Artwork courtesy of Megan Broussard Maughan, designed by Blake Lagneaux.
A few months ago, I put out a call on social media: Bring me a mystery to solve.
You see, I spent years producing true crime and paranormal television, and old habits are stubborn. I love a puzzle, but I especially love a puzzle involving ghosts. There are still missing pieces to this one, but I’m hoping you can help me find them.
This story came to me through the most Louisiana chain of connections imaginable. The original owner of my childhood dance school saw my post and thought of a local author. She reached out to one of my old dance teachers who then connected me to her mother-in-law: Christine Word. In 1988, Word published a book called Ghosts Along the Bayou: Tales of Hauntings in Southwestern Louisiana.
When I Googled the cover, it looked familiar; I remembered thumbing through it once at a friend's house when I was a kid. There were a few stories from the book that stuck with me, but once Word and I got on the phone, she reminded me of one I’d forgotten called, “The Ghost of Grand Prairie.”
The account, as Word documented it nearly forty years ago, goes like this: an elderly widow referred to only as “Maman” lived in a two-hundred-year-old Acadian house down a dirt lane near Washington, Louisiana. In 1987, she decided to have some renovations done, including brand new siding and a set of wooden steps off the back porch. But then came the water: puddles on the floor, soaked mattresses, water dumped on people’s heads, all without a source, even when the water in the house was completely shut off.
Then it escalated. Flying pecans pelted guests, chairs were overturned, recipe cards were flung across the kitchen. And traced into piles of tossed salt and pepper on the kitchen table: “hi” and “love.”
The family called in a psychic from Lake Charles, who was able to make contact with the spirit responsible for the mayhem. A male voice spoke through her in French, a language the psychic didn’t speak herself, so she had to ask the French-speakers in the family and neighbors to translate. The ghost presented himself as Leonce, a short, dark-haired man from Nova Scotia. He liked Maman, he insisted. He even had a message for her: decades earlier, on a night her husband had gone to town and left her home alone in the house, a Peeping Tom had come around, and Leonce was the one who ran him off. He made it clear that he wasn’t angry at Maman. He was just angry that those new back steps had been put directly onto his grave.
Everyone in Word’s account is anonymous. To this day, no one publicly knows who Maman was or where exactly the house is located. But, I found someone who does: her grandson, who asked that I keep it that way.
He now lives in the house alone full-time, and he told me about the night it started, how his grandmother and uncle had water thrown in their faces with no glass in sight, how a bowl on the table kept filling itself, how every mattress in the house was soaked by morning. He told me about bringing four or five buddies to the house one Friday night as a teenager, and with all of them around the table, pecans started flying around the house. They all ran out.
He told me about how his grandmother, calmly folding laundry while towels launched themselves onto the ceiling fan, finally addressed the air: “I don’t mind you being here, but you’ve got to stop.”
For eight or nine months, strangers showed up at the property wanting to witness the haunting, a couple hundred of them, he figures. Then, a priest came, a special Mass was given, and things slowed down.
But they haven’t stopped. Recently, he hung two pairs of Wranglers on the banister to dry. Within a minute, one pair was gone, never to be found. He’s also seen the rocking chair swaying back and forth on its own, and one night, praying for Leonce’s peace as he does most evenings, something shook his bed. He grabbed his gun, though no one was there, and when it happened again, he watched The Godfather in his recliner until the morning and drove to his mother’s.
But here’s where the story takes a turn. The thing about this ghost story that keeps me up at night is not what entity still haunts the house. It’s what happened to the psychic.
The psychic’s name is Barbara C. Lewis of Lake Charles, Louisiana. She was, I’m told, once the personal psychic to Mildred Kingsbury, the first Miss Louisiana. She recorded her sessions with Leonce at the house, so somewhere there might still be tapes that exist of a woman channeling a Cajun-French spirit in a language she mimicked.
I’d love to get my hands on those tapes, and want even more to talk to Barbara C. Lewis herself.
The grandson and I have both tried to find her. I’ve contacted Lake Charles Tourism, worked the South-Louisiana Facebook groups, called the kind of well-connected Louisiana folks who always seem to know everyone, all with no luck. No one seems to know her or have heard of her. I find it odd that a psychic memorable enough to be summoned to Grand Prairie twice, and connected to Louisiana royalty, seems to have vanished like a ghost, herself.
Maybe Lewis doesn’t want to be found, and if so, I will respect that. But if you knew her, worked with her, sat in her parlor, or know where those recordings went, do write to me.
The mystery I have my sights on now is her.
Got intel? Reach Megan at megsbroussard@gmail.com and read more entries of her column, “In Search of the Lost Tongue," here.
