Pointe Chrétienne mansion in Louisiana was the inspiration for the interior sets of Tara in Gone with the wind. In fact, the grand staircase at Chretienne Point is copied exactly in the scene where Rhett carries Scarlet up the steps, but the scene is reversed, with the windows on the opposite side from where they really are. The story goes that the set designer took a picture at Pointe Chrétienne and the negative was printed backwards.

Madame Chrétienne was a wild woman, long ago. She had lived with her husband’s gambling all their married life, and after he was killed over a gambling disagreement, she turned into the wildest woman of her day. She gambled, smoked, drank, and carried on in a way unknown among ladies at the time. She turned her mansion into a gambling house and would join the men with a drink and a box of cigars, and sit and gamble all night. Her negro servant would pass among the guests serving drinks, and he gave her winks and nods that told her what her opponents held during the card games.

Jean Lafitte and his crew were good friends of Madame Chrétienne and would often come to drink and gamble at the pointe. After Lafitte’s death, his men became renegades and turned from organized privateering to plain burglary. They came one and tried to break into the pointe, but the house was well locked after closing time. They knew she was quite rich, and were the wealth was kept, so they broke down the door.

Hearing them outside the mansion, Madame Chrétienne had gathered all her belongings—her money, jewelry, gold, everything she had that was of value. She had thrown it into her long dress and held it up from the hem, making her dress into a long bag. She was in the act of escaping, with her dress up and her hoops showing, when the doorframe gave way and a pirate entered the front hall and stopped her at the head of the grand staircase.

"Stop Madame," he called out, aiming his single-shot pistol at her, "and throw down the money you have in your dress!" She stood up proudly and dropped the front of her dress. Money, jewels, and gold cascaded down the grand staircase, tumbling and rolling toward the astounded pirate. As he dropped to his knees to grab the first coins to reach the hardwood floor, she drew her small hidden pistol and said, "Excuse me..."

When he looked up, she shot him square between the eyes, His blood stained the stairs and cannot be scrubbed away. If there were others with the pirate, they fled at the sound of gunfire. Madame Chrétienne stuffed the body into a closet and left it three days until the sheriff could be reached. Today, the ghost of Madame Chrétienne walks the mansion, and one can hear the pistol shot, the fatal blow to the skull as the ball strikes the pirate, and the sound of the pirate’s body striking the floor or rolling loudly down the bottom-most steps.

Those who manage the mansion today do not relate the final point of the legend: not only will the pirate’s bloodstains not scrub away, but when the ghost of the Madame walks by at night, the bloodstains again reliquify. The steps are now carpeted, but those who know the whole legend say that the blood boils up even underneath the carpet.—Collected from Louis Darby of Opelousas, Louisiana (June 1989). M. Darby is a fiddle-player and sometime storyteller.

Source: Young, Richard Alan, and Judy Dockery Young. Ghost Stories from the American Southwest. Little Rock: August house, 1991.