Did Evelyn Duval, the wife of a Louisiana plantation owner, elope with a runaway slave in 1847? No, that's not true: This story is full of precise details, which lend an air of authenticity - but the details do not match up with historic sources. Both the image of the couple and the story spontaneously surfaced on social media in October 2025. The story originated on a YouTube channel with a disclaimer that all of their content is fictional.
The story appears in a post (archived here) published on Facebook by the page Nancy Blaq on Oct. 15, 2025. The post was captioned:
The Plantation Owner's Wife Who Eloped With a Runaway Slave: Louisiana's Vanished Bride of 1847
This is the image included with the post on Facebook:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from facebook.com/share/p/17DskJX8zc/.)
The post contains a link to the website ustoday24h.com which redirects to ustoday.noithatnhaxinhbacgiang.com (archived here), a malicious link where virus protection software detected malvertising. The Facebook post caption continued:
Her disappearance, at first dismissed as a tragic abduction, would evolve into one of the most disturbing and enduring mysteries in Louisiana history -- a story of love, rebellion, and silence that has haunted the South for nearly two centuries.
It began innocently enough. On April 14, 1847, the St. Charles Herald printed a short notice:
"Missing -- Mrs. Evelyn Duval, wife of plantation owner Gerard Duval, last seen on the evening of April 10th. Reward offered for information leading to her safe return."
A Google reverse image search for the image in the post pointed to a YouTube video posted on Oct. 14, 2025 by the channel Dark Epoch Tales. The 37-minute video is titled, "The Plantation Owner's Wife Who Eloped With a Runaway Slave: Louisiana's Vanished Bride of 1847". The entire video consists of this one still image of the couple (pictured below) with a generated voiceover reading the detailed story.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from youtu.be/510eao4USgk?si=bmlBt2jqu5NN1KCo.)
A reverse image search with the high resolution image from the video (pictured below) produced no hits other than the YouTube video. A historic photo of this quality connected to a purportedly long-known tale from 178 years ago would surely have circulated widely, but the image appears to be less than a week old. AI detection tools at Hive Moderation and InVID were unable to produce a conclusive reading if the image was AI-generated. An inconclusive reading does not mean that the image was not AI-generated.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from google.com/search.)
The story originated on a fiction channel. The Dark Epoch Tales channel has a disclaimer which reads:
The stories shared on this channel are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental. This content is created solely for spine-tingling entertainment.
The channel (archived here) has been producing similar videos (pictured below) which use pseudo-antique AI-generated portraits and a variety of themes including love affairs between plantation owner's wives or daughters and enslaved men.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot from youtube.com/@DarkEpochTales.)
The narration of the YouTube story begins with many details which should be easily verified, it said:
It began with a simple notice in the St. Charles Herald on April 14th, 1847. A small column nestled between advertisements for cotton gins medicinal tonics read, "Missing Mrs. Evelyn Duval, wife of plantation owner Gerard Duval, last seen on the evening of April 10th. Reward offered for information leading to her safe return."
Lead Stories looked to see if this issue of the newspaper containing the missing notice might be archived. Instead we found the St. Charles Herald would not exist for another 26 years. On the website of the St. Charles Parish Virtual Museum it says:
The first issue of the St. Charles Herald was dated February 15, 1873.
A Google search for the terms (Gerard Duval AND Louisiana AND St. James Parish OR Saint James Parish) produced no results (archived here) about the plantation owner other than one-day-old posts on Facebook and a six-hour-old post on Threads.
