Route 58 is an east-west U.S. highway that runs through Virginia for some five-hundred miles, from the far southwestern corner of the state that meets both Kentucky and Tennessee, all the way across the southern edge of the Old Dominion to Virginia Beach. It is, in fact, the longest road in the state. Historic communities through which it passes on its journey through the mountains, the Piedmont, and ultimately down to the sea include Bristol, Abingdon, Galax, Danville, Emporia, Franklin, Suffolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach, all of which, of course, have their own ghost stories (e.g., the ones associated with Berry Hill Road and the Wreck of the Old 97 in Danville, both the subjects of chapters in this book).
Much of what was opened in 1931 as U.S. Route 58 was originally called State Route 12 and was part of the 1918 state highway system, which generally followed the current highway eastward from Abingdon to Virginia Beach. The stretch that is now part of Route 58 west of Abingdon was in those old days part of State Route 10.
An eastern, two-lane section of the highway between Emporia and Suffolk was at one time known as “The Suicide Strip,” as a result of the high number of fatal accidents that occurred along it (which decreased significantly when traffic was separated by the addition of a second roadway in the early 1990s). No such nickname seems to have been applied to the mountainous and even more treacherous western sections, which would seem more than anything else to be more a function of the road passing there through a much less densely populated area. Tragedies of the sort associated with highway accidents have, in any event, certainly produced any number of local ghost stories along the length of the road overall.
My first experience with Route 58 was in October 2002, when I was driving west along it toward Bristol in search of a place to spend the night, having climbed nearby Mount Rogers earlier that day. A storm of unprecedented fury struck that night, and lashed the forests around me as I crawled up and down along the winding road in the darkness. Great bands of lightning erupted over the ridgelines, illuminating in fairy fire the tortured landscape and leaping from hill to hill like the very devils of Appalachian folklore. (My wife, Diane, actually crossed my path in a manner of speaking that night, having likely flown right overhead on her way back to Washington, D.C., from a business trip. She can still recall looking down and seeing the strange, powerful, lightning formations erupting over the darkened landscape below her, and it was heartening to know she had been nearby during my journey.)
That was a pretty exhilarating experience, and I was glad for the opportunity to drive along that stretch of road again. Unlike my first experience, we were blessed with the characteristically beautiful weather that we experienced while doing most of the fieldwork for this book as we picked up Route 58 from where it intersects with I-81 and began following it southeastward. The road is known there locally as J.E.B. Stuart Highway, and, as we were to discover, it would have many other names just along the length we drove that day—sometimes as many as four at once. That is a peculiarity of the Old Dominion, where it seems just about any local jurisdiction can name a road whatever it wants. At one point, for example, in addition to being called Route 58 and J.E.B. Stuart Highway, the road was also labeled Wilson Highway, A.L. Philpott Memorial Highway, and possibly any number of other things as well.
Just a couple of miles into our journey, we passed a road leading down to a streambed, and I noticed it was called Drowning Ford Road. Unless it was named after a local family named “Drowning,” I reflected, it probably had some ghost stories of its own. And someone who could spend enough time along an old highway like this and wanted to hear the stories could probably find hundreds of them eventually.
After about ten miles we passed through Damascus, a little mountain town at the edge of where Route 58 enters the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, and I decided to stop and top off our tank and pick up a few provisions, not knowing how many amenities would be available on the road ahead of us. Damascus is an old town, founded in the 18th century after Daniel Boone blazed a trail through where it sits. Among the many old and strange stories associated with it are tales of Mary, a 19th-century witch whose spirit some believe still haunts the wooded hills around the town.
Once we left Damascus, the relatively straight road we had been driving on disappeared. Thereafter, Route 58 proceeded in three dimensions, moving up wooded slopes and down into sunlit gullies, heading generally east but cutting sharply north or south or even back in the direction from which it had come for short stretches. Frequently, the wooded terrain to our left—along the eastern approaches to the Iron Mountains and in the direction of Mount Rogers—sloped upward sharply, while the ground to our right fell off equally precipitously into little valleys cut through with sparkling streams. Sometimes, wooded heights surrounded us on all sides, towering over the road like some great sylvan arcade. We were struck with a profound impression of wildness and beauty that affected us very favorably and was as different from my previous experience with the road as it could have been.
Signs to be heeded along this segment of Route 58 are speed markers, which frequently called for speeds of 25 miles per hour and, in some cases, speeds as low as 15 miles per hour. Exceeding those speeds in anything less than ideal conditions could very likely reveal the treacherousness of the rugged, wooded terrain in a tragic way.
Signs less believable were those indicating distances to various towns ahead of us, including Galax, which successively went from 57, to 59, to 56. Presumably, these numbers were supposed to indicate the number of miles along the road to the points in question, and should thus not have gotten larger the further one went along the road, vicissitudes of terrain notwithstanding. During a nighttime trip by oneself, quirks like this would definitely have seemed disquietingly eerie and made one wonder if they had not somehow got turned around in the darkness.
During our journey along Route 58, we periodically passed occupied homes and farms, as well as the entrances to several state, county, and regional parks. That the area had a low population density was attested to by the Mount Rogers Unified School, a building constructed of mountain stone that has served kindergarten through twelfth grade since the 1930s. That the road was once much more significant as a commercial arterial that has been supplanted by the interstates was attested to by the many abandoned service stations we passed—perhaps as many as fifteen in a sixty-mile stretch. We passed through any number of tiny ghost hamlets as well, little clusters of boarded up buildings at lonely road junctions that had not seen life for many years.
Route 58 has its share of abandoned buildings.
Shortly after passing through Independence, we turned off north onto Riverside Drive, a loop of maybe fifteen miles that traces the beautiful New River and reconnects with Route 58 a few miles further east. We were following up on rumors we had heard of an ostensibly haunted bridge dubbed “Lovers’ Leap” by some, where two young, star-crossed lovers, their families at odds with each other, decided to become unified in death rather than remain separated in life. According to the legends, anyone passing over the span might spot the spectral images a young woman, a young man, or both together, variously calling out to each other or jumping individually or in tandem off of the bridge. We did not see any of that, but did remark upon what a melancholy spot it was, the rusting metal girders suspended over the placid river, collapsing ruins in the wood line near its north end, an ad hoc memorial to the victims of a more recent traffic accident set up at its south. A more formal and presumably nighttime investigation might very well turn up more. (“Lovers’ leaps” are, by the way, something of a state institution. As author Joe Tennis has observed: “All over the Old Dominion, so many cliffs are called Lovers’ Leap that the state’s motto should be ‘Virginia is for Leaping Lovers,’ rather than the more familiar ‘Virginia is for Lovers.’”)
Early in the afternoon we reached Galax, the first relatively large town we had seen since leaving Abingdon, and sought out Harmon’s Outlet, a local Western store located ri
ght on Route 58 (which was known there as Carrollton Pike). Deena McKinney, proprietor of the Volunteer Gap Inn, where we would be staying that night, had directed us to the outfitter and told us that it had one of the area’s better museums of local history right in its back room! We confirmed that she was right, and, after wending our way through a shelf maze of jeans and boots, spent some time browsing the long, musty room of exhibits and historic newspaper clippings. I was especially interested in the wealth of material devoted to the 1912 shooting at the Carroll County Courthouse in Hillsville, a reputedly haunted location that we would be visiting the next day. No one at the store could or would tell us anything about local ghost stories, however (a phenomena we were to experience consistently in this area).
Not long after leaving Galax we reached the juncture of Route 58 and I-77. After a brief stop for lunch, we left the historic and storied older highway and turned south onto the newer, more efficient, and considerably more austere modern road, which would take us just a short distance south to our next stop, the Devil’s Den Nature Preserve (a subject of a chapter unto itself in this book).
There are a number of other promising locations along the Route 58 corridor of potential interest to ghosthunters that we were not able to visit on this particular expedition, but which we hoped to see on future trips.
One of these is Laurel Hill, the boyhood home of Confederate Major General J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee’s flamboyant cavalry commander, located south of Route 58 and about ten miles outside the town of Claudville. “I would give anything to make a pilgrimage to the old place, and when the war is over quietly spend the rest of my days there,” Stuart told his brother in 1863. Sadly, he fell in combat in May 1864 at the Battle of Yellow Tavern near Richmond, a year before the war ended, and was never able to enjoy the rest he yearned for. Since then, stories have been told about sightings of his ghost at the estate, seeking in death the comfort he was deprived of in life.
Another site that might warrant some attention is Fairy Stone State Park, a few miles north of Route 58 near Stuart. It is famous as a source of a rare sort of mineral structure popularly dubbed “fairy stones,” which variously take the form of St. Andrew’s, Roman, and Maltese crosses. According to psychic researcher Ian Alan, these stones can bestow upon the person carrying them a multitude of benefits, depending on their form, which include “great physical and mental prowess,” “the ability to traverse … heaven and hell,” and “the power of precognitive sight, hearing, and the gift of invisibility” (he has also suggested that once benefiting from a stone but then setting it aside can draw the unwelcome attentions of ghosts and consequent negative effects). Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison both subscribed to these beliefs at least in part and carried stones accordingly. Assuming some truth behind these stories, a site that could produce such spiritually potent objects would seem to be worthy of attention by investigators of the paranormal.
While we did not see everything we wanted to, there was also no question that our journey along Route 58 had been markedly more enjoyable than the trip along I-81 we had taken into southwestern Virginia during the first two days of our trip that weekend, and confirmed my belief that—time permitting—local highways were always preferable to interstates in any number of ways.
Whether Route 58 is or is not actually a haunted highway per se, it does link numerous spots that likely are the haunts of ghosts, and I would be surprised if some investigation did not turn up paranormal phenomena along certain spots of the roadway itself. And, beyond being a useful thoroughfare for those interested in hunting ghosts in some of the most isolated parts of the Old Dominion, it is a beautiful and picturesque means of reaching them.
VALLEY
Frederick, Shenandoah, and Warren Counties
Cedar Creek Battlefield
Lexington
Virginia Military Institute
Middletown
Belle Grove Plantation
The Wayside Inn
Rockbridge County
Poor House Tunnel Road
Winchester
Virginia’s Most Haunted City
CHAPTER 22
Belle Grove Plantation
MIDDLETOWN
“As soon as I started down the driveway leading to the mansion, I sensed a ghost. I also sensed a terrible fight between two women on a dark rainy day, and a gruesome murder. I felt all this before I started the tour. And when the tour was over, I had the very strong sensation that a woman ghost followed us down and out of the house.”
—L. B. Taylor Jr., “The Vengeful Return of Hetty Cooley”
ONE WINTRY EVENING in late 1860 or early 1861, the mistress of Belle Grove was found severely beaten in the plantation’s smokehouse. She was only semiconscious, groaning helplessly in pain, unable to pull her feet out of the building’s smoldering fire pit. Much of her hair had been burned off and her head and face were bleeding from multiple wounds and had been beaten and singed almost beyond recognition. Her nose and right cheekbone were shattered, one eye was sunken into her head, and the other protruded unnaturally. She had also been choked, as evidenced by the finger marks on her throat. Four days later, she succumbed to her wounds and died without identifying her attacker.
Hetty Cooley had lived at Belle Grove for just a short time when she was attacked, and the story of the events that had apparently led to her violent death had unfolded only a matter of months earlier.
Sometime in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War that would ravage the surrounding valley, bachelor Benjamin Cooley had taken possession of Belle Grove, a grain and livestock farm, and moved into it with a small staff of servants and slaves. Within a few months, he met and then married Hetty, an attractive widow, and brought her to live with him at his new home.
Hetty began to have problems almost immediately with one of her husband’s house slaves, a young woman named Harriette Robinson who served as cook and housekeeper and was impertinent, physically intimidating, and feared by her fellow servants. According to the eventual testimony of other household staff, Harriette hated Hetty from the start, was openly disobedient to her, and made threats against her to others, expressing among other things a desire to poison her.
Tension mounted between the two women and reached a crescendo when the slave vehemently accused her mistress of stealing from her and of lying when she denied this. This apparently drove Hetty beyond the point of what she could tolerate, and she grabbed a broomstick and began to beat Harriette, who fought back. The two were grappling on the floor when other members of the household rushed in and pulled them away from each other.
Things having reached an intolerable point, Hetty implored her husband to get rid of the hostile and disobedient Harriette. For reasons unknown, however, Benjamin declined to do so.
A pall descended over Belle Grove after this, and a fearful Hetty confided to a friend named Mary Moore, who was staying at the estate, that she did not believe she would live much longer.
One afternoon soon thereafter, Hetty and Mary were sitting in the parlor of Belle Grove when the mistress of the house excused herself and went outside to attend to something. When she had not returned more than two hours later, Mary became concerned and began to look for her. When she could not find her, she asked one of the estate’s tenant farmers, James Gordon, and some of the resident slaves to help her look (Benjamin apparently being away from Belle Grove on some business).
One of the searchers heard groaning coming from inside the smokehouse but, when he tried to investigate, discovered that the door was locked. A desperate hunt for the key ensued, and, when it was found, the search party opened the door. They were greeted by the stench of burning hair and the sight of the savagely maimed and beaten Hetty.
Harriette was, naturally, the prime suspect in the attack and was arrested and tried. A preponderance of evidence and testimony from people who had heard the young woman’s threats against her mistress led to a quick conviction. Her precise sentence is today unclear, but records indicate she
died sometime thereafter while in prison.
Belle Grove has long had a reputation for being haunted, and if anything could account for this, a sordid, violent episode like the murder of Hetty Cooley—leading to two untimely deaths—certainly could. The history of the plantation, however, predates the killing by more than six decades, and it is certainly possible that previous generations of owners also made their own contributions to whatever spiritual energy may continue to linger in it.
In 1794, Major Isaac Hite, Jr., an alumnus of William and Mary College and a veteran of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, began construction on Belle Grove, using limestone quarried on the surrounding property. He was the grandson of one of the original German immigrants who had settled in the northern Shenandoah Valley, and he built upon a 483-acre tract of land that his father had given him in 1783 as a wedding gift when he married Nelly Madison, sister of future President James Madison. The stately home—which incorporates elements of Classical Revival and the architectural canons of Thomas Jefferson and features interior woodwork in a transitional style ranging from Georgian to Federal—was completed in 1797. It was, in short, as stylish and up-to-date as any fine home in the valley.
Nelly died just five years after the house was completed, having borne three children, and Hite was remarried to Ann Maury, with whom he had another ten children. Needing room to accommodate this growing brood, Hite added an extension at the west end of the house in 1815, increasing its length to a full one hundred feet.
Hite also continued to expand the plantation itself, eventually increasing his holdings to 7,500 acres, a general store, a gristmill, a sawmill, a distillery, and a workforce of more than one hundred slaves.
By the time Hite died in 1836, his empire had already started to recede a bit and, after Ann followed him fifteen years later, Belle Grove and its property were sold off to various owners outside of their family, their significant progeny notwithstanding. Benjamin Cooley acquired the house in 1860 and, in the war years that followed, it served variously as the headquarters of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and Union General Philip Sheridan and was at the middle of the savage Battle of Cedar Creek. A number of other owners followed over the ensuing decades.
Ghosthunting Virginia Page 15
