SHADOWS-ON-THE-TECHE
House — New Iberia, Louisiana
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/shadows-on-the-teche-new-iberia-louisiana/

The 1834 house—where the Weeks family stayed on the bayou.

A house in New Iberia, Louisiana, Shadows-on-the-Teche is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The 1834 house—where the Weeks family stayed on the bayou. The file’s recurring figure goes by a name, not a description: the weeks family. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors.

David Weeks never lived in the house he built. The sugar planter commissioned the brick mansion on Bayou Teche in 1831 — one of only three brick buildings in New Iberia — and died in Connecticut in August 1834, months before his wife Mary moved their six children into it. He had gone north seeking a cure for the illness that killed him. The house that was supposed to hold the family became the house that held his absence.
Mary Weeks ran the Shadows for decades — the house and the sugar plantations and the hundred sixty-four enslaved people listed by name and price in the 1835 and 1846 inventories that survive. Louisa, who worked in the main house, mother of eight; Isaac, her husband at Grand Côte; their children, divided between the plantation and the townhouse. The Shadows' archive — seventeen thousand family letters, receipts, inventories — is what makes the site exceptional: the paper trail of a Louisiana sugar plantation, kept whole, by the family that wrote it and then by the National Trust that inherited it.
William Weeks Hall, the last of the line, gave the house its second life — a Philadelphia-trained artist who bought out his aunt's half in 1919, spent four decades restoring the mansion and replanting the gardens, and willed it to the National Trust in 1958. His garden is the complication the site now tells honestly: the beautiful grounds he laid out erased the slave quarters, the working yard, the carriage house — the landscape of the enslaved, paved over by the descendant who thought he was preserving the place.
The house under the live oaks on East Main is one of the great survivals — Classical Revival columns and Louisiana Colonial floor plan, the Weeks furniture still inside, the family's graveyard in the corner of the garden. The Shadows' power is that its archive is honest: the names of the enslaved are in the file, and the house tells them alongside the family that owned them.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
The Shadows is the archive's paper-trail plantation file — the Louisiana sugar house whose seventeen thousand documents name both the family and the hundred sixty-four people they enslaved, in a mansion the builder never lived in, saved by the descendant who also erased the slave quarters.
A plantation that kept its inventories keeps its names — the file's suggestion being that the Shadows' haunting is the archive itself: Louisa and Isaac and their children are in the paperwork, and the house is one of the few places in the South where the enslaved's names survived at all.

FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The Weeks family is reportedly seen. The house's rooms are where the accounts concentrate — old houses keep their stories in the walls they were built around. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. The report is preserved in sources like 'Shadows-on-the-Teche'. The name travels further than the proof; the sightings keep renewing the lease.
  source: Shadows-on-the-Teche (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows-on-the-Teche)
· [Anecdotal] apparition: Reported figures in the house. Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana is the kind of old house where every sound eventually gets a name. The reports are anecdotal — consistent enough to record, thin enough to stay unproven. The report is preserved in sources like 'Shadows-on-the-Teche'. The apparition is the file's anchor — every other report orbits it.
  source: Shadows-on-the-Teche (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows-on-the-Teche)

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· [1834] The 1834 house is documented. Shadows-on-the-Teche's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'Shadows-on-the-Teche'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Shadows-on-the-Teche — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows-on-the-Teche

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/