Columns

Here is why I believe there may be something to at least some of the ghost stories that we hear at this time of year.
In 1998, photographer Pete Piazza and I spent weeks driving all across south Louisiana, gathering material and taking photographs for the book Our Acadiana. We stopped one afternoon at Albania Plantation, on Highway 182 midway between New Iberia and Jeanerette, to see what we could find out about its history.

Just like your car, you can run low on fuel. You can feel depleted mentally, physically, or both. If you don’t fill your car’s gas tank when running on empty, you’ll run out of fuel and your engine will stop.
When you are depleted, you feel you can’t take another step forward. You are experiencing mental and physical exhaustion. Taking just a small break provides an opportunity to get some of your energy back.

Even the New York Times took notice of the “literary birthday” at the end of October 1967 of Emmeline Labiche, “heroine who made her name … in real life and then gained immortality in the lines of a poem.” Some people claim she and her sweetheart Louis Arceneaux were the real-life models of Longfellow’s Evangeline and Gabriel, but the Times did it right in making it a literary birthday, not a real one.