Today, Belle Grove appears much as it did in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and is a National Historic Landmark, a Virginia Historic Landmark, and a historic property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Its features include the mansion itself, original outbuildings, a 1918 barn, an overseer’s house, and a slave cemetery, as well as gardens, fields, meadows, and an apple orchard.
Belle Grove today appears much as it did in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
My wife and I visited Belle Grove Plantation in April 2008 during a ghosthunting expedition to the northern Shenandoah Valley. The various charms of the place were not enough to induce her to get out of the car, and, as I walked through the parking area, out of the corner of my eye I could see a small pair of feet appear on the passenger side of the windshield. Assuming these were not the spectral extremities of Hetty Cooley, I continued on toward the house.
Several female docents ranging from teenaged to grandmotherly were present in the entry area and gift shop when I went into the main building, and I approached one of them and told her what my interests were. She responded by informing me that the director of the museum discourages the staff from telling ghost stories or expressing a belief that Belle Grove is haunted. She believed it was, however, based on her experiences and those of others who work at the plantation, and agreed to talk with me on condition of anonymity.
“There was an attack on the property,” she said, confirming the published account of the incident that I had read, “and one of the slaves actually attacked the wife of the home’s owner.” She was a little fuzzy as to whether the brutally beaten woman had been found in the smokehouse or the icehouse, but details like that don’t actually have much to do with the essential truth or falsity of a tale. She went on to confirm the story of the conflict between the mistress of Belle Grove and the impertinent slave who was convicted of mortally beating her.
“Her ghost actually wanders around here,” she said of the murdered woman. When I asked for an example of this spirit’s manifestation, she told me a story she was personally familiar with.
They had the carpets and rugs taken up and cleaned a couple of years ago. Once they had been cleaned and were ready to be returned, Belle Grove staff arranged to have them delivered on a Saturday before 5 P.M., which is when the site normally closes.
“The driver was running late, and got here about six, after everyone was gone,” my source explained. Hoping to find someone to whom he could turn over his truckload of floor coverings, he came up and knocked on the front door. A lady in period dress opened up the door, and didn’t say anything to him, even when he identified himself and asked where she wanted him to drop off the carpets, merely pointing silently to a spot down the hall. So, he carried the carpets in and put them down where the lady had indicated. The docent continued, “She didn’t say anything to him the whole time, and he said he felt that was kind of odd,” but accepted that, for whatever reason, she might just not have wanted to say anything. He thanked her for her help and then left.
“The next day, when the docent in charge came in and opened up,” she discovered that all the carpets had been delivered, my source said. “She called the cleaning company and asked them when they had delivered them. They put the driver on the phone with her,” and he explained what had happened.
The docent in charge was, understandably, shaken, and verified that the alarms had not been tampered with and that none of the staff had been at the house the previous evening after it had closed. She, and many of her coworkers—among them the docent I spoke with—believe that the driver had encountered the unquiet spirit of Hetty Cooley. Similar incidents have convinced them that Belle Grove is indeed haunted and that the ghosts of its previous inhabitants continue to walk its halls. Yet other stories involve Civil War soldiers and are similar to those told about the Cedar Creek Battlefield in general.
While I did not experience anything out of the ordinary at Belle Grove, I do believe that other people have and that it is a site of probable significance to anyone interested in haunted sites. Visitors with such interests, however, will need to be a bit circumspect in their inquiries if they want to obtain any useful information. And, unless something changes in the attitudes of the people in charge of the site, no one is likely to get permission to do a formal investigation or anything out of the ordinary (e.g., an overnight stay). Even my cordial letter to the president of Belle Grove Plantation’s board of trustees, requesting some statement on whether or not the place is likely haunted, was simply ignored.
It is a little off-putting that the people running the place are so set on discouraging an interest in any ghosts that might inhabit the property and—like too many people in positions of authority in a country where freedom of expression is supposed to be sacrosanct—try to control what others think and say. Indeed, this desire to hide the story of Hetty Cooley is strong enough to induce the current masters of Belle Grove to forego mentioning not just the story but the fact that the Cooley family ever dwelled at the estate in the information they make available about it (facts that can, nonetheless, be discovered and confirmed independently). However, ghosts may be less inclined to stay silent when they have something to say. And, by all accounts, the ghosts of Belle Grove have spoken, and doubtless will continue to speak, to those who want to hear to them.
CHAPTER 23
Cedar Creek Battlefield
FREDERICK, SHENANDOAH, AND WARREN COUNTIES
Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain’s door,
The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,
Telling the battle was on once more,
And Sheridan twenty miles away.
—Thomas Buchanan Read, “Sheridan’s Ride”
IN THE FOGGY, PREDAWN DARKNESS of October 19, 1864, the Confederate Army of the Valley under Leiutenant General Jubal A. Early had surprised the numerically superior Union army at Cedar Creek and quickly routed the troops of its VIII and XIX Army Corps. Alerted to the debacle while about twenty miles away in Winchester, Major General Philip Sheridan, the Federal commander, raced to the battlefield to rally his troops (as commemorated in the wartime poem “Sheridan’s Ride”).
“Little Phil” succeeded in halting the rout of his troops, rallied them, and, that afternoon, led a crushing counterattack against the rebel forces, driving them from the battlefield and regaining control of it for the Northern army. Overall, the fierce, back-and-forth conflict spilled into three counties (Frederick, Shenandoah, and Warren), involved some 52,945 men (31,945 U.S. and 21,000 C.S.), and inflicted an estimated 8,575 casualties (5,665 U.S. and 2,910 C.S.).
Sheridan’s success at Cedar Creek produced an unqualified Union victory and broke the back of the Confederate army in the region and was the high-water mark of his Shenandoah Valley Campaign, which continued until December 1864. That campaign, along with Sherman’s successes in Georgia, gave Lincoln the momentum he needed to win reelection to a second term in the White House.
Cedar Creek Battlefield is, by all accounts, a virtual hotbed of spiritual activity and should rank high on the lists of stops for ghosthunters traveling through the Old Dominion. When my wife and I visited Cedar Creek, we went straight to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation’s visitor center, located on the Valley Pike—the road down which Sheridan had rushed from Winchester to reinforce the crumbling Union line—a few miles outside of Middletown.
“I’m just going to wait in the car,” she said, reclining her seat as I opened my door to get out.
“I know, Hon,” I responded, as usual. “I won’t be long.”
And I wasn’t.
The two men staffing the visitor’s center were certainly friendly enough and were forthcoming with information of the sort likely to be of use to a conventional visitor. When I explained that my visit was for purposes of researching a book
on ghosthunting in Virginia and that I planned to devote an entire chapter of it to the Cedar Creek Battlefield, however, their demeanors cooled. They gave me the business card of the foundation’s current executive director and told me that any questions I had along my lines of interest needed to be addressed exclusively to her. (After I got home I wrote a detailed and cordial letter to the executive director of the foundation in hopes of obtaining an official statement about the many ghost stories associated with the battlefield, but I received no reply.)
Despite the reticence of the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation, innumerable ghostly sightings and stories of hauntings have been associated with the battlefield over the years, making it a key site for inclusion in this book. Such stories have been written about by ghost researcher L.B. Taylor Jr., who in the 1980s and 1990s wrote dozens of books about haunted sites in Virginia. A number of specific sites on or near the battlefield, including Belle Grove Plantation and the Wayside Inn, both covered in this book, also have rich bodies of ghostly lore associated with them, in part as a result of the battle.
Such stories began in the years immediately following the war, and included accounts by local farmers of spectral soldiers battling hand to hand in the streambeds of Cedar Creek and fields surrounding it.
Stories also began to be told of strange sightings at the Episcopal church now known as St. Thomas Chapel in Middletown, where coffins of slain soldiers had remained stacked for more than a month after the battle. These started when morbid curiosity seekers opened some of the coffins and, according to their accounts, discovered bodies that had not begun to decompose even after four or five weeks. Such stories grew to include widespread reports of ghostly candle lights moving around in the church even when it was devoid of people; phantasmal groaning and footsteps; military band music emanating from the empty house of worship; and strange, unidentifiable animals the size of calves lurking about the site.
Other phenomena have included sightings of soldiers, individually or in squads, marching across the battlefield in the gloom of twilight; sounds of cavalry units trotting along its country roads in the darkness; and various tales of barn-haunting specters and headless troopers (a la Washington Irving).
Sightings of these sorts seem to have reached a peak about a century ago (at least as far as the written record is concerned). One published, if somewhat whimsical, theory is that the ongoing tilling, planting, and harvesting of the fields has gradually driven the ghosts away (an explanation that, even if it is not true, has a certain poetical elegance). Many acres of the battlefield remain untilled, however, and tales of hauntings and ghostly sightings persist into our era and seem to be on the rise again.
As bloody as Cedar Creek was, other battles have been as bad or worse, and it is anyone’s guess why there have been so many reports of ghostly sightings at Cedar Creek in the more than 140 years since the battle was fought there.
Ghost spoor, however, is not generally evident on bright, sunny days, and we did not notice anything otherworldly during our brief visit to the Cedar Creek Battlefield. Night, fog, solitude, and any number of other ghost-friendly factors would, presumably, have made us more receptive to the presence of lurking spirits during our visit to the site.
CHAPTER 24
Poor House Road Tunnel
ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY
We recorded a really strange EVP of what sounds to me like a young child very close to the microphone. … I have been working with EVP for about three years and have never had one quite like this before, [which] seems to be of a young child saying “reach you …” This was recorded and analyzed before knowing the background and, to be honest, I was actually quite shocked to learn of the tragedy involving the young children.
—Terri Vanderlaan, Virginia Paranormal
SOME OF THE CREEPIEST and most probably haunted places are not those that are regularly seen by the living, but rather those lonely spots that people rarely pass through. One of these is certainly the tunnel on Poor House Road, a passageway of cut-stone blocks through an overgrown and unused railway embankment located on a forlorn stretch of wooded road north of Lexington.
While it is not very far off the beaten path, Poor House Road is sufficiently removed from main thoroughfares to keep most people from being aware of it, and to ensure that many people in the local area familiar with its reputation are not even sure exactly where it is. It intersects with a winding and little-used stretch of the old Valley Pike that splits off for a short distance from Route 11, along which most noninterstate traffic moves north and south through the valley.
My wife and I had learned about the Poor House Road tunnel in a detailed account posted online by Terri Vanderlaan of Virginia Paranormal, a ghosthunting group that had visited it in December 2007. We had read in that report, and from people we spoke with in Lexington, a wide range of urban legends associated with the place. These included it being a site for lynchings in years past; a story about two little girls who had been playing nearby in the woods when an unknown person shot them to death; and an account of a woman who had been raped and killed in the tunnel. Like most urban legends, whether true or not, the veracity of these stories is almost impossible to verify. We also uncovered a number of accounts about apparent paranormal phenomena, which included sightings of the spectral figure of a man who was killed by a train on the tracks above; a mist that is supposed to rise up around anyone standing in the middle of the tunnel; and the illusion of car headlights coming up behind people sitting in the tunnel at midnight, who then experience engine failure when they try to start their cars and get out of the way.
With such a rich body of associated lore, whether it was true or not, we decided the site warranted some investigation while we were in the Lexington area visiting Virginia Military Institute.
So, around 5 P.M. on May 23, 2008, we left the VMI campus and headed north up Route 11, out of town, and soon thereafter onto the short Valley Pike bypass. Near its north end, we came to the intersection with Poor House Road.
Poor House Road is a short, semi-improved, gravel-topped track flanked by heavy vegetation that has one end at its intersection with the Valley Pike and winds to its end at Reid Road, just a mile and a quarter to the northwest. It is barely more than a single lane wide, which, along with being rough, meant we found it advisable to watch our speed and keep as far to the right as possible (and that we were glad to be in an SUV). We passed one house but did not meet any oncoming traffic, however, by the time the tunnel loomed up on the road in front of us.
I parked a few hundred feet short of the tunnel. I got out of the car, grabbed my camera, and looped its strap over my neck. Diane indicated she was “just going to wait in the car,” and I heard its doors lock behind me as I walked away from it.
It was very quiet as I walked toward the south end of the tunnel, and I could not hear anything but the crunch of my hiking sneakers on the cinder road and the gurgling of a small stream that appeared to flow through the tunnel along its west side from the north. No other sounds came to me from the surrounding woods, which had spread over the years onto the crest of the embankment and choked the tracks along which trains had once run.
As I started to enter the tunnel, I stopped suddenly and an involuntary chill of fright ran up my spine as I suddenly heard voices ahead of me! I could see through to the other end of the short passageway, however, and could not make out anybody in the gloom. I strained to listen to what sounded like two or more men engaged in discussion, but could not make out any individual words, the exchange being muffled like a conversation heard through the wall of an adjoining room. I crept forward slowly, straining to listen, and as I did the words dissolved into the echoing trickle of the water flowing through the tunnel and were gone.
I moved slowly into the tunnel, the cobbled surface of which was heavily rutted and pooled with water. As I proceeded to take some pictures about midway through the tunnel, I wished I had thought to bring a flashlight with me, not so much to help me navigate my way
through the damp culvert as to make out the spray-painted graffiti on the walls and more accurately line up some shots of it. I paused in the middle and waited to see if a mist would start to rise up around me, more than half expecting that it would. There was a strange haziness around the edges of the tunnel entrances, but it seemed more likely to be a trick of the light than anything else. I continued through to the far end of the tunnel.
Back outside, I walked a few hundred feet up the road, took some pictures of the tunnel from its north end, and then walked back toward it.
As I came within about twenty feet of the tunnel, I was once again stunned to hear voices coming from it. This time, I had the impression that I was hearing two or more women speaking in frantic voices but, as before, I could not make out individual words. The sounds faded as I tried to make them out and headed back into the tunnel, once again dissolving into the sound of the trickling water. I continued through the tunnel again, taking pictures as I went and starting once when I thought I felt something brush against me in the darkness (which was probably nothing more than me coming into contact with the nearby wall).
I walked quickly back to the car and told Diane what I had experienced. None of it tempted her to get out of the car and accompany me on foot into the tunnel, but she did not object when I said we should drive through to the other side. We stopped about halfway through and I rolled down the windows to see if we could hear anything unusual, but the only sounds that came to us were those of the engine and trickling water.
Ghosthunting Virginia Page 16
