Ghosthunting Virginia

by Michael J. Varhola

  Moving around on the floor of the cave’s entryway and exploring the parts of it we could readily get to was somewhat hazardous and required quite a bit of attention. One misstep, while it would almost certainly not be fatal, could very well result in a broken ankle or some other injury that would have made getting out of the Devil’s Den difficult or impossible without considerable help.

  I clambered up toward the back of the cave and one of the main recesses that disappeared into the darkness. It was somewhat rough going, and I proceeded carefully in an attempt to keep from hurting myself or my camera. I had, shortsightedly, left my flashlight up above in my backpack, and, rather than retrieve it, for the moment I decided to just slowly work my way into the upward-twisting, narrowing passageway, periodically stopping and taking flash pictures as I went. At about the point where I could easily go no further, I took one last shot. As usual, the image I took lingered on the camera’s little display for a few seconds and, as it did, something on it caught my eye but disappeared before I could focus on it. Ahead of me in the gloom, I could hear what sounded like movement of some sort, but it was probably just dripping water. Feeling an inexplicable sense of unease, I carefully extricated myself from the end of the cave and returned to the entryway.

  I checked out one more of the dark recesses—a low, horizontal opening above the leafy floor and at the right side of the entryway. It led into an enclosed, rock-strewn shelf, and if there was anywhere I had seen so far in the cave where someone might have camped—both sheltered from the elements and out of sight from prying eyes above—this was it. Those features aside, it did not seem very appealing, and whether it continued further on into the hill I couldn’t tell.

  Needing a break, I sat down on a boulder outside the enclosed shelf and had a quick slug from my hip flask, surveying the cave as I did. There was a lot more here that warranted inspection, I reflected, and I knew I did not have the time or equipment to do it that day. I was also starting to have an eerie presentiment about something, and wanted to get out of the cave so that I could check it out.

  Clambering back out of the submerged foyer to the Devil’s Den onto the forested hillside, I found my way back to Diane, who was chatting with the young woman. She mentioned that she was a descendant of the Allens who were associated with this place and had returned to the area for an Allen family reunion that was taking place that weekend. In a way, her presence made the whole story about J. Sidna Allen hiding out in Devil’s Den all the more immediate and tangible.

  I sat down next to my wife and began to scroll through the photos I had taken, looking for one in particular. When I found it, I zoomed in as much as I could and then panned over to its left side. There, I found what I thought I had seen on the display of my camera.

  At the left side of the image, at a point that would have been immediately in front of me and close enough to touch, was what appeared to be a solid, amorphous, greenish orb floating in the mouth of the passageway (I later also found a smaller, fainter orb below it in the same image, and a second image taken back into the same area from the floor of the entryway that showed at least two orbs). It struck me that something had been right next to me down in that dark pit, and that the evidence of that had been provided to me in the very seconds after I took the picture. It was, in short, the closest I have ever come to seeing in “real time” what I took to be a manifestation of lingering spiritual energy that might more commonly be referred to as a ghost.

  Knowing something else was down there, something that might have been intelligent but certainly wasn’t living, gave me some pause, and made me wonder if I would not perhaps be inviting trouble if I clambered straight back down into that hole and tried to see more than I already had. In a sense, I had seen more than I had a reasonable expectation to see, and our mission had thus already been a success. I decided I had done enough that day, and that further investigation would have to wait for a future expedition or another group of ghosthunters altogether.

  And the question of who had died within the Devil’s Den, or had enough of an emotional attachment to it that their spirit would linger within it, was a mystery into which I would have to continue to delve.

  CHAPTER 20

  Octagon House

  MARION

  An almost frightening maze of doors opened into strange-shaped rooms and halls, but the scariest doors of all, at the end of the upstairs hall, opened onto nothing. The “dark room,” on the second floor, where there were dark blotches on the floor said to have been caused by the blood of slaves Abijah Thomas punished there, left an indelible impression on my boyish memory.

  —Mack Sturgill, Abijah Thomas and His Octagonal House

  MARION IS A LONG, NARROW, antebellum town of about 6,300 people that stretches the length of four exits along Interstate 81 and exists largely between it and the railroad that has served its various industries as long as anyone can remember. For those interested in Americana in general, it is named for American Revolutionary War hero Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion and is notable as being the birthplace of the formula for the Mountain Dew soft drink. For ghosthunters, it is the location of a couple of sites of possible interest.

  One of those—which I read about online but did not have time to visit while en route to Abingdon and the Barter Theatre, some thirty miles further to the southwest—is the Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute (a.k.a., the Southwest Lunatic Asylum). Now abandoned, it dates to the 19th century and is said to be inhabited by the spirits of patients who died while confined there. More than one thousand of those deceased patients are buried in unmarked graves in the cemetery located on its grounds, currently called “Forget-Me-Nots in Heaven Cemetery,” which is also reputed to be the site of paranormal activity.

  The other site is an octagonal-shaped house located a few miles south of Marion, about halfway between the town and the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, at the intersection of Thomas Bridge Road and aptly named Octagon House Road.

  Better known locally as the “Round House,” the “Octagon House” was built between 1856 and 1857 by planter and entrepreneur Abijah Thomas, who is believed to have personally designed its custom corner bricks. He is also said to have given the structure eight sides to make it more resistant to the wind. Most of the other buildings in the area feature the more traditional four sides and seem resilient enough, of course, begging the question if whether aesthetics might not have been a more logical motivating factor.

  Thomas’s grandfather John—according to the book Abijah Thomas and His Octagonal House, written in the 1980s by local author Mack Sturgill—emigrated from Connecticut in the early 1760s and settled along the banks of the Holston River in southwestern Virginia. His son, Thomas, married and fathered ten children, the youngest of whom was Abijah. He married Priscilla Cavinette Scott in 1836, and they had a dozen children of their own and prospered in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

  Abijah and Priscilla named their house “Mountain View,” especially appropriate when one considers that it sits at the base of the nearby Iron Mountains and looks out at mist-shrouded Mount Rogers, the highest point in the commonwealth. It would seem that those not privileged to look out its windows are more likely to have given the place its current geometry-based labels.

  Like his immediate forebears, Abijah Thomas started out as a farmer, but eventually became, in addition, a significant local manufacturer of woolen goods, leather, and iron, and controlled a great deal of property. For whatever reasons, however, he had a bad habit of not actually paying for the assets he acquired, and his debts grew—and his creditors grew more inflamed—in the years prior to, during, and after the Civil War. Fate and the legal system eventually caught up with him in a lengthy, complicated trial that began in 1869 and concluded with an 1874 decree that his assets be sold off at public auction.

  When Abijah Thomas died of pneumonia at the relatively young age of 62 in 1876 he apparently still lived at the Octagon House but was penniless. Funerals had been
held at the house for a number of people who had died in the years since it was built—including one for one of his daughters—and to these was added a service for its owner.

  Whether these sad events contributed to the home being haunted, it is currently rumored to be, and a number of stories have been told about things people claim to have seen or otherwise experienced in the Octagon House. Many of the associated stories are based on the largely unsubstantiated premise that Thomas tortured the dozen slaves he owned, and that the property is now haunted by the tormented spirits of these unfortunates. It is just as likely, one would think, to be inhabited by the spirit of the man who fortune would have driven from it.

  Visitors to the home have reported the following phenomenon: hearing strange noises throughout the building, including screams, cracking of whips, and rattling of chains; seeing blood seeping through and dripping down one of the walls; feeling a cold, tingling sensation while standing at the foot of the stairs to the second floor; and being driven out of the house or off its grounds by an angry spirit of some sort.

  “This place is really haunted,” one online posting from 2007 states. “I [live] right behind it, my husband and I keep up the grounds … so we can walk our three dogs on [the] property … [My] daughter has [photographed] an old man’s face and also heard kids crying.” No convenient digital images or audio recordings accompany this brief testimonial.

  My wife and I visited the Octagon House on Memorial Day weekend in 2008. The crumbling, boarded-up edifice appeared in front of us suddenly as we looked for our turnoff onto the road named for it, and we turned onto the rising dirt track and began to creep along it, looking for a place to park. We passed the clearly abandoned eight-sided building and right afterward came to a small, newer, occupied house behind it (where the person who posted the message mentioned in the previous paragraph presumably lives and which, according to some sources, has been occupied since sometime during or after 2002). We used its driveway to turn around and headed back to a small, steep turnoff in front of the house that was just wide enough for one car and just long enough to get us off the road.

  I collected my camera and got out of the car, while my wife proceeded to recline her seat and prop her feet up on the dashboard. I turned my attention to the two-story house and began to walk toward it through the long grass surrounding it and across patches of brick flagging that had originally been part of a circular driveway that curved up to the main entrance from either direction.

  Approaching the front door, located on the west side of the building, I saw a sign indicating that the place was private property and that entry was prohibited.

  Moving clockwise around the building to its next side, I came to the first of the two large ground-floor windows set into it, the first of which was uncovered and had its glass broken out, so that I could peer inside. The interior was gutted and in bad shape—the plaster completely stripped from some of the walls and from patches on the ceiling—and it had clearly been a very long time since anyone had dwelled within the place (according to one source, the building was actually condemned in the early 1970s).

  I continued around the building, taking pictures as I went and looking for anything of note. As I approached the rear of the house, the three-or-so dogs in the place next door began barking, and I was glad that they did not sound very large.

  At the back of the house, another one of the broken-out windows was uncovered, and when I looked through it I could see that many of the floorboards were missing and ground was showing just a few feet below their level. I reflected that some of the stories about the Octagon House had prominently featured a “haunted cellar” where slaves had been tortured and killed, but it did not appear as if one extended under the area into which I was looking, which would likely be the case if one existed at all. Likewise, there was no evidence of an exterior cellar entrance anywhere around the building, which would have been typical of a structure from this era.

  Despite the lack of physical evidence for a cellar, stories persist about people who have stood at the rear of the house on the spot above where a cellar used to be and both heard screams and been confronted or driven away by an angry ghost. Whether or not these accounts are true, of course, has nothing to do with whether a cellar ever actually existed or not. And while it is certainly possible that some sort of cellar that has subsequently been filled in once existed behind the building, it is much more likely that some sort of long-gone wooden outbuilding served as the site of any atrocities that might have occurred (e.g., a summer kitchen apparently once existed directly behind the house, and a number of outbuildings, including wooden slave quarters, still stood at least into the 1930s).

  Some of the accounts that cite a cellar do, in any event, seem to correspond geographically with “the large cistern to the right of the rear entrance,” accordingly to the recollections of author Mack Sturgill, which “was extremely deep.” This feature was not evident during my visit, but even if covered or filled in could be the focus of some psychic energy if it once was the site of some tragedy or atrocity.

  A windowless “dark room” at the center of the house and on its second floor is also a prominent location for ghost stories associated with the site and has a similar reputation as a place of torment (although, according to sources cited in the Sturgill book, the room was used for storage and not punishment, the dark stains reputed to mark its floor left by the contents of broken jars of food).

  I did not venture into the Octagon House, the combination of no-trespassing signs, a hazardous interior with presumably treacherous floors and stairways, and a disapproving spouse collectively serving to dissuade further investigation. I was thus unable to personally examine the “dark room” or any other parts of the house that I could not look directly into. That, along with the fact that it was a bright, sunny day in late spring, makes it not too surprising that I did not sense anything of a paranormal nature.

  The Octagon House, however, does warrant further investigation by a ghosthunting group able to secure permission from the owners to explore the place (or even attempt to spend the night within it). Another story claims that visitors to the site on the night of December 1—the anniversary of Abijah Thomas’s death—can witness an eerie, blue-white light moving from a nearby graveyard to the house and then back again, believed by some to be the former owner seeking in death what he lost in life. If I ever have the opportunity to expand my exploration of the site, it will probably be on that day, when any number of conditions will likely increase the chance of experiencing whatever the Octagon House has to offer.

  CHAPTER 21

  U.S. Route 58

  LEE, SCOTT, WASHINGTON, GRAYSON, CARROLL, AND PATRICK COUNTIES

  Climbing into Patrick County, Virginia’s longest road becomes the “Crooked Road,” a driving trail connecting the musical hot spots of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Highlands. This scenic area’s name comes from early explorers who found a haze over the highlands that appears blue at a distance. Here, trout streams tumble into tiny waterfalls … as [Route] 58 curls, climbs, and becomes quite crooked, indeed.

  —Joe Tennis, Beach to Bluegrass

  WHILE IT MAY NOT BE actually haunted itself, the westernmost stretch of U.S. Route 58, which winds through some of the most rugged and beautiful terrain in the state, connects a number of strange and possibly ghost-ridden places. It is, at the very least, mysterious, special, perhaps even enchanted, and under the right conditions can seem to travelers to intersect at certain points with the unseen world.

  “I don’t know so much that 58 is a haunted highway,” author Joe Tennis told me when we spoke about the road. And he certainly knows Route 58 as well as anyone does, having spent much of his life at various locations along its length and celebrated it in his 2007 book Beach to Bluegrass: Places to Brake on Virginia’s Longest Road. But, he continued, “It is a very under-appreciated corridor with fascinating stories to tell.” Tennis has suggested in his various works that more than one spot along its length m
ight yet be occupied by the spirits of those who once traveled along it in life. Two such sites are in Abingdon, near the western end of Route 58.

  One of these is the Barter Theatre, widely believed to be haunted by several ghosts, including that of its founder, Robert Porterfield, an actor from the Abingdon area who found himself hungry and out of work in New York City during the Great Depression. He returned home, opened the theatre, and, as its name implies, allowed local people to trade produce for theatre tickets. His spirit has been seen in the theatre many times (Barter Theatre is the subject of its own chapter in this book).

  Another is the Martha Washington Inn, a historic hotel established in what was once a women’s college that has been the site of many ghostly phenomena. The spirit most often said to haunt the inn, often referred to as “Beth,” is believed to have been a student nurse at what was then known as Martha Washington College when the Civil War began and it was converted to a hospital. When one of the wounded men she cared for was dying, he asked her to play her violin for him, and she complied. To this day, many people have said, her music can still be heard, especially in room 403 and on nights when the moon is full. Some people have even claimed to have seen her. A number of other ghosts, including one of a maimed and bleeding Civil War soldier, have also been spotted at the inn.

  My wife and I spent part of Memorial Day weekend 2008 in Abingdon, and spent some time at the Barter Theatre when we were there. Our investigation there concluded, we headed out along Route 58 on an eastward journey that would ultimately take us to the Devil’s Den Nature Preserve and the haunted courthouse at Hillsville (both of which are covered in separate chapters of this book).