Everyone in Kipsen had their own story about the Woodsman Plantation, each one different depending on who you asked. Black people focused on the revolt. One of Roman’s slaves, Jeffrey, led a failed insurrection that happened a few years before the start of the Civil War. Jeffrey had planned to gather the slaves at Roman’s plantation as well as two others—the Murrell and Kingsley—and take them over. No one knew exactly why it had failed. Some said it was because the slaves all debated on where to go first. Others believed the group had fractured, with a majority wanting to chance escaping to the river. Jeffrey knew they’d never make it through the night, not without killing their owners, but by the time he realized his followers had other plans it was too late.

Another story was that one of the slaves had betrayed Jeffrey and warned Roman about the attack. The question of who had betrayed him and the reasons why was often gossip fodder for the white people of the town, with many wondering which slave had been the good one, the one to be trusted, the one who had helped keep their ancestors alive.

The white members of the town told their own stories about the Roman family. Stories of horror that grew more macabre with each retelling. They described contraptions he used to torture disobedient slaves. He cut off body parts as punishment and kept the pieces in sealed jars as tokens. They told of slave corpses being sold to medical schools. They told stories of slave concubines, of torture rooms that would stretch limbs and break bones.

The most well-known story, the one everyone agreed on, was the belief that the Woodsman property was haunted. Here, again, people disputed the specifics. Some believed it was of the slaves who’d escaped to the river, making it to the swamps where they waited for their loved ones who never came. Their ghosts roamed the land now in search of their families. Others believed it was Jeffrey himself, and the others from the revolt, who haunted the grounds, still vengeful for their reckoning. Then, there were those who believed that it was haunted by the bodies of all the slaves Roman had killed and secretly disposed of.

“They say that land is haunted,” Celine responded. “The slaves from a failed revolt.”

“I’ve heard those stories too,” Mira agreed. “They say people have died up on that land.”

“I heard Keisha Parker say that the spirit of the slaves that died come out at night, every one of them searching for who put their bodies in the ground in the first place. She said that’s what happened to that white family up in the West End.”

“What family? What happened?” Mira asked.