Isabella's Ghost

Isabella is told as a beautiful young woman whose fiance, a man from the East who had come to Louisiana for work, died in a duel rumored to involve another woman. She entered the Sacred Heart Convent on Normal Hill, the story goes, and walked the woods at night. It is folklore: no records for the romance or the duel have been put forward. The ghost has moved with the campus. Since 1904 she is said to have haunted East Hall, the old music hall, Bienville Hall and Caldwell Hall, the 1906 building that burned in 1982.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.3 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.3 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.0 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Old Normal Hill — steps away
• Northwestern State University — steps away
• Steel Magnolias — 0.2 mi
• Judge Porter House — 0.4 mi