Several years ago I was asked by an elderly gentleman to consider allowing him to use a metal detector in search of buried treasure on my property between North Portage and Arnaudville. Of course I allowed him, and didn’t even ask him for a share of the loot if he found any.

The gentleman repeated a story I had heard many times.

Pirates had used the Atchafalaya to hide the fortunes they had seized from ships in the Gulf of Mexico. From the Basin, many of the pirates were supposed to have gone upstream to Bayou Portage and traveled by land to Bayou Teche in Arnaudville. From there, they would sail up Bayou Fuselier on their way to visit Chretien Point.

Portage is the French word for “to carry” and the area between Arnaudville and Portage was used as a land route between the two waterways.

I had forgotten about possible hidden loot until I received an e-mail from Randal Rodriquez about Narcisse Thibodeaux’s gold. According to his research, Narcisse, the son of Isaac Thibodeaux and Felecite Bernard, was born on Jan. 25, 1797, and was married to Lucie Potier.

Narcisse and Lucie had seven sons, two of whom died young. Their plantation was located in the vicinity of Doyle Melancon Road in Breaux Bridge. The original plantation house still exists and was moved from its original site to Acadian Village in Lafayette in the 1970’s.

The legend of the lost treasure begins with the story that one of Narcisse’s sons had abused slaves who then rebelled and beheaded a son with a machete.

The rebel slaves then stole the family’s box of gold coins and fled east into the nearby Atchafalaya swamps where they buried the gold. A vigilante mob captured the nine slaves and hung them for the rebellion and the murder of Narcisses’s son. To this day, the treasure of gold coins has never been found.

The plantation house remained abandoned for more than 100 years. It was rumored that neighbors reported sighting of ghosts walking around the grounds of the plantation home.

Some people reported visions of slaves and heard the sounds of the chains rattle as the spirits walked around the house. Other sightings were reported of the headless son walking the grounds in search of his head, like the headless horseman in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Rene Thidodeaux speculates in online chats that two of Narcisse’s sons, Charles and Narcisse Jr., died before the Civil War. Edouard Thibodeaux, who was born in 1832, died sometime between 1862 and 1869. It is known that Edouard married and had children before his death. The remaining sons married and died after the war when slavery was ended.

Rene thus implies that Edouard was the son who was beheaded by the slaves.. Is he correct?

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