👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9474 ACTIVE

Lopinot

Name: Lopinot
Address: Tunapuna-Piarco, TT

Lopinot is a location reputed to be haunted in Tunapuna-Piarco, TT. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.

Where is Lopinot?

Location: Tunapuna-Piarco, TT
Type: Village / settlement
Coordinates: 10.683, -61.317
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

Why is Lopinot said to be haunted?

Lopinot is a mountain village in Trinidad's Northern Range where the ghost story and the history refuse to stay apart. The valley's cocoa estate, La Reconnaissance, was founded in 1806 by Charles Joseph, Comte de Loppinot — born in French Canada in 1738, an ensign at the fall of Louisbourg, married in New Orleans, ruined in Haiti, and finally a planter in Trinidad who, historians now document, brought with him Africans who were legally free and re-enslaved them. Village tradition says that on stormy nights the count gallops across the old savannah in military dress and vanishes at the cashew tree once shown to visitors as "the hanging tree"; elders told reporters that the enslaved who died cruelly on the estate "are not at rest". The count died in 1819 and lies buried beside his wife on the estate; the 1821 gazette notices winding up his bankrupt succession still survive. Today the restored Lopinot Historical Complex — count house, plantation jail, cocoa house and tombs — doubles as the heartland of Trinidad's parang music, brought by villagers resettled from Caura in the 1940s, and as a stop on the paranormal-TV circuit since Ghost Hunters International filmed here in 2011.

What is the history of Lopinot?

The village of Lopinot, in a mountain valley of Trinidad's Northern Range about nine kilometres north of Arouca, is named after Charles Joseph, Comte de Loppinot de la Fresillière (1738–1819) — and almost everything popularly told about him is a later romance. His real career is stranger than the legend. The Loppinots were not courtiers who "left France": they had been in French North America since 1699, when Jean-Chrysostome Loppinot became clerk of court at Port-Royal in Acadia, later king's attorney — his career is documented in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and two of his sons served in the colonial troops at Louisbourg. Charles Joseph, his grandson, was born in 1738 and joined the canonniers-bombardiers, an artillery corps recruited from native-born Canadians. He was an ensign on Île Royale when the British took Louisbourg in 1758; the historian Anthony de Verteuil, who reconstructed the family's path in Great Estates of Trinidad (2000), notes that the terms of surrender were carried to the British by "an officer named Lopinot". Posted next to Louisiana, he married Marie Cécile Favre at St Louis Cathedral in New Orleans in 1768, ran her family's plantation and its 127 enslaved workers, then moved to Saint-Domingue, where he built a fortune at Grande Anse in the Artibonite. The 1791 revolution destroyed it. He fought on the British side from 1793, withdrew with them to Jamaica in 1798, and there — as the historian Claudius Fergus of the University of the West Indies has shown — reclaimed as "slaves" Black men and women who had been legally free citizens of the French Republic since the emancipation decree of 4 February 1794. Somewhere in these years he also acquired the title of count; De Verteuil could find no record of how. He landed at Port of Spain on 29 April 1800 with his family and about a hundred captives, in a convoy under Admiral Hyde Parker; Governor Thomas Picton reported the arrival to London two days later. A promised land grant did not materialise, a sugar venture at Orange Grove in Tacarigua collapsed into litigation, and only after Governor Thomas Hislop made him Brigadier-General of the Trinidad Militia in 1805 did he receive, in 1806, 478 acres in the mountains above Arouca. He planted cocoa and called the estate La Reconnaissance. It became one of the island's great cocoa plantations, worked by enslaved Africans whose lives are documented in fragments: the first slave register of 1813 counts 71 people on the estate; the Protector of Slaves reported that in 1833 nearly half of the 64 enslaved there had been flogged within six months, the highest proportion in the district. The estate's jail still stands, with the cocoa-drying house built directly above it. Loppinot sat on the Council of Government under Governor Woodford until his death in 1819 — by village tradition, after a landslide caught him on the track back from Arouca. He was buried on the estate beside his wife, and he died intestate and in debt: in April 1821 the Court of Intestate Estates published notices in the Trinidad Gazette winding up "l'Habitation Reconnaissance", and that June the estate was sold to Webster Gillman for £27,000. The village's later history no longer belongs to the count: when the government expropriated the nearby Caura valley for a dam in 1943, the displaced Spanish-speaking cocoa farmers were resettled at Lopinot from 1945, bringing the parang music for which the village is now famous — the dam itself was never built. The Tourist Board restored the estate buildings in the 1970s as the Lopinot Historical Complex, and a TT$15 million restoration of the count's house, the jail and the cocoa house began in 2024.

Timeline: the documented record of Lopinot

1758 The British capture Louisbourg. Charles Joseph Loppinot, grandson of the Acadian king's attorney Jean-Chrysostome Loppinot, is serving as an ensign on Île Royale; De Verteuil records that the terms of surrender were carried to the British by "an officer named Lopinot".
Autumn 1768 Loppinot marries Marie Cécile Favre at St Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, and takes over her family's Louisiana plantation with 127 enslaved workers.
1791 The revolution reaches his Saint-Domingue estate at Grande Anse. A later tradition — absent from the earliest account of 1833 — claims his enslaved workers smuggled him out to Jamaica hidden in a sugar barrel; De Verteuil prints it with the caveat "it is said".
4 February 1794 The French National Convention abolishes slavery in all French colonies. Claudius Fergus's central point: the Africans who later reached Jamaica during the British withdrawal of 1798 were legally free, and Loppinot's reclaiming of them there as "slaves" for Trinidad was a re-enslavement.
29 April 1800 Loppinot lands at Port of Spain in an armed convoy under Admiral Hyde Parker, with his family and about one hundred captives. Governor Picton reports the arrival of "the Count de l'Oppinot and Family" to the Secretary of State on 1 May.
1806 Appointed Brigadier-General of the Trinidad Militia by Governor Hislop the year before, Loppinot receives a grant of 478 acres above Arouca, founds the cocoa estate La Reconnaissance and builds the estate house.
1813 Trinidad's first slave register records 71 enslaved Africans on La Reconnaissance. Fergus notes that only 56 of them could have come from Haiti, and asks what became of the rest of the "hundred faithful slaves" of the romance.
1819 Loppinot dies — by valley tradition after a landslide on the track from Arouca caught and half-buried him — and is interred on the estate beside his wife. He dies intestate.
27 April 1821 The Court of Intestate Estates orders public notice, printed in the Trinidad Gazette in French, calling anyone with claims against "l'Habitation Reconnaissance" of "the late Charles Joseph Comte de Loppinot" to come forward. On 14 June the bankrupt estate is sold to Webster Gillman for £27,000.
1833 Mrs A. C. Carmichael publishes the founding text of the romance — "There is a story almost of romance connected with the first settlement of this estate" — with devoted slaves and no ghost. The same year, the Protector of Slaves reports that nearly half of the 64 people enslaved at La Reconnaissance were flogged within six months, the highest rate in the district.
1943–1945 The government, planning a dam at Caura, buys the remaining 320 acres of La Reconnaissance for $30,000 and resettles the displaced Spanish-speaking villagers of Caura at Lopinot, who bring their church, their patois-Spanish culture and parang. The dam is never built.
13 July 2011 Syfy airs the Ghost Hunters International episode "Rising From the Grave: Trinidad", filmed at the complex after a local investigator proposed Lopinot to the network. On 10 August 2011 an anonymous editor adds the haunting — soucouyant and the count's ghost — to the English Wikipedia article, without a source.
14 September 2018 After the Cross Rhodes Freedom Project's "No More Slaves" campaign, backed by village leaders, the chairman of the Tunapuna/Piarco Regional Corporation commits in writing to replacing the complex's romanticised signpost with "historically correct information".
2 March 2024 The Ministry of Tourism turns the sod on a TT$15 million third restoration phase covering the count house, the jail and the cocoa house, with completion targeted for March 2025.

Is there a rational explanation for Lopinot?

The legend as told in the valley is specific, and it is not the imported one. In the version printed by De Verteuil in 2000 — the earliest appearance of the ghost in print that this review could date — the count appears on stormy nights on a jet-black charger, in military dress with sabre drawn, gallops across the savannah, stops at the old cashew tree presented to visitors as "the hanging tree", and vanishes; later tellings put him on a white horse or simply riding through the rain. Nothing in any Trinidadian source gives him no head, and no source at all has him searching for buried treasure — both details circulated in an earlier version of this page and have been removed as unsupported. The local repertoire is Trinidadian: a soucouyant seen as a fireball near the Arouca River, douens, La Diablesse, a faceless man on the estate bridge. The ghost is young compared with the documents. Mrs A. C. Carmichael's 1833 account of La Reconnaissance — the text that founded the romantic image of the count — contains no ghost at all: in the full scanned volume, "ghost", "spectre" and "apparition" return zero matches (against 146 for "Trinidad" in the same file). A full-text search of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, whose Trinidad newspapers and gazettes mention Lopinot 481 times, returns zero pages combining the name with "ghost", "haunted" or "treasure". What the legend does encode is the estate's documented violence: village elders told the Guardian in 2011 that "about 100 slaves had died under Compte de Lopinot... their souls are not at rest", and the hanging-tree story was already attached to the (long-dead) cashew tree when Michael Anthony repeated it in 1974. Historians disagree about the man — De Verteuil thought him genuinely paternalistic, Fergus documents floggings and re-enslavement — but the ghost story functions either way as moral memory of slavery, which is precisely what the 19th-century "contented slaves" romance was built to erase. The modern boom is datable television. A local investigator told the Trinidad Guardian in 2011 that when the Syfy channel contacted him about a different village, he proposed Lopinot instead "simply because there was nothing going on in Moruga"; Ghost Hunters International aired its Lopinot episode on 13 July 2011, and the haunted sentence entered the English Wikipedia article on 10 August 2011, added without a source by an anonymous editor. Discovery's Expedition X followed with a two-part episode. The National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago's heritage listing for Lopinot House, meanwhile, does not mention ghosts at all, and no admission is charged to the ghost's supposed home — the incentive here is community tourism, which the village leadership itself describes with disarming honesty: the cautionary tales, one told the Guardian in 2026, were invented by elders to keep children out of the forest, and the tactic worked.

Can you visit Lopinot?

The Lopinot Historical Complex sits at the head of Lopinot Road, a winding 20-minute drive (about 9 km) north from the Eastern Main Road at Arouca; the road has been under phased repair since 2024. The complex preserves the restored estate house — originally, according to the Ministry of Tourism and De Verteuil, the estate manager's dwelling — a small museum with Amerindian artefacts from digs in the valley, the plantation jail with the cocoa house above it, carat-thatched picnic sheds along the Arouca River, and the tombs of the count and his wife under the trees. A TT$15 million third restoration phase (count house, jail, cocoa house) began in March 2024 with completion targeted for 2025, so individual buildings may be closed for works. Guided tours, cocoa-dancing demonstrations and chocolate-making experiences are run by the community's Lopinot Tourism Association, which reports over 60,000 visitors a year; the associated Lopinot Chocolate Company sells estate chocolate. The liveliest season is parang time, from late November to Epiphany (6 January), when the village that inherited the tradition from resettled Caura hosts music events. The river pools and caves (one named after the late parang musician and guide Martin Gomez) are popular on weekends. There is no entrance gate fee reported for the grounds; check with the association for current tour prices and building access before travelling.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-17 · How we verify our content