Description: My husband, our daughter and I toured Oak Alley Plantation while on vacation in New Orleans, LA in 2003. Oak Alley Plantation is now a National Historic Landmark, with its antebellum mansion and surrounding twenty-five acres, is owned and operated today by the non-profit Oak Alley Foundation. The balance of the original plantation id divided up as follows: are residential complex of seventy-five acres surrounds the Foundations property; six hundred acres are leased for sugar cane cultivation and four hundred fifty acres remain in virgin woodlands.
Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana is an extraordinarily, magnificent house, and the most famous of the antebellum homes in Louisiana and an outstanding example of Greek revival architecture. The 28 massive oaks that line the driveway were planted in the 1700’s and that is where the house got its name. Parts of the movies The Long Hot Summer and Interview With a Vampire were filmed there.
A French-Creole sugar planter from New Orleans named, Jacques T Roman, built oak Alley between 1837 and 1839. Mr. Roman built this beautiful home for himself and his family. Although all physical traces of the Romans are gone, Oak Alley seems to be plagued by ghostly sightings of a young, beautiful girl. A guest taking a tour of the plantation house took a number of pictures of the various rooms in the house. When he developed his photos, he saw an image of a young lady in an old-fashioned dress, sitting in a dress that was empty when he took the photo.
It is thought the specter may be the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Roman, Louise. Louise had a boyfriend who came to call on her one evening in a state of intoxication. Like any proper lady of the day she ran away from him. While she was running, she tripped over her own hoop skirt and cut her leg on the wire. Gangrene set in and she had to have her leg cut off. Off course, she was considered unable to marry and run a household with one leg, so she decided to become a Carmelite nun. She lived out the rest of her life in a convent in New Orleans and lucky for her, her family saved her leg for her so it could be buried, and hopefully reunited with her in the afterlife. (Awesome).
This house is available to tour all year-round.
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