Ghosthunting Virginia

by Michael J. Varhola

  Quakers settled in the area in the early 19th century and at one point made up about a third of the population. After a few decades, however, they moved on to points north and west—taking with them, one might note, their pacifist ways.

  Indeed, when the Civil War began, the county was home to 884 white males, ages 17 to 34—out of a total population of 8,012—and some 600 of them volunteered for military service under the Confederacy within six months. Stubbornness, a sense of adventure, and loyalty to Virginia, Alderman says, were the main motivations (slavery not being an issue to them, there being only 261 slaves in the entire county at the time).

  Much has been written about the courthouse shooting, especially in the days, weeks, and months following it. In many of the contemporary newspaper accounts, the Allens and their kin were depicted as barbaric hillbillies, while in the writings of their apologists they are characterized as people who, despite being the salt of the earth, were inexplicably persecuted by enemies and sorely misunderstood by the public.

  The truth, as always, would seem to be somewhere in between. What is known for sure is that Floyd Allen had a reputation as a mean-spirited bully who had a practice of intimidating his neighbors and threatening to kill them. In 1904, Floyd had nonfatally shot a man for buying a piece of land that he himself wanted. He was fined a mere $100 for this attack after threatening to kill the judge and jurors if he was convicted and sent to jail. So, the ongoing debate aside, it would seem to the dispassionate observer that what happened when Floyd ended up in court again eight years later was something he had made a practice of threatening to do.

  Like the shooting itself, the events that led to Floyd Allen being in the courtroom the day of the shooting are still hotly debated (and, while somewhat sordid, are much less interesting than is warranted by the amount of attention they have received). A short version is that when two of his nephews, Wesley and Sidna Edwards, were arrested the previous year for brawling outside a church over a girl, Floyd rescued them from the sheriff and his deputy while they were being transported to jail. Accordingly, he was charged with “Illegal Rescue of Prisoners” and, after several continuances, had a trial date set for March 12, 1912.

  He was convicted pretty quickly by a jury of his peers and sentenced by Judge Thornton L. Massie to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

  “Gentlemen,” Floyd Allen announced as the judge finished speaking. “I just ain’t a goin.’” And then all hell broke loose.

  Ultimately, Floyd Allen did go. Shot in the ensuing altercation and too wounded to flee, he went to jail, even as he declared he would not. And a year later, on March 28, 1914, he went to the electric chair, followed eleven minutes later by his son Claud. Three of his relatives, including his nephews Friel Allen and Wesley Edwards and his brother J. Sidna Allen, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eighteen to thirty-five years.

  In May 2008, my wife and I visited Hillsville and a number of sites associated with the courthouse shooting in an attempt to piece together as well as we could what had happened at the site and what the lasting effects of it might be.

  Our first stop had been the day before we reached Hillsville, in nearby Galax, where we had visited Harmon’s Outlet, a Western store that operates a museum of local history in a large back room. We learned a bit about the shooting there and picked up the book recommended by the staff, the Memoirs of J. Sidna Allen: A True Narrative of What Really Happened at Hillsville, Virginia. We later learned that the owner of the store is a member of the pro-Allen camp in the ongoing debate about the shooting and, as we started to read through the book, immediately learned it was a rather smug apologia.

  “… a pistol cracked loudly. The sound indicated that the shot had been fired in the southeast corner of the room. Looking in that direction, I saw flashing guns in the hands of Dexter Goad, clerk of the court, and Lew Webb, the sheriff. Their weapons, I thought, were pointed directly at Floyd Allen and apparently they were attempting to kill him,” Allen writes. “Snatching out my revolver I began firing at Goad, for by this time he was popping away at me.”

  If the clerk and sheriff had attempted to summarily execute Floyd Allen in a courtroom filled with some three hundred people, their dastardly plan backfired on them disastrously. Those killed included Webb, presiding Judge Thornton L. Massie, Commonwealth’s Attorney William Foster, juror Augustus Fowler, and spectator Betty Ayers. Goad was among the many wounded.

  We moved on to our second stop, Devil’s Den, later the same day. A cluster of irregular caves at the bottom of a steep, wooded mountainside, it served as a hideout for a couple of the Allen clan gunmen in the weeks after the shooting. Our investigation confirmed to my complete satisfaction that it was actually haunted, but the presence of ghosts in it probably has nothing to do with the gun fight at the Carroll County Courthouse, as none of the shooters died—or are known to have killed anyone else—at the site. (It was a significant enough site to me, however, to devote a separate chapter to it in this section.)

  Our venture into Devil’s Den accomplished, we moved up the Blue Ridge Parkway a little ways to the Volunteer Gap Inn, where we spent the night. While we were there, we chatted with proprietors Ron and Deena McKinney. Ron told us about the local area and what he knew about the Carroll County Courthouse shooting, and filled in the gaps in our knowledge a little bit. Ron and I also compared notes about our respective experiences at Devil’s Den, which he had visited the month before and found to be pretty creepy as well.

  The next morning we hit the road and headed north toward the third stop on our journey. A few miles outside of Hillsville, we came to the home of J. Sidna Allen, who prior to the shooting had been a prosperous merchant and property owner and had had the Victorian mansion built shortly before the incidents to which he was party. Floyd Allen spent the night before the final day of his trial here, and many believe that it was here the two brothers formulated their plan for what would occur the following day.

  Open to visitors on an irregular basis, the house is widely considered in the local neighborhood to be haunted. No one was there to show people around when we arrived, and the place was locked up. However, I walked around it anyway and peeked through the shuttered windows to see what I could, while Diane kept an eye on the car. Whether the house was haunted or not I couldn’t tell, but it certainly was creepy. The once-beautiful home was now neglected and crumbling from a lack of care, and inside its unfurnished rooms I could see little piles of debris scattered about.

  The approach to the historic but crumbling and uncared-for J. Sidna Allen house, believed by many to be haunted by the ghost of its embittered former owner

  Circling around the property, I passed by the back of the house and a number of outbuildings, and saw the same sort of neglect. On a rational level, I knew my apprehension that someone with a leather mask and a chainsaw would come running out at me from one of several half-closed doors was a product of the kinds of movies I watched, but I still felt kind of nervous and didn’t linger. Returning to the car, I continued on the last few miles into Hillsville and the Carroll County Courthouse.

  We visited the historic courthouse on a Sunday, when it is normally closed. I had made several calls to the numbers given for it and the museum the week before we made our trip to southwestern Virginia in an attempt to arrange a tour or interview, but no one bothered to return our calls. Sometimes, declaring oneself a ghosthunter makes people decide they don’t need to respond, and sometimes they just aren’t very courteous or professional to start with, and we had no way of knowing what the case was here.

  Getting inside certainly would have been a plus, but even if we had spent another night in the area it would not have done any good, as the courthouse and museum were also closed on Mondays (not to mention, it was also Memorial Day). That was disappointing, as a firsthand examination of the courtroom would have been key to our assessment of whether or not it was haunted. And the museum was supposed to feature a number of relevant exhibits, including a number of
pieces of furniture crafted by J. Sidna Allen while he was in the state penitentiary.

  That left us with access only to the exterior of the building. A largely neoclassical structure completed in 1874, it combines elements of various traditional courthouse forms, including an arcaded Doric portico in front of an arcaded ground floor and flanking wings, and is topped with an octagonal pinnacled cupola. In front of it is the Confederate war memorial that the Allens had used as cover while making a fighting withdrawal from the courthouse.

  As I walked around the courthouse taking pictures, however, I was fortunate enough to discover that the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce was open that day and that its offices—also located in the basement of the courthouse—were manned by the chamber’s executive director, Roger Hawthorne. I quickly went back to the car and rousted Diane, who had opted to wait for me there while I took pictures.

  Hawthorne chatted with us for awhile about the courthouse and the shooting, and then very graciously showed us around the outside of it a little bit, pointing out some places where bullet holes from the 1912 shootout had been left in stairs leading up to the main entrance.

  We did not see any signs of ghosts while we were in Hillsville, but I suspect there is a pretty good chance some were there. There was a measure of justice, after all, and Floyd Allen did ultimately pay for his crimes with his life, as did his son. And three others served time in prison for their part in the lawless act.

  And yet the ghosts of the Carroll County Courthouse are not quiet. Possibly it is because after he had served a mere eleven years of his sentence, J. Sidna Allen had his sentence commuted when he was pardoned by the governor of Virginia. Maybe it is because people in and around Hillsville still besmirch the names of the dead and charge them with the crimes that led to their deaths. Perhaps it is because they continue to hope into death that there will ultimately be justice for the acts that ended their lives.

  CHAPTER 19

  Devil’s Den

  FANCY GAP

  Dipping into the surrounding thorny woods, you find the Devil’s Den, a cave carved inside the Blue Ridge with a name inspired by mystery, legend, and a network of seemingly endless channels. A folk tale says a man once spent a week inside this fault cave and came out three miles down the mountain. Exactly where the cave goes, it seems, is unknown.

  —Joe Tennis, Southwest Virginia Crossroads

  ON THE SUNDAY BEFORE MEMORIAL DAY in 2008, my wife and I spent a couple of hours at the Devil’s Den Nature Preserve, a 240-acre park located at the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Escarpment, overlooking the foothills of North Carolina. It is right outside of Fancy Gap and just a few miles from the nearest entrance to the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. That it warrants investigation far beyond what we were equipped to do during our short visit is an understatement.

  What originally led us to the Devil’s Den was a list of “Ghostly Haunts in Virginia” posted on the official tourism Web site of the Commonwealth of Virginia. “Huge rocks mark the entrance to the Devil’s Den,” the Web page says, “a cave that played a role in local history in association with the infamous 1912 Carroll County Courthouse shooting.” This Web site cites but a single reference, the National Register of Haunted Locations, and implies that it is the source for the information on the “Virginia is for Lovers” Web site.

  Beyond that single reference, however, source material on Devil’s Den proved very difficult to find, as did any actual ghost stories about it. The National Register of Haunted Locations—a publication of Dale Kaczmarek’s Ghost Research Society—seemed like a good first place to start, but there were no references in it to the site. Likewise, Internet searches, perusals through books of ghost stories written as early as the 1930s, even explorations through old histories of Carroll County, where it is located, revealed very little. Presumably, there is something more published about Devil’s Den than what I was able to find, but it is not easy to locate.

  Other bits of information I was able to obtain prior to our visit included that J. Sidna Allen, one of the men who participated in the lethal gun battle at the nearby Carroll County Courthouse in 1912, fled into the hills following the attack and apparently took refuge at Devil’s Den for some time (likely a factor in it becoming a tourist attraction in the 1920s). It seems that the place had a history of being used as a hiding place for as long as anyone could remember and that it had very possibly sheltered escaped slaves as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

  Once at the park, we were able to get a little more information from a sign at its entrance off Cemetery Road. It was the sort of charming information I usually found best to keep to myself, my wife generally finding it much less amusing than I do.

  “The Devil’s Den Cave is within the preserve and accessed by a strenuous path,” the sign said in part. “Some areas are very DANGEROUS. Along the trail to the cave are cliffs and rocky ledges, which are not visible below your feet. Watch where you step, as a fall from these areas would result in SERIOUS INJURY or DEATH. … Wild animals, including bears, are in the area. Do not try to feed or taunt them.” The surrounding area would have been even wilder in centuries past, and it is little wonder that fugitive slaves and outlaws—those who could resist the urge to taunt the local dangerous wildlife, in any event—figured they could obtain a certain amount of sanctuary there.

  We drove through the entryway and past the fenced Morris family cemetery on the left. A number of cars were parked just beyond it, and it was not immediately obvious to us that this was the parking area for the preserve, and we continued on to a dead-end near some utility infrastructure before we realized our mistake. (Gas prices aside, I will never regret using an SUV for expeditions like this.) Our mistake did provide us with a view into a wooded ravine containing an old house, evidently the Robert S. Harris Farmstead, a late-19th-century dwelling that is currently being renovated for use as a future exhibit at the park (and, based on its appearance alone, is almost certainly haunted).

  Diane and I parked in the grassy field alongside a number of other vehicles, exchanged pleasantries with some of the other people milling about, and tried to obtain any additional information we could about the site. Some kids told us they had spotted several snakes while hiking on the trail that disappeared into the nearby wood line—something we were not too happy to hear.

  A sign at the head of the trail indicated it led a mere 0.46 miles to the Devil’s Den. As we followed it into the wood line, it began to descend immediately through thick vegetation. To our right, the hill sloped back up toward the meadow where we had started. To the left, it tumbled away into a rocky, forested ravine. Stands of pine alternated with groves of leafy trees of various sorts, and thick clumps of mountain laurel clung to a number of dark, rocky outcroppings. The one thing that moderated the wildness of the place was the presence of periodic benches, perhaps a half dozen of them, placed at the side of the trail. These seemed a bit extraneous for such a short trail, and we did not avail ourselves of them (their utility became apparent on the steep walk back, however, when we made use of every one of them).

  After perhaps a quarter mile the trail became steeper and rougher, and, maybe a quarter mile after that, it split. We went to the left, following some crude blazes on the trees, and we could hear a group of four following a ways behind us head noisily off to the right.

  Path leading to Devil’s Den

  The way only got worse as we progressed and lost most of its claim to being called a trail. To our right, it fell away into a wooded gorge, a fall into which would certainly have resulted in some injury. On our left, it wound around the edge of the hill, curving out of sight so that we had no sense of what was just ahead of us.

  “Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” Diane asked me a little bit irritably.

  “How,” I asked, turning to give her a hand over a particularly rough spot, “could I possibly be sure we’re going in the right direction? I’ve never been here before. But I obviously think we’re going in the rig
ht direction or else I wouldn’t be going this way.” Somewhere off in the direction of the other trail, we could hear the little boy in the group that had gone that way yelling that he could see the cave.

  Something about his tone, however, suggested he was lying, and I continued leading us in the direction we had chosen. And, almost immediately, we emerged onto the entryway of the Devil’s Den. Our sense was that the distance was probably one-and-a-half times as far as the sign had indicated, and that the 0.46 miles was a straight-line map measurement that did not take into account the slope of the trail.

  Devil’s Den is impressive but in no way inviting. Its entryway consists of several huge slabs of rock, rising as much as fifty feet above the approach and pitched over on each other in such a way as to produce a covered area over a forty-foot-deep pit. Various dark recesses within the pit lead deeper into the mountain, but whether their depth is ultimately a few feet or many miles was in no way immediately apparent. A number of boulders at the right side of the mouth afford hand- and footholds for anyone willing to clamber down into the pit. A tree grows out of a shelf most of the way toward the bottom, and the irregular floor is covered with a thick accumulation of leaves.

  The group we had heard before, consisting of a young man named Chris, a young woman, a boy, and a girl, showed up while we were assessing the scene. We chatted a little, I grabbed some gear out of my backpack (which I took off and left behind so as to not throw off my center of balance), and then Chris and I descended into the pit.

  The first thing we noticed was how cold it was on the floor of the cave, just forty feet down and still exposed to the outside, where the high that day was eighty-one degrees. Our breath appeared before us, and I wondered just how much colder than the prevailing fifty-five degrees (typical for caves) it was—and why that would be the case, reflecting that an unnaturally low prevailing temperature was a characteristic of some haunted places. A hundred feet or so above us, a natural oculus had opened up somewhere in the tumbled slabs of the hillside, letting in more light.