It was dark by the time we reached Chincoteague, and we could see the lights of the town twinkling ahead of us as we crossed the four-and-one-half mile-long series of causeways and bridges that both link it with the mainland and emphasize its sense of seclusion from the world at large. Indeed, Chincoteague has remained relatively isolated since its first white settlers arrived on the island April 1, 1671. From then until 1922—when the causeway that connects the island with the nearby Delmarva Peninsula was opened—it could be reached only by boat. It was largely a lawless place in its early years, with no government or police, and is rumored to have been a refuge for former convicts and other ruffians. Mail service to the island was not established until 1854, when its first post office was opened.
Chincoteague takes its name from the tribe of Gingo-Teague Indians who were dwelling on the seven-mile-long, two-mile-wide barrier island in the 17th century and who, appropriately, called it “Beautiful Land Across the Water.” Its first white settlers and many of their descendants alike have supported themselves by farming corn, potatoes, and strawberries for their own consumption, and harvesting clams, fish, oysters (including a succulent local variety, the “Chincoteague salty”), and salt from the sea both for themselves and trade with the mainland.
By the mid-1800s, the island had become too populous for its inhabitants to support themselves primarily through farming and, as trade became more important, the town itself began to grow. Around this time the steamboat Chincoteague was commissioned to carry passengers and freight to and from the island, departing Franklin City on the mainland and going back and forth to the island throughout the summer. Stores, hotels, and churches began to open along the streets of the quiet fishing village, and a new wave of settlers from the mainland traveled to it.
Among the people flocking to the boom town were two affluent young gentlemen, merchant Joseph Kenny and Dr. Nathaniel Smith, who established themselves as some of the community’s most prominent citizens. This prominence is evident in the grand home they cooperatively built on Main Street, about two-thirds of which have been incorporated into the 1848 Island Manor House.
Drawing on the Southern architectural tradition then prevalent throughout the mid-Atlantic region, Kenny and Smith constructed a grand residence in the form of a “Maryland ‘T’ House,” popular in that era, that incorporated Georgian and Federalist design elements. Both remained prominent citizens, with Kenny in particular going on to serve as the town’s elected postmaster when its sole post office was opened in 1854.
When Southern states began seceding from the United States in 1860, prior to the Civil War that broke out the following year, Chincoteague was exceptional in that it remained under Union control and its citizens faithful to the Stars and Stripes.
“That was because of our connection with the oyster and scallop and clam industry, which sold to Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C.,” Jerry says.
Along with war came some small fame for Chincoteague: After Union forces that included many men from the island won a significant battle, the native oysters were served to some four thousand people at a victory celebration, and Chincoteague thereafter became known for them. The Island Manor House served as a Union infirmary during the war, and Dr. Smith himself treated Union troops during the conflict.
Kenny and Smith must certainly have been some of Chincoteague’s most eligible bachelors in the postwar years, and both eventually married. First was the merchant, who married a young woman from Baltimore, Maryland, named Sarah. He was followed soon after by the doctor, who married another young woman from Baltimore named Juliet, who, perhaps not coincidentally, happened to be the sister of Sarah. Both couples dwelled under the roof of the home that had been so amicably shared by Kenny and Smith prior to their nuptials, but the sisters could not get along with each other, and the household was ultimately split in half—literally.
Workers built a new foundation next to the existing structure, and when it was complete the house was cut in two and one half was disconnected and painstakingly moved to the new location. The Kenny family remained in the original section, and the Smith family moved into the relocated one.
“If you look closely at the Island Manor House today you will see that one portion sits lower than the other since the new foundation was not built to the original height,” Jerry says. “These houses were used as separate residences for many decades.”
Construction on the causeway connecting Chincoteague with the mainland began in 1919. That was not soon enough, however, to be of use to the town in a great fire that broke out the following year, the same one in which the fledgling Volunteer Fire Department of Chincoteague was founded. Departments from the mainland were unable to assist in putting out the conflagration, and the town was nearly destroyed, with much of Main Street and many of the buildings along it succumbing to the flames.
Chincoteague survived but another major fire struck the town just four years later, in 1924. In response to this, some forty local women decided to form an auxiliary to the volunteer fire department and to hold an annual fundraiser to support the efforts of the firefighters.
The event that grew out of this resolution is today Chincoteague’s great claim to fame and has been related to millions of readers in the classic children’s tale Misty of Chincoteague, published by Marguerite Henry in 1946. Every year on the last Wednesday in July, a certain number of feral ponies are rounded up on nearby Assateague Island and swum across the channel separating it from Chincoteague. Pony Penning Day is celebrated the following day as the ponies are auctioned off at a carnival that includes bake sales and other means of raising money for the volunteer fire department. (Any of the ponies that do not sell are swum back to Assateague on Friday.)
Over the years, the annual festival increasingly began to attract people from around the country and to draw attention to the area’s great natural beauty, its beaches, its wildlife, its seafood, it history, and its seclusion. Now, hundreds of thousands of visitors come to the island every year, swelling the ranks of its 4,500 regular inhabitants and supporting the dense collection of inns, hotels, restaurants, boutiques, and bookstores that fill the small downtown.
With demand growing for places to accommodate those visitors, some prospective innkeepers purchased the historic Kenny and Smith residences in the 1980s—the latter from the descendants of its original inhabitant—and converted it into one of the island’s first bed-and-breakfasts, which they named the Little Traveler’s Inn. They decided to reconnect the two homes and built the long sunroom that now unifies the structure.
New owners acquired the inn in the early 1990s and changed the name to the one it currently bears as both a tribute to the year it was built and to gentrify its image a little. They expanded the scope of the establishment, increasing the number of guest rooms to the eight the property currently has and adding the red brick courtyard—complete with rosebushes and a three-tired fountain—that now lies between the two wings.
Then, in 2003, Jerry and his partner Andrew Dawson took over the 1848 Island Manor House.
“I decided to go into business for myself and started looking for a bed-and-breakfast,” says Jerry, who taught public school for six years in Kentucky and then went on to do corporate training in northern Virginia for four. “I had been to the eastern shore several times but had never been to Chincoteague until I actually came to look at property, and I loved Chincoteague and Assateague and [their] history.”
The things real estate disclosure laws require people to reveal about a property when they sell it, however, do not include the presence of ghosts, and Jerry soon began to experience some strange things. He eventually came to the conclusion that three ghosts dwell within the 1848 Island Manor House, and that they are a little girl, a woman dressed as a Civil War-era nurse, and a middle-aged man with the attire and demeanor of a butler.
Jerry says his favorite is probably the little girl, who appears to be between seven and ten years of age. “She’s our little
prankster and enjoys playing chess. The reason I know that is when I’m here by myself and no one [else] has been here, I’ve actually seen [that] chess pieces have been moved, as if a game is in progress,” he says, referring to the chessboard in the sunroom.
Jerry is not alone in having experienced ghostly presences in the house, he says, and that many guests have as well. “Typically after breakfast on their last day here,” Jerry says, people who have experienced something out of the ordinary “will ask me if we have ghosts.”
In particular, Jerry says, during his time at the inn at least five or six couples have related having a similar experience in the Joseph Kenny room, the one in which my wife and I stayed. Typically, he says, the wife will wake up and hear someone walking around in the room, and assume it is her husband—until she notices he is still in bed with her. The husband, on the other hand, will dream about a woman dressed as a Civil War-era nurse who comes into the room, goes through it as if making her rounds, and then departs.
“And never before have we ever published this on our Web site [or] done any interviews or anything about it. So, it’s not like they’ve read it somewhere and brought those stories with them.” His interview for this book, Jerry says, is the first time he has discussed the hauntings at the 1848 Island Manor House for the record.
The third ghost, which appears to be that of a middle-aged servant, is the least obtrusive of the three, Jerry says, but has still been noticed by both him and a number of guests. Women in particular, he says, have heard a voice calling to them from the uppermost room at the front of the Kenny house, but have been unable to make out the words that are apparently being spoken to them.
Other local residents have also confirmed that they believe ghosts are present in the 1848 Island Manor House. Most notable is artist Katherine Kiss, owner of the nearby Guinevere’s boutique, who says she is sensitive to the presence of spirits and has also confirmed that the inn is home to at least three ghosts. (Katherine has also noticed ghosts in at least one other house in Chincoteague, and says that the town hosts a relatively high number of them by virtue of the fact that it is such an old community.)
Jerry says he has tried to research a connection between these ghosts and the properties that comprise the inn and has spoken with previous owners about it but has not been able to; the nurse is perhaps the most obvious and could certainly have been one of the women that tended wounded soldiers during the war. But why she and the others have remained in the house is by no means clear.
A mischievous little girl purportedly haunts the 1848 Island Manor House and has been credited with moving around the pieces of the chess board in this sunroom.
One theory is that they are happy at the inn and, while they may eventually resolve whatever issues have kept them upon the material plane and eventually move on or fade away, for the time being they are relatively content where they are.
And the fact that no connection can be proven between the ghosts and the history of the house is not necessarily significant, Katherine says. They might have been inadvertently brought in over the years by a visitor to the site and simply remained there because it felt right to them.
I did not experience any dreams of a Civil War nurse while at the inn (although I will admit that the active and melodic wind chimes in the courtyard outside my window did give my sleep a somewhat otherworldly quality). Nor did my wife and I experience anything indicative of a supernatural presence (despite her repeated and vocal assertions of hope that we would). If what Jerry says about the personalities of the ghosts living in his establishment is true, however, then encountering evidence of their presence would have only enhanced an already enjoyable visit.
CHAPTER 15
Colonial Williamsburg
WILLIAMSBURG
Spirits that have been dormant for centuries can be awakened by a flurry of activity and sounds. In the 1920s and 1930s, a major restoration project found the village of Williamsburg undergoing complete re-creation. It is possible that the constant pounding of hammers and the digging by archaeologists may have jolted some of these spirits from their sleep.
—Jackie Eileen Behrend, The Hauntings of Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown
MANY TIMES OVER THE YEARS I have walked the darkened streets of Colonial Williamsburg late at night, often in an attempt to clear my head a bit after some party before turning in. Despite the fact that on any number of those occasions not a single other living human being was in sight, I often felt that I was not alone, and that other people were moving about me on the ancient byways of the sleeping town.
Colonial Williamsburg—one point of the “Historic Triangle” that also includes Jamestown and Yorktown—is the historic district of the modern city of Williamsburg and includes many of the buildings that were part of the capital of the British colony of Virginia from 1699 to 1780 (although its first structures were built as early as 1632). Located on the high point of the Virginia Peninsula about halfway between the James and York Rivers, the town was prominent both geographically and as a center of politics, education, and culture. It was named in honor of King William III of Great Britain.
After the Revolutionary War began, the capital was moved to Richmond, fifty-five miles to the west, for security reasons and never returned to Williamsburg, which thereafter slipped into relative obscurity for several decades. It regained some prominence during the Civil War, when Union and Confederate forces fought for control over the strategic area it commanded. It returned to a somewhat sleepy and increasingly marginalized existence for the following half-century or so, however, and the historic district began slowly to decay.
Then, in the early 20th century, millionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr., his wife, Abby, and the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin began to champion the restoration of Williamsburg as a way to educate people and honor the patriots who participated in the struggle for American independence. Spurred by their efforts, renovation of the district began in 1926 and continued initially into the 1930s—and since then into the present—during which time existing buildings were restored as closely as possible to how they were thought to have looked during the 18th century. Many vanished Colonial-era structures were also reconstructed on their original sites. All signs of later improvements and buildings were removed.
Today, the historic area is run as a living history center that interprets life in Colonial America through dozens of authentic or accurately recreated buildings and exhibits. Most of the roughly five hundred buildings in the historic district are open to visitors—with the exception of several that serve as residences for Colonial Williamsburg personnel—and some eighty-eight of them are original.
In the nearly two decades I have lived in Virginia, I have visited Colonial Williamsburg at least seven times for a variety of reasons, including family vacations, research for my Living History magazine, and for an annual conference that I used to attend on behalf of yet another magazine. Other than a distinct feeling that this oldest city of Virginia intersects with the unseen world, I never saw anything that I would take as credible evidence for the presence of ghosts. Innumerable other people have, however, and it would be completely accurate to say that the population of ghosts purported to haunt the district far exceeds the number of living people who now dwell within it (most of whom are now researchers and historical interpreters affiliated with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation that was initially endowed by Rockefeller).
My wife, brother, and I all spent a weekend at Williamsburg in the 1990s and stayed at a historic property called the Chiswell-Bucktrout House, one of the historic properties associated with the Williamsburg Inn (which had once served as accommodations for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during a visit to her government’s former colonial capital).
This two-story, nine-room house does, in fact, have a violent past, and its owner, mercurial military officer Colonel John Chiswell, was accused of murder in 1766. Freed on bail pending his trial, he was himself discovered dead before the court could det
ermine his guilt or innocence. A number of ghost stories have been associated with this house over the years, and with the detached kitchen (now also used as lodgings), including tales of sleeping people being awakened by ghosts touching or talking to them. I recall sleeping rather heavily the weekend I spent there, however, during which I discovered the delights of fortified wine, a Colonial-era favorite.
Just a few blocks northeast of the Chiswell-Bucktrout House, at the east end of Duke of Gloucester Street, is the old capitol—the first such building in America—a large structure that has been carefully recreated and landscaped as closely as possible to its original 18th century appearance with the help of period descriptions and illustrations. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry were among the famous members of the House of Burgesses who met there in its day. Fire destroyed it in 1747, after which it was rebuilt, falling into disrepair and eventually being abandoned after the state capital was moved to Richmond, and the building now standing on the site is a 1930s recreation of the 1705 building.
A number of ghost stories have been associated with this site, but while it is possible that some or even many of them are true, they generally seem more fanciful and have a less credible ring to me than many.
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