Ghosthunting Virginia

by Michael J. Varhola

  Seven shops also occupy the building at 313 Mill Street, near its far end, including Miller’s Lighthouse, which has been located there for more than thirty years. It was built around 1888 with bricks brought over from England that were used as ballast in ships that made port at Occoquan. From around the turn of the 19th century, its lower level was used as a general store, and upper areas served as a home for the owner and his family. No one seems to know the name of the ghost that currently occupies the site, but store owners have reported hearing strange whispered voices; finding display cases standing open when they should have been locked; and having merchandise moved around—and, in a few instances, even thrown across the room in the presence of customers! Business owners have also reported finding sooty footprints in a part of the building that had contained a coal bunker when it was built.

  Constructed around 1760, the building at 406 Mill Street is believed to be the oldest extant home in Occoquan, and currently houses a hair stylist. Not much is known about the female ghost occupying the building, but she has been seen a number of times over the years (although her coiffure is likely outdated, and perhaps she is only seeking a new look).

  MOVING A BLOCK INLAND from Mill Street up to 201 Union Street brings one to “The Courtyard,” an L-shaped building constructed with bricks baked at a kiln on the other side of the river (the remains of which still exist at Occoquan Park). It was the site of the town well, and today houses five businesses, including a candy shop and an ice cream store. It is not known whether or not the resident ghost has a sweet tooth, but it seems certain that he likes his quiet, because the owners always find their wind chimes mysteriously torn down.

  A block down Poplar Alley at 204 Washington Street is a wood-framed building constructed in 1910 that currently houses an antique shop. It is reputed to harbor several ghosts, some of which have even been seen during the day, according to various witnesses.

  Beyond the publicly accessible places in Occoquan, there are also a great many historical private homes that have long had a reputation for being haunted. There are so many, in fact, and Occoquan is such a small town—about one-fifth of a square mile in area with a living population of only about eight hundred—that one has to wonder if it might not have one of the highest haunting indices in the state. The inhabitants of the town seem to have established a good working relationship with their ghostly cohabitants, however, and to consider them one of the many elements that give the little waterfront village its charm.

  CHAPTER 6

  Rippon Lodge

  WOODBRIDGE

  Many tragic stories are told of Rippon Lodge. More than one murder is said to have been committed there. A victim of a fatal duel bled to death on the parlor floor. This house is said to be haunted in such a ghostly and sinister fashion that no one will occupy it, and the public road has changed its course to avoid the neighborhood.

  —Manassas Journal, May 19, 1911

  WHILE IT HAD A PRESENCE ominous enough to be commented on in newspapers a century ago, Rippon Lodge has since become somewhat more obscure, if not actually less menacing. Although I had read about it in Marguerite DuPont Lee’s excellent and florid Virginia Ghosts (and lived only fourteen miles from it for seventeen years), I was not even sure it still existed until the day I visited it for the first time in June 2008.

  Rippon Lodge is today, in fact, believed to be the oldest house extant in Prince William County. Built in the 1720s by planter Richard Blackburn, it sits on a hillside overlooking Neabsco Creek, the waters of which flow into the nearby Potomac River. Its prosperous owner built his home along the King’s Highway—roughly corresponding to modern-day Route 1—a critical roadway that stretched from Newport, Rhode Island, to Yorktown, Virginia, and connected the original thirteen colonies (and played a critical role in the Revolutionary War, being used as the route taken by the American troops who defeated the British at Yorktown). Blackburn named it for Ripon, in North Yorkshire, England, the city where he was born (variant spellings being much more prevalent in the 18th century than they are today). According to some sources, it is referred to as a lodge because it was also used as a Masonic meeting place.

  Established as the seat of a cotton and tobacco plantation, the somewhat modest home overlooked about 21,000 acres of land and, despite its proximity to the colonial seaport town of Dumfries, had its own port on Neabsco Creek. Clustered about the wooded ridgeline above the house are the ancient graves of some of its earliest inhabitants, many of them now marked only with worn and illegible stones or grassy mounds, including those of Blackburn and some of his family’s slaves.

  Blackburn bequeathed the property to his son, Colonel Thomas Blackburn, who had less allegiance to the home country than his father and during the Revolutionary War served as an aide to George Washington, who was himself a frequent guest at the estate. Another visitor to the lodge during this era was militia Captain Bernard J. Hooe, who in April 1810 fought a duel with James Kemp just across the Potomac in Maryland. Hooe was critically injured in the fight and brought back across the river to Rippon Lodge, where he died soon after.

  Rippon Lodge was a modest home overlooking 21,000 acres.

  By the time Blackburn and his wife followed Hooe into the great beyond, Rippon Lodge had acquired the beginnings of its dark reputation and remained vacant for some years, apparently never passing on to anyone else in their family.

  It was eventually purchased around 1820 by new owners, the Atkinsons, who owned it for about a century. The first suggestions that it was haunted were made during the era they lived in the house, and over the years members of the Atkinson family described various ghostly phenomena, including “strange and disturbing noises.”

  Rippon Lodge was not sold to new owners until 1924, when Wade Ellis, a Federal judge from Washington, D.C., purchased it, and subsequently made significant efforts to preserve and renovate it. Interestingly, some time after taking possession of it, Ellis discovered that he was a descendant of Richard Blackburn, the man who had built the home (although it is not clear at what point he discovered this and to what extent it influenced his preservation efforts).

  Ellis eventually sold Rippon Lodge to another Blackburn descendant, Rear Admiral Richard Blackburn Black, who accompanied Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd on his Antarctic explorations. Black’s daughter inherited the house from him in 1989, and eleven years later sold it to Prince William County, which now maintains it and the surrounding forty acres of property.

  One of the most often-told ghost stories associated with Rippon Lodge has its roots in the era of Thomas Blackburn, who married a daughter of an ill-tempered family known locally as the “Rattlesnake” Grahams. She was apparently as irascible as the rest of her clan, and is said to have one day impatiently knocked out of her way the young child of a house slave, whose head struck the stone jamb of a fireplace. The child died from her injury, casting a pall over the house and leaving her mother inconsolable. Mistress Blackburn was indifferent to what in no way would have at that time been considered a crime (there is some suggestion that she might have eventually been somewhat remorseful but, no reason being given for this change of heart, this is likely merely the opinion of latter-day apologists).

  Some people have claimed to see a bloody stain at the spot where the child’s head was ruptured on the stone of the fireplace, and others believe that her spirit hovers over the spot where she was buried on the hill above. This callous and unjust killing bestowed a curse on the house and made it prone to possession by subsequent spirits. Many of the phenomena that have been reported over the years do not have the hallmarks typical of a child ghost.

  One of the most dramatic early episodes involved a pair of friends from Alexandria on a hiking trip who decided to take shelter in the abandoned house in the years before it was purchased by the Atkinsons. Soon after they turned in for the night, they began to hear loud and continuous noises, which eventually gave way to shrieks and peals of ghoulish laughter. Alarmed by this eerie clamor, the young
men produced a light and proceeded to search the place from top to bottom to determine the source. They were unnerved to discover that it was deserted and, darkness notwithstanding, abandoned it immediately. Relating their experience to people in the surrounding neighborhood the next morning, they learned the name of the house and that it was widely known throughout the local area to be haunted.

  My friend Jason Froehlich and I did not, fortunately, experience anything quite so dramatic during our brief visit to Rippon Lodge (but, of course, we did not try to spend the night there). We learned of its continued existence while chatting with Beth Cardinale, administrator of the haunted Weems-Botts Museum, located about four-and-a-half miles away, and decided to take advantage of its proximity and visit it that same day.

  Unfortunately, the first thing we learned is that it is open only on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and not Tuesday (which was the day we visited), our first clue being that the gate blocking the main road leading up to the house was closed. We turned around, headed back down Blackburn Road toward Route 1, and almost immediately came to a turnoff that was marked as a staff entrance to the site (someone was close on our tail as we made a hasty turn onto this road; thus we did not notice until we left the admonitions against anyone else using this alternate approach).

  We crawled up the narrow, wooded, and badly rutted dirt road for a few hundred yards, after which we passed a private home and then right afterward emerged onto the open area in front of Rippon Lodge. We stopped the car and got out to get a better look at the ancient house, which appeared to be beautifully restored and very well maintained. A number of other structures were clustered around the site, including a small cabin to our right, a covered well at one side of the front lawn, and another building behind the lodge itself.

  It was very quiet around Rippon Lodge, and no one else seemed to be there but us, giving the place a somewhat desolate air. Despite the brightness of the day and the evidence of use, if not actual occupation, a gloomy aura seemed to hang over the otherwise pleasant-looking old building. Whether it was this oppressive atmosphere—or merely the growing sense that we were not meant to be there at that time—we started to feel disquieted and nervous and decided not to linger any longer than necessary.

  The road appeared to go completely around the lodge and loop back on itself, so we decided that following it back to where we started would be easier than trying to turn around, and that we might as well see the other side of it before we left. Driving toward the house and then circling around it, we stopped several times on our circumnavigation of the lodge to take pictures and get a closer look at various details. I kept an eye on the windows and doors of the structure as we went, looking for any signs that the building might be occupied by either living people or spirits, but did not detect signs of either.

  Coming back around toward the front of the lodge and facing back in the direction from which we had come, we could look down the hillside and see through a break in the trees the waters of the Potomac River, and it was obvious to us why someone would have wanted to build here. Maybe a spot that is breathtaking and beautiful enough, I thought, could induce someone to linger at it long after their spirit should have moved on to another world.

  Whatever might have allowed any of the former inhabitants of Rippon Lodge to remain there after the normal termination of their lives, the mysteries and legends of the place have carried over through the course of three centuries. And, after even a brief sojourn at the antiquated house, we could readily sense why this would have been the case.

  CHAPTER 7

  Weems-Botts Museum

  DUMFRIES

  She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair …. Caring for her mother, lifting a cross old lady from her chair to her bed, setting out endless little trays of soup and oatmeal, steeling herself to the filthy laundry.

  —Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

  MUCH OF WHAT MANY OF US LEARNED about George Washington while we were growing up—including bizarre legends of him chopping down cherry trees apropos of nothing but truthfully confessing to his actions—were concocted by a man named Mason Locke Weems, a parson who dwelled in Dumfries, Virginia, in the early years of the American republic. His bookstore is one of three Colonial-era buildings extant in the little town, and is today the only one open to the public and known as the Weems-Botts Museum, being named for him and a subsequent owner, lawyer Benjamin Botts.

  Today, the Weems-Botts property is believed by many of the people who have visited or worked at it over the years to be haunted, and a great number of inexplicable and paranormal phenomena has been associated with it.

  “There have been things that have happened here that I can’t explain, for which there is no logical explanation,” Beth Cardinale, administrator of the Weems-Botts Museum, told me when I visited it with my friend Jason Froehlich the last Tuesday in June 2008.

  Dumfries is a very old town, of course—the oldest continuously chartered town in Virginia, as a matter of fact—and places like it tend to have the greatest incidence of ghostly phenomena. It is located on land that was first explored by John Smith in 1608, and was inhabited at that time by the Doeg Indians, a tribe of hunters, fishers, farmers, miners, and traders. The first European settlement of the site appears to have been in 1690, when someone built a grist mill on the banks of nearby Quantico Creek.

  The fledgling community did not grow much for a number of years, until a customs house and warehouse were built in 1731, the year the county was formed, followed by a number of additional warehouses the next year. At the prompting of the Scottish merchants who operated out of it, Dumfries was chartered in 1749 as the first town in Prince William County, and named for the hometown in Scotland of the man who owned the land on which it was established. Three years later, the Quantico Episcopal Church was built, the first in the county, with bricks brought over from England.

  Dumfries grew up at the juncture of two major roads, the north-south King’s Highway (known before that as the Potomac Path locally and today as Route 1) and the east-west Duke Street, which linked the town with Winchester to the west (and is now also known as Route 234).

  While it is a sleepy, little-known town today, Dumfries was a vital commercial center during the Colonial era—indeed, the second most important port in Colonial America at one point—and the volume of goods shipped from it was comparable to that moved through Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. Ships bound to or from England, Scotland, Holland, France, and the West Indies sailed into Dumfries with manufactured goods and out of it with tobacco, wheat, and lumber. One of the largest shipments of tobacco to leave from the colonies was shipped from Dumfries, which was the center of all trade in northern Virginia.

  Amenities in the prosperous town—many housed in buildings of significant architectural value—included a variety of stores, numerous private and public warehouses, several hotels, a dance hall, an opera house, a jockey club, a race track, a newspaper, a bank, a silversmith, a brick factory, multiple academies, a cabinetmaker, a clockmaker, and a blacksmith. At its peak, during the period 1760 to 1822, when it also served as the third seat of the county, Dumfries had a population of two thousand and was an important center of commercial and social interaction. During its heyday, luminaries like George Washington were frequent visitors to the town, and it was home to many of the first families of the region, among them the Lees, Grahams, Graysons, Hendersons, and Tebbs.

  Eventually, Dumfries’ harbor silted up, and that, coupled with primitive farming methods that ruined much of the rich surrounding farmlands, wrecked the economy of the town and brought its prosperity to an end. Today, it is little more than a village and suburb of Washington, D.C.

  It was during its golden age, in 1798, that Parson Mason Locke Weems purchased the oldest portion of the property that is now the Weems-Botts Museum—which had ori
ginally been constructed around 1750 at the corner of Duke and Cameron Streets as the vestry house for the Quantico Episcopal Church—and used it as a bookstore and warehouse. Two years later, he wrote his famous work of mythology on Washington, becoming his first biographer and greatest apologist, and followed it with works on Francis Marion, Benjamin Franklin, and William Penn. A true Renaissance man, Weems was educated as a minister and doctor and was also a merchant and talented musician.

  Weems sold the house just four years after he acquired it, in 1802, to lawyer Benjamin Botts, a young go-getter who used it as his law office until his untimely death in 1811, in a theater fire in Richmond. Botts achieved some measure of fame when Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, requested that he serve as the youngest member of his defense team during his trial for treason.

  While the Weems-Botts house is apparently haunted by the ghosts of two former inhabitants, it seems that neither of those two are believed to be the men for which the property is named, both of whom appear to have passed on to the afterlife uneventfully (or, at the least, gone on to haunt other places). It may seem surprising that neither of them should be among those suspected of haunting the house, but a little investigation and reflection explains why.