Location: The Wicker House is a bit difficult to find. To discourage amateur ghost hunters and vandals from looking for it, Wicker Lane has since been renamed Candlelight Lane and Wicker Drive has been re-routed into nearby Rural Route 13. Located in a residential district in walking distance of Green Street Grammar School, the house now rests at 206 Candlelight Lane in Crowley, Louisiana, fifteen miles west of Lafayette on Interstate 90. Because of the proximity and perhaps to further deter unwanted sight-seers, some references place the house within New Orleans.

Description of Place: The large white two-storied gabled Victorian rests behind a walled property surrounded by nearly identical homes in close proximity to Candlelight Grammar School. Resting on a brick foundation and basement, the meticulous Old World interior includes a mahogany staircase and numerous turn-of-the-century antiques. The property features five bedrooms with an old style bathroom and turn-of-the-century kitchen. The gabled roof includes an attic, and both an attached green house and an old slave quarters rests on the rear of the property.

Ghostly Manifestations: In the movies, haunted houses suffer from a majority of clichés; one is that ghosts purposely haunt and terrify the living. The reality is that ghosts are often seen doing the things they did in life: walking, sitting in chairs, doing laundry, poking in drawers and enjoying the things that made them happy when they were alive. It is not their fault that we are terrified by their unearthly visages and supernatural activities. However, worst among these haunted house stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood are the urban legends that they are magnets of unsolved disappearances. Teenagers claimed in the Fifties that a number of kids once vanished within Milwaukee's Simpson House while in Pickford, Illinois, a phantom blonde supposedly lures potential boyfriends into the Stoddard House to never be seen again. A few disappearances have been allegedly connected to the Old Adams House in Northeastern Virginia. During the heyday of Hollywood, five passengers in an elevator allegedly vanished after it crashed into the basement at the Hollywood Tower Hotel. More notorious is the reputedly haunted Wicker House in Crowley, Louisiana.

"I can neither confirm nor deny that anyone has ever vanished in the house." Sara Minor is a financial consultant for the Crowley Trust Bank, who formerly held the mortgage on the house through Oswald Realty. "I do know that in December 1951 a boy named Justin Hartfield reportedly vanished in the house while chasing after a baseball knocked over the fence, but that may be an error or blatant hoax because the real Justin Hartfield actually vanished in Creeley, Oklahoma in December 1947."

"Over the years," Sara adds. "Stories involving a woman in white prowling the property has been reported. She tends to wander the property and grounds and vanishing into the house. People claim to have seen her peeking out from the windows or pulling the curtains back. The upstairs windows have been reported seen open during the day despite the fact no one lived there."

The Wicker House is believed to have one of the most sordid and disturbing histories in the United States. In the Late Eighteenth Century, Desmond Delacroix reportedly encouraged his slaves to participate in dark Voodoo rituals and possibly attracted to this sort of history, Robert Wise, The Mad Preacher, who allegedly murdered almost eighty travelers, criminals and prostitutes who didn't measure up to his religious views in the Mid-19th Century. With this sort of energies in the house, it is no wonder that people believe the house is haunted.

Foremost among the ghosts here is that of a Lady In White. Numerous locals have seen her on the property since the 1920s drifting around the property. Her appearance has convinced locals that the Old Wicker House has a new owner, but others blame her for alleged and unconfirmed disappearance of children in the area. Whether there is any credence to the stories is unknown.

According to the verifiable report of Dr. Dennis Carpenter, a Crowley forensics expert who helped excavate the property for further human remains on the grounds in 1978, there were always strange and unexplainable events taking place in the home. Among these were unexplained footsteps on a blocked attic stairway near the bathroom in a remote part of the upstairs interior, disembodied voices in some of the guest bedrooms, and unexplained movements in the empty attic spaces.

One of the most unique experiences was witnessed by Carpenter and Michael Quaid, another representative from the bank. while taking a cigarette break out on the interior balcony overlooking the downstairs entry hall, both men distinctly heard the sound of women laughing in the house accompanied by invisible feet running and the rustling of long skirts through the downstairs hallway. When they asked whether anyone else was expected for the scientific excavation, Carpenter was told that no one else was expected to be in the house, but he later learned that the sounds of women  had been heard frequently and weren't shy about how many people were around.

Another ghost that evidently wasn't shy was that of a female who appeared shortly after restoration of the downstairs fireplace. In the restoration, an uncovered rolled-up parchment was found in a sealed up compartment in the wall. When opened, it was discovered to be a charcoal rendering of Desmond Delacroix, one of the few only known renderings of the man. After the discovery, strange activity began to occur in the renovated room with tools and paintbrushes disappearing and even drop cloths being found and bundled in fireplace grate by the morning work crews. The figure of a woman in a long green dress has been seen casually striding on the exterior porch past the windows of the study and even terrified a workman who pulled the windows back to clean them and saw her staring back at him with her hands cupped over her eyes on the glass.

One local carpenter claimed to have seen a tall figure of a man in black staring from out of one of the upstairs bedrooms. He lurks around in the room at the end of the hall over the greenhouse and has been seen sitting in the chair by the window. A few people think this apparition is Robert Wise himself. His voice has been heard preaching loudly his twisted view of the scriptures along with the screams of a woman from the house at least three times since 1922. In 1983, during repairs to the house, a painter felt a tug at his trouser leg then looked down into a dark mist with "a creepy set of glaring eyes staring back at him." As he watched, the mist dissipated, and within minutes, the painter was out of the house and heading for the nearest bar to drown his fear in beer. Witnesses who recall his story in the bar recall the man's hands shaking so bad he could barely hold his drink.

No one has ever personally experienced Delacroix's reported ghost or the Lady in White, but Quaid did have what he called "an unforgettable encounter" with another entity when he tried selling the house to a physician from Nashville looking for a local residence to continue his practice. He was asked to go into the unused side of the house used for storage where there were stacks of books and newspapers that needing sorting and packing. In his own words:

"It was a creepy day and it had been raining so there wasn't much light in there. I found a lamp without a shade and used that to sort the books and the other stuff, and at first, I was really absorbed in the packing so I wasn't immediately aware of anything strange going on. The room I was in was really big, but it was separated by a set of large sliding doors, the kind with the smoked glass in them that go back into the wall. Anyway, at one point I felt the room get really chilly; it just felt like something wasn't right. I was working with my back to the empty room, behind the sliding doors, and gradually I began to feel uncomfortable with this, so I turned around and began to work facing the doors. At one point, I glanced up and it looked kind of like someone had put a light on in the other room, but since there were a bunch of staffers who were supposed to arrive and help with the move, I didn't really think anything about it. I stooped down to sort some books that were on the floor and lifted up a bunch to put them in a box and I stopped short. A creepy feeling came over me all of a sudden because I looked up and realized that one of the sliding doors was open!

"I stepped over to one foot and looked into the room but didn't see anybody in there, but I started to feel like I wanted to hurry and get done, just get out of there. I started putting books into boxes in no particular order, just jamming them in and trying to keep from looking at the door, but unfortunately, at one point I felt this urge to look and my mouth just fell open!"

Standing there, with his hand braced on the doorframe, was a vaporous male figure, appearing more solid around the shoulders and waist, but without any visible legs. His hair was longish and slicked to the side, and he had a neat beard like those popular among gentlemen of the Early 19th Century. He was wearing a period white shirt with a scarf or colored ruffle around the neck and a gold-toned waist coat with brown pants.

"He just stood there and looked at me with this look like he was wondering what I was doing there, and then he tilted his head and just disappeared. I wasn't scared at first, but then, I was struck by a sort of delayed reaction of what had just happened and just got the heck out of there. I haven't been back to the house since which is why I have Sara handle all the matters for the house now."

Friends and colleagues gradually greeted Cathy's story with a wry exchange and confided that they had experiences near the house with strange sounds, the Lady In White and other figures. One of them told him that he had even smelled and seen the smoke from a pipe or cigar lingering in the empty air when he had gone to try showing the house to a client.

Bank employees have long suspected the ghost to be that of Desmond Delacroix and Viola Wycoff-Poirier, who might have been his lover. They suggested that t he apparitions appeared every so often to confirm their dominion over the house and grounds. Their apparitions have been seen from time to town, but other occurrences point to unseen presences. The apparition of a headless woman was reported coming off the property on Halloween 2003, but then as Sara adds, "a lot of things tend to occur around Halloween."

"In 2005, several teenagers thought it would be "cool" to sneak into the house and have an unauthorized party in the house and look for ghosts. Thank God they found it so hard to hide their partying otherwise the neighbors wouldn't  have called the police to have them arrested otherwise we'd be now trying to sell a trashed house.

"One of the teenagers, however, was into the paranormal and though he didn't see anything, several of his friends claimed to have seen things which he later documented. One of them saw a phantom little girl in the basement who threw rocks at the witness surprised by her appearance. Several kids reported the odor of floral perfume pervading the upstairs. People have also watched water faucets turn on and off by themselves, and lights tend to have a mind of their own as well.

"In the main bedroom, the host and hostess of the party decided to engage in a little sexual activity in the main bedroom. As the police came to arrest everyone on the property, they came running down the stairs screaming that they were suddenly being watched by a woman sitting in the chair next to the closet. The story is the young man just casually looked up and saw the reflection of this specter in the mirror. He described her as a misty woman in a white dress... with empty black openings where her eyes should have been."

History: Desmond Delacroix (Delacourt in some accounts) was a French nobleman who arrived in Louisiana during the early French colonization efforts of the late 17th Century. No much is known of his past, but it is known he presented himself as a nobleman and traveling companion of Gillett Poirier, a local plantation owner who married into the family of Senate Wycoff, whose family owned much of Crowley during the 17th and Early 18th century. Gillett acquired a parcel of land to develop from Wycoff, and gave it to Desmond who built Wicker House on it. It is believed but unconfirmed that the name "Wicker" was derived from "Wycoff."

Desmond was also reputed to be fascinated in alchemy and interested in trying to prolong his life, creating and mixing elixirs designed to extend his life. According to legend, he dabbled a bit in the dark arts and had his slaves entomb their dead relatives in the foundation of the house and mummify them to seal up in the floors and walls. Part of this reasoning and delusion may be due to the fact he was using the metal lead as a catalyst in his potions to attain immortality and with other ingredients he was using, the lead he was drinking was actually causing him to become erratic and irrational even while he was poisoning himself. He died in his sleep at the age of thirty-seven in 1760.

The house afterward seemed to fall to a string of owners who were all single unmarried men without families. The first was Samuel Lewton, a renowned farmer and widower in the area. Although he added the property to his own nearby land, he moved into the Wicker House and had his previous home torn down. During his life, he was first to report feeling Desmond's spirit in the house. He had the servant's quarters built in his lifetime. Likewise, subsequent owners all put their own marks on the property. Tool-maker Victor Tournier converted the attic into a workspace, many of his tools still fill the attic. During the Civil War, Robert Wise, "The Mad Preacher," left his mark on the house, abducting and killing immigrants, slaves and prostitutes he tried to convert to Christianity, creating a stain in the history of the house until Union Soldiers hunted him down and hanged him in Hope Springs, Texas in 1869. 

It was a few years until the house was once against sold. In that time, the land was sold and split up for a school, a church and private homes. In 1881, a violinist named Abraham Marker rented the house to use as a music school; his antique violins are still present in the house. After he died in 1901, Justice Radcliffe, a Crowley judge, bought the house to retire quietly, spending his time gardening and setting up a greenhouse which still exists. During Radcliffe's time, the house developed the majority of its sinister reputation; it remained empty for years after his death and was the center of a police investigation the week of October 11, 1951 when twelve-year-old Kyle Radner vanished inside it. To this day, his remains have yet to be found, and his disappearance is still an open police case. One theory is that Kyle became trapped in a secret compartment of the house left over from Preacher Wise and died, or that he was a victim of an unidentified intruder in the house. No one is sure when or how Justin Hartfield was linked to the house.

In recent years, the Bank of Crowley (now Crowley Trust Bank) held the title to the house and struggled to sell it. To kill off the legends of ghosts there, bank representative Sara Minor hired the paranormal team from the TV series "Sinister Sites" to discredit the ghosts. During their investigation, Robert "Bub" Haskell, their camera guy, discovered human remains in the wall of the upstairs bedroom and producer Tom Rule notified the police to report them. Much of the house was gutted over the next few weeks to retrieve further human remains; none of which were old enough to date back to Delacroix. It is believed they were victims of the Mad Preacher Robert Wise; however some of them date to the turn of the century after his death. Theory has it Wise had an unidentified assistant in his murders that has yet to be identified. 

Since then, Tom Rule, director and lead investigator for "Sinister Sites," has acquired the house for far less than its worth to restore into a bed and breakfast with his wife, Stephanie.

"Well, the show is cancelled, and we've got a nice nest egg," He comments. "And I figured, hey, if Jason and Grant (of TAPS) can buy an inn, why not me?"

Identity of Ghosts: Psychic Heather Burton described quite a few surviving spirits in the house as well as several residue spirits (place memories). Among the ghosts, she felt the spirit of Desmond Delacroix, who she describes as "a very angry spirit who believes he is still very much in charge and still very much alive." The Lady In White is allegedly Viola Wycoff-Poirier, the wife of Gillette Poirier, who is very distant, very secretive and very frustrated to be trapped there. Although she knows she's dead, she is terrified of moving on into the afterlife. The ghosts of several slaves still tend to the grounds including a tall powerfully-built over seer who calls himself "Duncan." Although he's terrified of Delacroix, he's very loyal to him. Victor Tournier and Abraham Marker also wander the location as well as as deceased prostitute known only as Octavia, who says her bones have yet to be found in the greenhouse. Heather rebuffs exaggerations that the house has over 500 spirits; she asserts there could be as many at fifteen ghosts on the location, including eight-year-old David Chapman, who died in a car accident nearby on August 18, 1967, and Sarah Weisdorff, a young girl about which nothing else is known.

Source/Comments: House of Bones (2009)/Sinister Sites TV-Series (Episode: "The House Of Bones") - Activity based on the old H. H. Holmes Murder Mansion in Chicago, Illinois, the La Laurie House in New Orleans, Louisiana and Bobby Mackey's Music World in Wilder, Kentucky among others.