Photo courtesy of Carmin Nezat
Author Carmin Nezat as a child, on the plank swing hanging from an oak tree on her family property. The swing was one of the places where the property's resident ghost, George, made himself known.
I grew up in Sunset, Louisiana in the nineties, on a homestead surrounded by farmland. We were sharecroppers; for generations, we had grown corn, potatoes and strawberries. My French-speaking maternal grandmother was the head of our household—the caretaker of me, my brother, both her ailing parents, and both her brothers, one of whom was completely disabled. On this land, my mother, aunt, and uncle also grew up. The ties run deep.
In the house, we kept a tin box of artifacts we’d found in the fields: arrowheads, buttons, coins, marbles, and metal buckles that we knew were from the Civil War and other moments of history observed by our land. Over the years, the collection was reduced to only a few of the coins—the rest of it nabbed by cousins and family friends who wanted pieces of the history.
The home itself and the surrounding outbuildings were built by the hands of my great grandfather, Edward Leger, from scrap wood. The “old house” was made from boards of cypress that he repurposed when Sunset’s original “Community Store” was dismantled.
“Pappy,” as we called him, was a traiteur, a Cajun faith healer who used Catholic prayer and energy work to heal and treat the sick. Traiteurs have been compared to Reiki practitioners; the techniques are very similar.
Growing up, there were always strangers around, sick strangers. As a kid I didn’t understand why but never really asked questions. It was just how things were. There were specific rituals, practices, guidelines, and rules that Pappy adhered to in order to honor his gift. My aunt recalled that when she was a child, my great grandmother would beg Pappy to give his work up; she was tired of having to nurse him back to health every time he would energetically take on these folks’ illnesses. And she was frustrated that he would not accept payment for his services, something forbidden of those with traiteur gifts.
Other strangers have visited our homestead over the years, for reasons other than healing—people searching for something more tangible: treasure.
The story, according to family lore, is that beneath the nearly-two hundred-year-old live oaks in our backyard is buried $650,000 of gold treasure—placed there by either the infamous Jean Lafitte, or local cotton baron Hypolite Chrétien. My grandmother’s property, after all, was once part of Chrétien Point plantation. And the planter was known to bury bits of his fortune around his property, which in its heyday stretched upwards of 3,000 acres—some sources say 6,000, and some 10,000—all labored over by more than 500 enslaved individuals. Chrétien was also known to allow smugglers and pirates to use his land to distribute contraband—the most famous being Jean Lafitte, who became a friend and regular guest.
Photo courtesy of Carmin Nezat
The remnants of the family tin box treasure collection: old coins found around the property.
These treasure hunters would take over our backyard, roaming around with their maps, metal detectors, and dowsing rods. My grandma has a specific memory of one stranger named Stanley who asked to explore the property. She instantly felt a bad energy coming from Stanley, but still allowed him access—albeit chaperoned by her nephew, Sherman, and her friend, Dudley Pontiff. Stanley had come equipped with a metal detector, a chainsaw, and shovels. The metal detector sensed something under or around the tree closest to the house, and over the course of days, Stanley dug and chopped at the roots of the tree, until my grandma was unable to see him.
He’d dug a tunnel beneath the tree from one side to the other, and all the while, the metal detector kept beeping. According to my grandma’s telling, Stanley claimed to have some kind of special device that could differentiate between gold and silver. The closer to the house he would get, the more this device would sound off. Unbeknownst to him, my great-grandma kept a sack of silver dollars inside of the wall of the house closest to the tree.
Still, Stanley claimed that it was gold that had the machine trilling. Metal detectors operate by generating an electromagnetic frequency that metals conduct; conductive metals elicit a strong response, and silver seems to be the benchmark for conductivity, with gold registering slightly below it. It’s unclear if the machines of the 1990s could have possibly actually differentiated between the two. So, was it the silver dollars that Stanley’s machine detected, or was it truly the gold?
He never did find the treasure. Once he’d thrown in the towel, my grandmother asked that he not return—though we feared for months that he might come back to find the gold, and perhaps harm us in order to do so.
In addition to the earthly strangers frequenting our home and property, there were unearthly visitors as well, particularly in the proximity of the huge oak trees in the backyard. One came by so frequently that my grandmother gave him a name: George. If the history holds up, then George existed on our land before I was born, before my mother was born, and long before my grandmother or great grandparents were born.
According to family legend, George’s bones are buried beneath one of the oaks, resting right there beside Lafitte’s treasure chest. As all those old pirate tales go, only dead men can keep secrets. We’d (or my grandmother, rather) surmised that “George” was tasked by Lafitte to dig the hole to bury the gold that unknowingly doubled as his grave. And for more than a century, he had roamed around our backyard, unaware that he was dead.
But where did my grandma get the idea that George’s tie to the property was to guard the rumored gold? Was Stanley’s detector faulty and in fact only picking up the silver we had hidden in the walls? Was there even any gold at all? If there wasn’t gold, then who was George and what was he doing there?
One thing is clear: “George” did exist. We’d see him in our peripheral vision as just a passing shape, and we’d feel his presence on a regular basis. My brother and I spent a lot of time playing on the massive root systems of the oak trees—as did my mother, aunt, and uncle when they were children. Those tree roots were particularly suited for the imaginary worlds in which our GI Joes, Trolls, and Barbies inhabited. We had a plank swing tethered to the lowest branch of the smaller tree—it was still at least twenty feet high. So many hours were spent playing there and thus, spent with George. George had an affinity for the plank swing. As anyone in South Louisiana knows, wind and even light breezes are a rare thing unless there’s a storm rolling through. But when we’d play on the other trees, that swing would just get going, back and forth, back and forth, all on its own. “Hi George!” We weren’t bothered by him; we’d just continue doing whatever we’d been doing. My grandma taught us not to be afraid of him, but I learned later that she herself was, in fact, the one who was afraid. She said her hair would stand up and she’d feel static electricity around her whenever she sensed him near. I’d feel it too—a sensation like being inside of a bubble.
George wasn’t the only energy haunting our yard. We’d hear things, too. On what seemed like almost a daily basis, the sound of the song, “Dixie Land,” seemed to float over from the field behind the oaks—an often distorted and muffled, though sometimes very clear, arrangement of battle snare drums and trumpets. It seemed like it was coming from really far away, perhaps from a dimension parallel to ours, yet we could feel the rumbling of it inside our chests and stomachs.
I had an interesting revelation: could we have been haunting our own land?
No one else lived in the area back then. My grandmother’s homestead sat isolated on Chris Road except for ninety-year-old Madame Verlice Higginbotham’s home almost a mile away as the crow flies, and an almost uninhabitable cabin that housed the Breauxs, who we suspected were the descendants of the enslaved people who once worked this land. They lived across the road on the opposite side of where we’d hear the song.
As part of Hypolite Chrétien’s plantation, our family property was also in very close proximity to two Civil War battle sites—the Battle of Buzzard’s Prairie, which was fought directly in front of the Chrétien Point big house (in plantation days, the front of the home was the part that faced the waterway, so that would’ve been Bayou Bourbeaux) and the Battle of Carrion Crow (meaning buzzard) Bayou (also known as the Battle of Bayou Carencro or the Battle of Grand Coteau, or the Battle of Bayou Bourbeux).
There is a phenomenon called Place Memory Theory, in which events involving intense energy or negative/tragic situations can be absorbed and stored in locations where the electromagnetic field is strong enough. In these cases, events can repeat mechanically, like a playback loop, when and if the environmental conditions allow. It was as though the music and the elevated energy of those soldiers marching into battle had been recorded by the earth, played like a tape, again and again, whenever the veil was thin enough for us to be able to perceive it. Environmental triggers or sensitive human minds act like decoders, replaying the sights or sounds of the past.
A long stretch of Bayou Carencro runs parallel to the area on Chris Road where our home was. My grandmother tells stories about how when she was a child, she and her brother were exploring near the big oaks when they found the red brick foundation to an old home, as well as a cypress cistern on the field-side of the oak trees.
My grandmother always understood this home to have belonged to the overseer of the plantation. Pappy told her that he remembered a house still being there when he was a child, and that once, while digging to install posts for a clothesline, he had found human bones with Confederate uniform buttons in a shallow area of the yard. Once, before someone took them, those buttons lived in the tin box along with the old coins and things.
My family were spiritual people. My great grandparents had chosen to participate in the organized religion of most Cajuns, Catholicism. But they were spiritual in different ways as well—connected to the earth and to the people. Pappy was a traiteur, given a mystical gift by God. His wife, Delia, known to us as Ma-mom, was half Chitimacha. She held a profound connection to her land and the flora around her.
Early on, I realized I carried some of this mysticism, too. It felt as though the things I saw and heard affected me more than anyone else in the family. As early as age five, I asked my grandmother relentless questions. Like my mother, I had dreams that felt riddled in meaning, location-specific dreams—something in the field behind the oak trees, all the time.
My grandmother explained to me that I had these experiences because I was still so “close to the other side”—I was a child and had only just recently crossed over into our physical dimension. But also, children are not as tainted by societal beliefs and standards as adults are. I was very young, but understood what she meant immediately.
All of these influences fueled an obsession with the paranormal that would carry on for years to come. I’d borrow every book I could find on ghost stories from the library, I’d ask my mom and dad to bring me to book stores and buy books about ghost-hunting, eye witness accounts, and folklore. I’d watch television shows about haunting re-enactments and psychics.
But just recently, after years and years of reading and learning, I had an interesting revelation: could we have been haunting our own land?
There is something to be said about energy and how it only changes forms but never disappears. Pappy used energy-work to heal the sick, but that was fueled by belief too, wasn’t it? Unless of course it was completely real—in which case he had the ability to harness his energy and use it in a way to heal the human body.
But what happens to the un-harnessed energy?
The gift of healing is said to be passed down in family lines. I’ve long wondered if perhaps we, Pappy’s descendants, all have a bit of its power in us but were not aware enough to nurture it. Nor was the gift “handed down” to any of us, as is the tradition.
If a person has excess energy and also possesses the ability to direct it, what happens when they direct it toward the wrong things—consciously or subconsciously? If all my family possessed this ability to harness energy, if our third eyes were more open than most other folks—then had our collective energy and beliefs, and more or less fabricated stories surrounding these hauntings, fueled or even flat-out created them?
There is something in the field of parapsychology called “P-K manifestation,” or psycho-kinesis. I think of it as psycho-kinetic manifestation, influencing a physical system without physical interaction. This phenomenon is specific to people with unknown psychic abilities. It is usually associated with adolescents going through puberty, which is a tense and confusing time where emotions and energy run high. But I wonder if it isn’t age specific: strong enough emotion, intention, and things like mass thought can direct energy into forming its own entity—sometimes called a poltergeist. Poltergeists aren’t intelligent beings, they’re just a personified amalgamation of emotions, and are usually a negative force.
But when their creator has control over their abilities, they don’t have to be. Take Pappy for instance. He healed people by using energy fueled by his and their shared belief that they would be cured.
And they were.
Photo courtesy of Carmin Nezat
The author's grandmother, Dot Leger Speyrer, standing beneath the ancient oaks on the family property.
George isn’t there anymore. My grandmother says that one day, she was so spooked by him that she said aloud, “George, go home to your mama, go home.” And that was the end of that. Had she moved him on, or had she convinced herself that she had gotten rid of him by just believing that she had? And by believing that she had gotten rid of him, had the energy she put forth in order to do so in fact ceased his existence? Was George just the ghost in a ghost story that we had all collectively made up and chosen to believe in? Had we forged our own narrative surrounding his presence and then breathed life into the story, which in turn perpetuated this haunting? Did he, as an intelligent spirit, ever really exist, or had we completely created him?
The fact that he stopped existing, to all of us, especially after my grandma told him to go, doesn’t answer these questions, but it makes me wonder if our collective belief that he had “gone home” cut off the energy supply that we manifested into the haunting.
It was around the same time that we stopped hearing “Dixie Land” in the field. But concurently, the area was becoming more populated. This was the 1990s. My great grandparents passed away within a few years of each other, a subdivision was made on the other side of the field, my grandma sold some acreage behind the house, and a trailer park was built. Maybe all the new energy snuffed out the old ones. Or maybe we had just been so isolated back there that we made stuff up to entertain ourselves.
The property is pure peace and quiet now, but has an empty feeling. My grandmother still lives there with my aunt, in a trailer. The old house sits vacant and forlorn in the backyard. I don’t visit as often. But when I began my research for this project, when I started asking all these questions and gathering the photos and walking around all the old hot spots, my grandma said there was an eerie feeling back near the oaks again. Is it only that I sparked her memory?
Or has something woken up?
