intoxicating liquor,” there’s virtually no paper trail of Pitre’s moonshining exploits. He did well enough over time to parlay those profits into buying land and investing in prized Angus, Brangus, and Hereford breeds for his cattle operation, Dixieland Ranch. Upon his death in 1962, he was one of the largest landholders in the area with enough acreage to employ over a dozen tenant farmers—including famous Creole musician Eraste “Dolan” Carrière. 

Then there were the other spirits, those that haunted his old home.

Located along Highway 103 near the Prairie Ronde Baptist Church, Ludeau’s house stood for nearly a century until it was demolished in January of 2023. By that time, both the home and property had been in the hands of the George Fontenot family for fifty years.

Growing up, I heard not only the moonshine tales but the enduring lore of the homestead’s hauntings. An older, now-deceased cousin of mine relayed how years ago, my great-grandfather’s workers were instructed to dig up and move a small graveyard in order to clear the land for the house. “C’est ma terre maintenant, pas la leur,” he is rumored to have said. 

If such a bold move weren’t enough to wake the restless spirits, another myth told of how they had appeared in a dream to Ludeau, telling him where gold coins were buried on his property. 

Yet another concerned Delton, Ludeau’s oldest son, who kept a jar of marbles on a fireplace mantle. One day while in another part of the house, he and his mother heard the crash of the jar and the sound of marbles scattering along the floor. When they went to the source of the noise, the marbles remained resting in the jar on the mantle, undisturbed.

Then there was the time that Sheriff “Cat” Doucet and his deputy left abruptly during an evening meal when they heard a door slam out of nowhere—a small but telling indication of the house's eerie atmosphere (as well as Ludeau’s cozy relationship to the sheriff’s department). 

"C'est ma terre maintenant, pas la leur."

—Ludeau Pitre

Ludeau and his wife are said to have often heard the sound of chains in the attic at night. The old man was unbothered by them, said to have dismissed these disturbances and returned to sleep without worry.

There were more tales, like those of the glowing ball of light that would dance at the far end of the hall, and a headless apparition that appeared at night in the yard.

In 2022, driven by curiosity about these stories, I reached out to the ghost hunting group Louisiana Spirits to investigate these long-standing tales of hauntings. With the permission of the property owner at the time, the team set a date for an exploratory investigation.

Equipped with cameras, microphones, and a motion-activated electronic doll that had an eerie resemblance to a horror film prop, the team began setting up in various parts of the house. The doll went in Nonc Delton’s boyhood room, where the fireplace mantle was.

That evening, we sat around in the dark with flashlights, whispering ghost stories, while the team walked from room to room asking questions to unknown inhabitants. Momentarily, the electronic doll let out a noise and the handheld receiver flashed, indicating something moved in the room.

[Read this: "Don't Run—and other lessons from a night with Louisiana Spirits Paranormal Investigations"]

Some days after the field investigation was complete, a team member contacted me saying that they had recorded several EVPs, or “Electronic Voice Phenomena”.

In January of 2023, the Pitre home finally met its end. The center-matched walls that were rumored to hold the cold hard cash of Ludeau’s whiskey-making ventures began to break and crumble under the heave of an excavator. As the weeks went by, more and more of house was reduced to piles of wooden and brick rubble. A few hidden gems emerged: a leather rifle scabbard, some glassware, but no sign or hint of a graveyard where the cypress floor joists once held wooden tongue-in-groove planks in place. Nor did we find any moonshine treasure.

By the end of that cold month, everything was gone. Only the bare, soft, wet ground that once held the brick pilings stood as a testament to the spirits of a bygone era.