Through the University of Louisiana Monroe, I worked at Layton Castle (originally called Mulberry Grove Plantation) in Monroe, Louisiana. For one of my assigned tasks, I was asked to transcribe many slave-related documents (bills of sale, farm ledgers, copy book letters, etc.) and index their names on a Google Sheet.

I grew up wondering who “Annette” was. When we’d visit my grandparents in Monroe, Louisiana, my mother, Carol Layton Parsons, would point at the four poster she slept in and say it had belonged to Annette - who had been enslaved and then stayed with the family after the Civil War, helping to look after several generations of Layton children.

I don’t believe in ghosts. A child of the 1980s, I grew up on Captain Planet and The Day After Tomorrow. I had a microscope at eight, a chemistry set at ten, and by twelve, Fat Man and Little Boy ranked among my favorite movies. I was a nerd, a geek, and I dismissed out of hand the notion that spirits wandered the ether longing to finish their unfinished business. I read physics books. The ether wasn’t real.

That all changed one humid Saturday evening in late August of 2003. ..