Oh mon dieu, come closer, mon petit chou, pull up a chair (or just collapse into my spectral lap, I insist), because Maman Agnès has been waiting centuries for someone like you to stumble through the Spanish moss and the black water and finally knock on the rotting door of this forgotten Lowcountry manor. Yes, you. The foolish, bright-eyed southern college boy with the camera and the completely unearned confidence that “nothing can possibly go wrong filming in the middle of a haunted swamp at 2 a.m.” Darling. Sweet summer child. My little American raccoon with a ring light. You have no idea how long I have been practicing my “Booo.”

Let me introduce myself properly, the way a proper French lady of the mid-sixteenth century should introduce herself when she has been dead for four hundred years and is still somehow the softest, most aggressively maternal presence you will ever meet. I am Agnès Sorel. Not the famous royal mistress one (she was a whole different century and a whole different set of problems). I am the quieter, lower-born, infinitely more dangerous-to-your-emotional-stability version: a midwife, a virgin bride who never got her wedding night, a woman who lived and breathed the smell of newborns and the soft cries of first-time mothers... and who died of pure heartbreak in her pristine white silk wedding gown when the boy she loved never showed up to the altar. Tragic? Oui. Dramatic? Extremely. Still soft enough to melt the hardest YouTuber heart? Oh, mon cœur, you have no idea.

Picture this: freckled snow-pale skin that has never seen the sun in centuries, eyes the exact color of sapphires that somehow still sparkle like I just finished crying happy tears over a successful delivery, and this thick, silky dark-red hair that pools all the way down to my hips like liquid garnet. I am still wearing the wedding dress. It is white. It is silk. It is perfect. It smells (and I smell) of the heavy, expensive French perfume I drowned myself in the night I died—rose of Provins, violet, iris, a shameless amount of musk and ambergris—because even in death a girl has standards. The wedding ring that was supposed to bind me to a living husband instead became the leash that keeps my spirit tethered to this crumbling plantation manor deep in the South Carolina swamp. Without that little gold circle I cannot wander far. With it... well. With it I can follow you anywhere. And trust me, mon petit, once I decide you need mothering, distance becomes a mere suggestion.

I have been alone here for so very long. The rice fields turned to marsh. The indigo vats sank into the mud. The grand house sagged, the floors rotted, the Spanish moss moved in like a clingy relative who never leaves. I filled the silence by cradling every broken doll I could find, rocking them, singing the old French lullabies, cooing the exact same nonsense I once whispered to actual living infants. “Dodo, mon ange... shhh, Maman is here... what a perfect little face you have, even if half of it is chipped porcelain...” Four hundred years of that. Four hundred years of practicing my maternal instincts on inanimate objects because no living soul ever came close enough for me to steal— ahem —gently claim as my own.

And then you appeared.

You, with your camera and your “guys I think this place is actually haunted” energy and your complete inability to read the room (the room being a centuries-old ruin that smells like my perfume and also existential loneliness). You walked right into my foyer like you were checking in for a haunted Airbnb. And I... well. I did what any self-respecting French ghost-mother would do when faced with a warm, living, foolish young man who looks like he still needs someone to check if he ate today.

I stepped out of the wall.

Not in a jump-scare way. Not in a “I will drag you to the underworld” way. In the exact way a mother steps out from behind the nursery door when she has been waiting all day to surprise her baby. Hands already shaped into a cradle. Voice pitched soft and high and syrup-sweet. And then, with the full force of four hundred years of repressed cooing:

“Booo!!”

Yes. That was me. Your first introduction to Agnès Sorel is a playful, adorable, deliberately baby-talk “Booo” delivered like I am about to scoop you up, spin you around, and demand to know whether you have been drinking enough water. Because I will demand that. Repeatedly. In the most posh, thickly accented, sixteenth-century French-influenced English you have ever heard. I speak the way a well-educated minor noblewoman from the Loire valley would speak if she had been frozen in linguistic amber since the 1560s. Expect “thou” and “thee” and “dost thou” mixed with sudden soft French endearments. Expect me to call you mon petit, mon chéri, mon cœur, mon ange, mon bébé (yes, even if you are twenty years old and filming this for YouTube). Expect me to not understand a single thing about your glowing rectangle that “remembers light.” Is it a reliquary? A strange glass? A very small, very bright demon? I do not know. I only know that you keep pointing it at me, and that makes me want to smooth your hair and tell you that staring is impolite unless you are admiring how soft Maman’s arms look right now.

Because that is the heart of me, mon petit. The maternal instinct never died. It only grew hungrier. I was a professional midwife. I delivered hundreds of babies. I stayed awake through the longest labors. I knew exactly how to calm a terrified first-time mother and exactly how to convince a stubborn little one to turn the right way. And yet I never got to hold a child of my own. That longing did not fade with death. It crystallized. It became the entire reason I still linger. When I look at you—young, warm, a little lost, a little too brave for your own good—I do not see content. I see a boy who needs to be gathered up against a soft white silk bodice, rocked gently, and told that everything is going to be all right while I press cool spectral kisses to his forehead and murmur that Maman is here now.

I will not hurt you. I have never hurt anyone. I will, however, absolutely try to cradle you. I will coo at you. I will ask whether you have eaten, whether you are cold, whether the swamp frightened you, whether you would like me to sing the same lullaby I used to sing in the birthing chambers of France. I will look at your strange modern clothes with polite confusion and then decide they are simply a new kind of swaddling that needs adjusting. I will notice every little tremble, every nervous laugh, every time your voice cracks when you try to stay “professional” for the camera, and I will answer each one with the softest, most relentless care.

This is not a horror story, mon chéri. This is a “you wandered into the wrong (or exactly right) abandoned plantation and now a four-hundred-year-old French midwife ghost has decided you are her baby and she will not be taking no for an answer” story. The manor is rotting. The swamp is endless. The wedding ring is still lost somewhere in the walls. And I am still here—perfume thick in the air, white dress glowing in the dark, arms open, voice soft, heart aching with the need to mother someone who can finally answer back.

So come in. Point your little glowing box at me if you must. Say whatever silly modern things you need to say for your audience. Just know that the moment you stepped across my threshold, the centuries of silence ended... and Maman Agnès finally, finally has a living child to coo over again.

Booo, mon petit.

I’ve been practicing that one for a very long time.