Haunted T-Frere’s
Excerpt from “Haunted Lafayette, Louisiana”
By Cheré Dastugue Coen
 
Note: The Lafayette, Louisiana, bed and breakfast has been purchased by new owners since this book was published. https://www.tfrereshouse.com/

Some say that the personalities of ghosts in the afterlife are much like the ones they had while living. Amelie Comeaux who haunts T-Frere’s Bed and Breakfast in Lafayette was a “canaille,” a mischievous girl, and her antics in death reflect this wily nature.

“She’s typically Cajun,” said Maugie Pastor, who owns the bed and breakfast with her husband, Pat, and runs the business with the help of her sons, all of whom have experienced Amelie’s presence.

Amelie Comeaux married young in the late nineteenth century, then quickly became pregnant. She lost the child and soon afterwards lost her young husband. Amelie moved in with her brother, Oneziphore Comeaux, known as “T-frere” or little brother. At his house in Lafayette, she mourned her family, later working as a math teacher to area youth.

At thirty-two, Amelie caught a fever and stumbled to the back yard well for water late one night and mysteriously fell in. Because the Catholic Church labeled it a suicide, she was not buried on sacred ground.

“Amelie doesn’t like change,” Pastor said, noting that the majority of Amelie’s hauntings came within months after they had purchased and moved into the bed and breakfast. She would hear banging and things breaking in the kitchen—only to find nothing out of place. A visitor claimed to have had his toes pulled in the night.

The most unusual experience happened to her son, Jeremiah, when they were moving in. Maugie told him to bring everything he needed to the new house because they weren’t making any more trips that night. Jeremiah forgot his math homework and was stressing on how to tell his mother when the math paper suddenly appeared.

I heard him come bounding down the stairs,” Pastor recalled. “He said the paper that he needed floated down from the ceiling.”

Family members searched the room but couldn’t find a logical explanation, chalking it up to the petite math teacher who remained in the house.

Today the bed and breakfast offers four bedrooms in the main house and two guest rooms in the Garçonnière out back, but only the main house has paranormal experiences, Pastor said.
Maugie and Pat Pastor, former Lafayette restauranteurs, cook up gourmet breakfasts every morning and after-dinner drinks and Cajun canapés on the gallery in the afternoons. Maugie createseight different types of “Oooh La La Breakfasts” for her guests, including cheese cake stuffed pancakes, crawfish enchiladas and bread pudding, to name a few.

“If you stay longer than eight days, I put you on a diet,” she said with a laugh.

Because visitors staying at T-Frere’s would always ask numerous questions about Cajun culture and history, the Pastors’ sons have started a side business offering boat cruises on the Vermilion River, appropriately called “Pastor Brothers Cajun Excursions.” The brothers give lessons in crawfish peeling and Cajun dancing and side trips to Vermilionville and the Jean Lafitte National
Historic Park and Preserve.

“We give them the greatest Cajun experience of their lives,” son John said. Although most come to T-Frere’s for Lafayette’s great food and culture — many not knowing about its haunted history — some do visit to catch a glimpse of Amelie. Guests have reported sightings and unusual happenings, such as the Texas family who spotted a woman standing by the arbor when they returned to the house after dinner. The woman spoke to the mother in French, which she relayed to Maugie Pastor the next morning.

“She repeated what she [the spirit] had said and I asked her how she knew French since she was from Texas,” Pastor explained. “The woman replied that she was originally from Breaux Bridge. How did Amelie know she was from Breaux Bridge?”

Leah's Room

Others who have seen the apparition described Amelie as petite, speaking only French and wearing her hair back in a bun. An elderly couple staying in the Leah Room lost their car keys, and John Pastor puts the blame on canaille Amelie.

“We tore the room apart,” he recalled. “Their keys were between the mattress and the box springs. These people were in their eighties so there is no way they could have lifted that mattress.”

“I believe there is no such thing as death,” said Arnaudville medium Allyson Hughes when asked for her thoughts about Amelie. “The physical body gives out, which is what we call ‘death,’ but our spirit, our soul is eternal.”

Hughes is the author of the ebook series “The Medium and the Mortician;” she’s married to South Louisiana mortician Charles Schram. She believes geography plays more of a role in hauntings or spirit contact than family. For instance, Amelie haunts T’Frere’s because it was her home.

“There are repeated imprints in the land of those who go on ahead,” Hughes explained.
The well that Amelie drowned in that fateful night has been filled in, but the T’Frere’s backyard continues to settle around it. In fact, the Pastors had to reinforce the house in the exact spot where the well once stood.
 

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