Jim Bradshaw
Pete, six or seven ghosts, and me
Here is why I believe there may be something to at least some of the ghost stories that we hear at this time of year.
In 1998, photographer Pete Piazza and I spent weeks driving all across south Louisiana, gathering material and taking photographs for the book Our Acadiana. We stopped one afternoon at Albania Plantation, on Highway 182 midway between New Iberia and Jeanerette, to see what we could find out about its history.
It was up for sale at the time and nobody was living there except a caretaker who told me the story of the place. He said it was getting a good bit of attention from potential buyers, but that the deals seemed to fall apart at the last minute.
“The problem,” he said, “is that six or seven ghosts live here, and they seem to be really picky about who they want to live with.”
He said it half in jest, and I took it that way ─ until Pete walked up and said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Pete, who knew nothing about my conversation with the caretaker, was a burly guy who would wade fearlessly into a riot to get a good picture. Nothing should have bothered him at this pretty plantation home on this tranquil afternoon. But when I looked up at him, he was as white as, well, a ghost.
“We’ve got to leave, now,” he said, with real urgency in his voice.
“What’s going on?” I asked when we were safely back in his truck and heading down the long driveway.
“I was taking pictures of the house and something very cold came up behind me and wouldn’t let me take any more,” he said. “It wanted me to leave.”
It was hard to be skeptical when you realized who was talking and heard the tone of his voice. Nonetheless, I’d all but forgotten about the incident by the time the designers went to work putting the book together months later.
We had little say-so in the design of the book. That was the domain of the layout artists. They had several hundred photos to pick from, and none of them knew anything about Albania and its ghosts.
That’s why it knocked us for a loop when we saw the cover design. They’d picked one of the few shots of Albania that Pete had been able to take and, further, had overlaid it with a faint, ghost-like, image of the statue of Evangeline.
I couldn’t help but believe that the combination of the Albania picture and a ghostly image had to be more than a random choice. I don’t know what that extra something was, but I think more than coincidence brought the combination of those two images to the eyes and imaginations of the designers.
I became even more convinced of that when they told me that they’d used nearly 200 pictures in the book, some of them overlaid just as the cover was, but that the cover image of the house was the only one that kept crashing their computers ─ until they “protected it” with the ghostly image.
You can believe what you will, but I still get a little tingle up the spine when I look at that book cover and think about how it came to be. There’s no other word to describe its creation but “spooky.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
