CHAPTER 11
Trapezium House
PETERSBURG
The architectural oddity was built by Charles O’Hara, whose West Indian servant convinced him that spirits could inhabit only right-angled buildings. So, the O’Hara house has no right angles at all. None of the walls are parallel, doors and windows are all framed crooked, and the stairs and floorboards are cut at a slant.
—Dennis William Hauck, Haunted Places: The National Directory
IF ANY MUNICIPALITY IN VIRGINIA is likely to be haunted, it is almost certainly Petersburg, a crumbling, industrialized, antebellum sprawl along the banks of the Appomattox River that is notable both as a historical city and as the scene of one of the bloodiest massacres in U.S. history.
On July 30, 1864, U.S. Army engineers attempted to break through the defenses of the besieged Confederate city by detonating a massive quantity of explosives in a tunnel dug beneath the city’s fortifications. The explosion created a 135-foot-wide crater and instantly pulverized as many as 350 rebel soldiers. Confused and lackluster Union commanders squandered this initial success by ordering an entire division of troops into the crater, rather than marching around it. They where butchered by the quickly rallying Southerners, who seized control of the high ground above the hole. Some 5,300 of the Federal troops were killed, wounded, or captured before the ill-fated assault was abandoned.
Hunting for the ghosts of poorly led soldiers who died to no good end seemed a little too grim for me, however, as my wife, Diane, and I passed through Petersburg a couple days after Christmas 2007. Our plan, rather, was to visit a much more classic haunted site, a 190-year-old building known locally as the Trapezium House. We were en route to Atlanta, Georgia, and hoped to make the most of our time by spending the night at the Quality Inn at the Washington Street exit off I-95, visiting the Trapezium House the next day, and getting on the road again by mid-morning.
Our ghost hunt was not to begin auspiciously, however—a realization which began to dawn on us when we had trouble finding the motel. Eventually going into the office of what looked like an abandoned Rodeway Inn at approximately the right location, I was greeted by the young female clerk sitting behind the counter and, on the wall behind her, the word “Y INN” (the letters “QUALIT” having long ago fallen away). Had I not reserved and paid for a room in advance, we would certainly have moved on to another place.
It is almost inconceivable that this rotting, sepulchral, nearly empty collection of multilevel wings at the edge of the interstate, which we would come to call the Yinn, was itself not haunted. It looked like the kind of setting that Snoop Dog might have chosen if he had directed The Shining. Yes, the seemingly unnatural cold that permeated our room could possibly be attributed to the innkeeper’s indifference to the comfort of the guests checked into a mere half dozen of the dilapidated establishment’s hundreds of room, as frigid air was all we could coax out of the climate control vents. Beyond that, however, the desolate edifice evoked spectral images of failed Willy Lomans dead of self-inflicted wounds and urbanized folk who had met violent ends in drug deals gone bad in its bleak little rooms. We spent a grim, fitful night, during which I looked out often to make sure our SUV was still there, and we had an intimate awareness of everything that rattled by on I-95.
Nothing induced us to delay our departure in the morning, and we arrived ten minutes early for our meeting at the Trapezium House, a mere seven-tenths of a mile away. It was located a few blocks down Market Street, the apparent line of demarcation between a largely industrial area that stretched from there to the interstate and a neighborhood of historical mansions that extended away from it. I had scouted out the site the night before, and taken a few pictures of it, but daylight clearly revealed to me the source of the three-story brick building’s primary name—namely, a four-sided structure having no parallel walls. I was photographing the exterior when the current owner arrived. I had called him the week before, and he had graciously agreed to meet my wife and me at the house and to tell us what he knew about it.
Irishman Charles O’Hara—who is referred to only by this title in any source I could find—purchased the lot the house is on in 1816 and completed construction of it the following year. According to local legend, a West Indian slave owned by O’Hara convinced him that evil spirits are able to dwell in right angles and, accordingly, advised him to build his home without any. Why O’Hara believed this, and why he was concerned about his house becoming a harborage for evil spirits, is lost to the ages, if it is indeed true at all. A more austere, latter-day explanation holds that he was merely building to the shape of his lot and that similar structures were once common in Petersburg (although none are extant today). In any event, the original owner is the source of one of the other local names for the place, the Charles O’Hara House.
Beyond his supposed preoccupation with evil spirits, O’Hara was reputed to be more than mildly eccentric and to have a habit of heavy drinking (but this latter detail may actually be an unfair embellishment that seems to be almost universally applied to Irishmen in tales of this sort). It is, however, his reputed practice of keeping in his house a little menagerie—which is said to have included a monkey, a parrot, and a number of white rats—that gained the place yet another local nickname: the Rat Castle.
Some believe that whatever demons haunted O’Hara in life and encouraged his various eccentricities also kept his unquiet spirit from passing on after death—and that the unparallel angles of his home which might have kept other spirits out of the house inadvertently served to trap his own ghost within it. The Trapezium House is cited as a haunted site by a number of authorities, including Haunted Places: The National Directory and the official “Virginia is for Lovers” Web site.
The current owner of the house, a sagacious man who it would be fair to characterize as “sober as a judge,” is a bit more skeptical.
Oliver A. Pollard Jr. is, in fact, a retired Circuit Court Judge with thirty-six years on the bench, and a fifth-generation native of Petersburg, which his family has dwelled in since 1740. (He is also the picture of a Southern gentleman and, apparently, too refined to have even noticed something as coarse and awful as the Yinn, which, despite its close proximity and his long ties to the community, Pollard seemed to be completely unaware of.)
The Society for the Preservation of Petersburg Antiquities had acquired the property in the 1930s, and in recent years the city had operated it as a tourist attraction, opening it on request and sending a guide from another site to unlock it and lead visitors through it. By the turn of the millennium, however, the municipality had too many such minor sites to effectively administer and thus sold them off to private parties, with easements dictating that they be properly preserved and open to the public a certain number of days per year. Pollard was thus able to purchase the Trapezium House in 2002, and has used it since that time as an office, as a studio for the painting to which he has increasingly turned since retirement, and for storage.
Pollard does not reside in the Trapezium House, and that might account for why he has not noticed any evidence of haunting. He might also have the kind of temperament that is inclined not to notice such things. He is willing to admit, however, that he has heard stories about the house and that someone close to him has reacted adversely to it.
That someone was his now-deceased Jack Russell Terrier, Russ, who would refuse to go up the stairs to the second floor—the level upon which O’Hara lived. The poor dog would just cower by the front door until his master was ready to leave.
Pollard also concedes that O’Hara does seem to have been odd, and that he employed measures in his construction of the Trapezium House that go far beyond the need to accommodate the shape of an irregular lot.
“You can see it’s built in the shape of a trapezium,” Pollard said, pointing out various features of the ground level as he spoke from the old, swiveling jury chair that he uses at his ground floor work station. “There are no right angles. If you look at the side
of the staircase, you can see that it is offset. The lot is somewhat trapezoid in shape, but he did carry it to extremes. There’s no need to not put the fireplace in the center of the wall. Also, the staircase is cattywampus and the floorboards are cut on oblique angles. Even the bricks are a little cockeyed.”
I could readily see everything Pollard pointed out, and, irregularly shaped lot or not, O’Hara had indeed applied considerable effort and additional expense to avoid the incorporation of any ninety-degree angle.
Pollard concluded our interview with a brief tour of the house, during which my wife and I availed ourselves of the opportunity to enjoy his collection of predominantly Impressionist-style paintings—including a small, affectionate one of Russ, the Jack Russell Terrier—and to take some photographs. During our time in the house, neither of us noticed anything profoundly out of the ordinary beyond the strange construction, although toward the end of the tour I did experience a mild feeling of discomfort similar to the sensation of having someone look over my shoulder. We presently stepped outside and then chatted with the judge at the door for a few more minutes before walking across the street to our car and resuming our journey.
Rain and poor driving conditions harried us all the way to Atlanta, and it was not until two nights later, in the city of a different O’Hara, that I had the opportunity to download my photographs and check the quality of my interview tape. To say that I was stunned by the results would be an understatement.
Most of the more-than-fifty digital photographs I had taken were pretty much what I expected: some were better or worse than others; a few were fairly good and of publication quality; a few were worthless. Two, however, revealed effects unlike any I’ve seen in the thousands of digital pictures I have taken over the years.
One of the photos of the exterior of the Trapezium House—the very first one, in fact, that I had taken the night we arrived in Petersburg—was warped and distorted, as if the space and light between me and it had somehow been twisted widdershins. Bent, ghost images of the house looked as if they were being twisted away from it. None of the other photos I took at that time looked in any way irregular.
The second odd photo was one I took during our last few minutes in the house, of the stairway as it descended from the uppermost level of the house. Centered along the upper edge of the image, was a wispy, gray mass, located as if it were moving from one floor of the building to another.
And on my audio tape, a distinct chirping noise is obvious at two points during a thirty-minute period—the first right after I asked Pollard if the house was haunted and almost in response to his skepticism on that point.
There are no clear words on that tape other than the ones uttered by me, my wife, or Pollard, and there is nothing indisputable in the odd characteristics of those two photographs. Suffice it to say, however, that I believe those anomalies suggest the presence of something out of the ordinary in the Trapezium House—and that someone other than the judge may very well have been trying to answer my questions on that point.
A wispy, wraithlike form manifested itself along the upper edge of this image taken from the third floor of the Trapezium House and down into its stairway.
CHAPTER 12
Wreck of the Old 97
DANVILLE
It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville,
And the lie was a three-mile grade,
It was on that grade that he lost his air brakes,
And you see what a jump that she made.
He was going down the grade making 90 miles an hour,
When his whistle began to scream,
He was found in that wreck with his hand on the throttle,
He was scalded to death by the steam.
—“The Wreck of the Old 97”
ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1903, the train known as the “Old 97” flew off a bridge near Danville, Virginia, and smashed into the ravine below, horribly killing eleven people who had been on board and injuring seven others. It was one of the worst train wrecks in the history of the state and, within a few years, became one of the most famous in the country as the result of a song about it that became the first record in the United States to sell more than a million copies.
Mail-and-express train No. 97, consisting of four cars and locomotive No. 1102, was one of the “Fast Mail” trains run by the Southern Railway under contract to the U.S. Postal Service. It ran 640 miles from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, Georgia, and was on the leg that went from Monroe, Virginia—176 miles southwest of Washington—to Spencer, North Carolina, a route that passed through Danville. No. 97 had started its run late and was an hour behind schedule when thirty-three-year-old engineer Joseph A. “Steve” Broady climbed aboard at Monroe for the leg into Spencer, another 166 miles down the track, where it would pick up a new crew. For every minute it was late into Atlanta, Southern Railway would forfeit a substantial amount of money to the Postal Service, which would not reflect well on the engineers, whether it was their fault or not. And so, Broady ran the train hard, and tried to make up for lost time.
Despite the folksy name commonly attributed to it, No. 97 was not actually that old when it met its end, and was one of the workhorses of the Southern line. Its engine was one of the best available, a ten-wheeled model produced by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. It carried no passengers, just eighteen crewmen and postal workers, and earned its keep by fulfilling the terms of its owner’s $140,000 annual contract to carry mail south from the nation’s capital to Atlanta.
While the claim that it was “the fastest regularly scheduled train in the world” might have been a bit of an exaggeration, No. 97 did maintain an average speed of nearly forty miles per hour and had a reputation for never being late. The normal time allotted for the run from Monroe to Spencer was four hours and fifteen minutes, which the train accomplished by maintaining an average speed of 39 miles per hour. If Broady wanted No. 97 to be back on schedule by the time he reached his destination, he would need to cut the time to just three hours and fifteen minutes and to run the train at an average speed of at least fifty-one miles per hour—which would be a trick, to say the least, in the rolling country ahead of him, which included many steep grades and tight curves. Signs posted along the route warned engineers to watch their speeds.
Broady did his best, blazing through at least one intermediate stop normally made during the run. It is not known for certain how fast he was driving No. 97 as it approached Stillhouse Trestle, the bridge that would carry it across the Dan River into Danville. Witnesses claimed it was going anywhere from thirty-five to eighty miles per hour, with the most likely estimates being closer to about fifty miles per hour. Any of those speeds but the very lowest would have been too fast for the curve leading down the steep, three-mile grade onto the bridge.
As he approached the curve, Broady discovered with horror that he did not have enough air pressure in his brakes to slow the train sufficiently. In desperation, he reversed the engine in an attempt to lock its wheels so as to slow or stop the train and sounded its shrieking whistle, in order to alert the crew to apply the hand brakes on the cars. It was all futile, however, and as train No. 97 struck the curve at high speed, it flew off the tracks, splintering a telegraph pole and tearing through the wires that ran parallel to the tracks. It then went soaring out into the air, its whistle screaming as if in mortal terror.
Engine 1102 traveled about one-hundred feet through open space and then crashed into the rocky creek bed in the ravine forty-five feet below the trestle. Its four cars followed and smashed into it in turn, piling up onto the wrecked engine and each other.
Of the eighteen people on board, ten were killed in the wreck, including all five of the train crew, four postal clerks, and a “safe locker” employed by the railway; seven were injured, all of them postal clerks, one of whom succumbed to his wounds nine days later; and one, an express messenger, escaped without being hurt at all. The injuries to the killed and wounded were horrific, and many of the victims were dying wh
en people arrived at the scene of the wreck and tried to pull victims out of it.
“The three men in the engine were so badly scalded by hot water and steam that they were all the same color,” witness J. E. Lester recalled years later. “It was a horrible experience.” The two mangled and scalded firemen had been ejected from the left side of the engine and appeared to have died quickly. Broady was still alive when he was flung from the engine and landed in the creek bed next to it, but was horribly injured; his skin peeled off as witness John Wiley pulled him away from the wreck and he died right afterward.
No. 97 flew off the tracks and careened into a creek bed forty-five feet below after hiting a dangerous curve at high speed.
In the aftermath of the disaster, Southern Railway disavowed any responsibility for the wreck, claiming that it had not encouraged Broady to make up lost time and that he had been going too fast and was alone to blame. It is the railway that would have been penalized if the train had arrived late at its final destination, of course, and it is a sure bet that its engineers were always under pressure to ensure that No. 97 arrived in Atlanta on time. A coroner’s inquest held in Danville three days after the tragedy determined that its cause was excessive speed, but allowed that it could not say whether that speed was the result of human error or mechanical failure.
In the years following the wreck of the No. 97, people began to see strange activity in the ravine below the bridge, including what appeared to be lantern lights moving around in it, as if carried by people searching for the survivors of a crash. Stillhouse Trestle was used for another dozen years after the wreck, until the Southern Railway mainline was shifted about a mile east in 1915. However, even after the trestle was removed and the ravine became so overgrown with vegetation that people could no longer pass easily through it, the phantasmal lights were still seen. And, even though trains no longer passed anywhere near the site, people nearby were sometimes shocked to hear the shriek of a train whistle near where No. 97 sounded its last blast.
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