Shirley MacLaine and the Haunted Cherokee Plantation, Louisiana

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 11, 2026 · How we verify

Most of the ghost talk attached to the haunted Cherokee Plantation can be traced to a single visit by a movie star. While Steel Magnolias was being filmed in the area in 1989, actress Shirley MacLaine came out to this French Colonial house at Natchez, Louisiana, a few miles from Natchitoches, and afterward reported experiencing a paranormal encounter there. The family who owned the place said they had been telling a similar story for years. That is the whole of it. No documented death in the house, no catalog of sightings, no tour guide script. What the record does hold is a far bloodier story, and it happened out on the grounds.

Sompayrac Buys 1,133 Acres on the Cote Joyeuse

Cherokee Plantation, also recorded as the Emile Sompayrac Place and the Murphy Place, sits in what the earliest French planters in Louisiana called the Cote Joyeuse, the Joyous Coast. Charles Emile Sompayrac married Marie Clarisse Prud’homme in 1837. His father, Ambroise Sompayrac, had emigrated from the Tarn in France and ran a horse race track at Natchitoches. Her father, Louis Narcisse Prud’homme, owned the neighboring Narcisse Prudhomme Plantation, and her family had been the first in the area to grow cotton.

On December 19, 1839, Sompayrac bought roughly 1,133 acres to create Cherokee Plantation. A cistern was included in the sale, and so were enslaved people. For many years the site was worked and maintained by enslaved African Americans. By 1860 Sompayrac owned 65 of them. The fields produced mainly cotton, with indigo, sugarcane, corn, and tobacco besides.

The name came from the enslaved workers themselves, a nickname for the large hedges of Cherokee roses that ringed the property.

Bousillage Walls and Eighteen Hand Hewn Cypress Timbers

Nobody knows for certain who designed or built the house. The estimate runs between 1825 and 1849, with many settling on 1839 simply because that is the year Sompayrac bought the land. It is French Colonial and Creole in form, with three patios wrapping the house and a frame of eighteen hand hewn cypress timbers, skilled work generally credited to the enslaved people who lived and labored here. The original interior had six fireplaces, wide planked floors, bousillage walls, and hand blown window glass. The outbuildings included three old barns, a slave cabin, and a log crib.

The house came through the Civil War between 1861 and 1865 undamaged, which is part of why it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 14, 1973, for both architectural and agricultural significance.

The Autumn 1839 Duel That Killed Twelve Men

If any event on this ground deserves a ghost story, it is the one the house never seems to get blamed for. In the autumn of 1839, a political argument between Francois Gaiennie, adjutant general of the Louisiana Militia, and State Senator Pierre E. Bossier ended in a duel on the plantation grounds. Gaiennie fired first and missed. Bossier shot him through the heart and killed him where he stood. Another eleven men died afterward as the animosities surrounding the duel kept working themselves out.

Twelve dead from one quarrel, and the surviving accounts of hauntings here say nothing about any of them. That gap is worth noting rather than filling in.

What Is Actually Reported Here, and What Is Not

The reported phenomena at Cherokee Plantation amount to two threads. One is MacLaine’s account of a paranormal encounter during her 1989 visit. The other is the family’s long standing story of haunting activity in the house, described as similar to hers. Neither has been elaborated in the public record with specific apparitions, sounds, or locations inside the building.

Anyone who tells you more than that, that it is a particular woman on a particular staircase or a duelist bleeding in the yard, is improvising. The honest version is thinner and, in its way, more interesting: a famous visitor felt something, and the people who lived with the house said they knew what she meant.

Ownership, Restoration, and Seeing the House

Sompayrac died in 1878 and his widow began selling off parcels. The plantation went to Robert Calvert Murphy in 1891, and much of the furniture still in the house arrived with him, including a rare eighteenth century French secretaire bought from a neighbor. Murphy died in 1936 and the place stayed in his family until 1966. Leola Murphy struggled to find a caretaker and in 1972 sold it to Theodosia Nolan, Robert Calvert Murphy’s granddaughter, and her husband William Nolan of Arkansas. Preservation and restoration work began with that sale.

The property has an official website and a foundation attached to its name, and a 2019 book, Cherokee Plantation on the Cane River, documents it in detail. Public access terms are not stated in the available record, so check directly with the property before driving out. Treat it as a private historic house until told otherwise, and do not go looking for the live oaks and pecan trees from the roadside ditch.

Address: Natchez, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana

See Cherokee Plantation for Yourself

Sources

• Cherokee Plantation (National Park Service)
• The Pelican Guide to Plantation Homes of Louisiana
• Cane River National Heritage Area
• …and Down the River
• Cherokee Plantation, Highway 494, Natchez, Natchitoches Parish, LA (Library of Congress)
• Wikipedia: Cherokee Plantation (Natchez, Louisiana)