Did You Know This House Is Haunted?

BOSSIER PARISH, La. -

 One morning Sassy Williams and her Haughton family woke up to find every single kitchen cabinet open. The family also saw an old rocking chair begin to rock with nobody in it. 

But then Williams says just about every room in their Bossier Parish home has had some sort of unexplained ghostly activity happen in it. She even has an eerie photograph of what looks like a ghost baby taken by her dog sitter one night. The sitter was so scared she has never come back to the historic Sligo Road home.

The history of the mid-19th century home may explain why there is so much ghostly activity. The Bossier Parish History Center has a replica of what the house looked like when it was built by a Dr. Abel Skannal back in 1832. The house is known as the Oakland Plantation. 

Historian Pam Carlisle says the doctor was a very eccentric slave owner.

"When he was alive he kept a coffin in the attic. A lot of these stories are very bizarre," says Carlisle.

Legend has it the doctor slept in the coffin with a slave chained to him while he slept. It's also written online that Dr. Skannal murdered his wife and kept her body in the attic of the house and she wasn't discovered until after he died. 

The Skannals also lost several children while they were very young. Maybe that explains the child-ike gliket in that picture taken by the dog sitter. If the doctor was a jokester when he was alive, the Williams family thinks he might be the one messing with them today.

"When we first moved in our son would come downstairs and I would say 'What’s wrong? Why can't you sleep?' and he said he could see ‘people running across my room,’" says Sassy Williams. 

Her son’s room has been the scene of many more unexplained occurrences. The family that lived in the house before, the McCallon family, said their two young girls were sleeping in that room when their blankets were ripped off of them and when they looked up the covers were thrown in the corner. 

The house is located on Sligo Road in Haughton and marked by a Louisiana Historical marker. It reads "This house was built in stages between 1832 and 1848, and by 1850 was owned by Doctor Abel Skannal. From this house the family controlled five plantations totaling over 8,000 acres. Rumors about ghosts are sustained by the fact that Doc Skannal kept a coffin in the attic of the house. The family cemetery is located nearby in the woods." 

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