Ghosthunting Virginia

by Michael J. Varhola

  We parked a few hundred feet up the road on the north side of the tunnel. I stuffed my microcassette recorder into my pocket, and I headed back toward the dark passageway, turning on the recorder as I approached it.

  The third time I entered the tunnel on foot, I heard a cacophony of voices—like they were coming from a crowd of people that, by this time, I knew were in no physical sense in the darkness before me—and also had a sensation of music. When I strained to listen carefully and isolate something distinct, the sounds once again melted away into the gurgling of the water flowing around me.

  I walked about two-thirds of the way through the tunnel, taking pictures as I went, and then thought I heard something in the direction of the car, so I trotted back toward it. All it had been was the engine of our hybrid SUV kicking on, but both of us were pretty much ready to go, so I got back in the car and we drove up the narrow, vegetation-choked road to find a place where we could turn around. We then drove back toward the tunnel, went back through it, and headed back toward Lexington to find a place to spend the night.

  The December 2007 ghosthunting group had obtained several bits of electronic evidence of a spiritual presence at the Poor House Road tunnel, including photos that showed bright streaks of light inside the tunnel and ghost orbs outside of it, and audio recordings of voice-like sounds. My own photographs did not reveal anything similar, and neither Diane nor I would make out anything distinct in my audio recordings (although some of the sounds were evocative to me of the things I thought I had heard when in the tunnel).

  Two of the digital photos I had taken from the middle of the tunnel toward its north end during my last walk into it, however, were somewhat peculiar. In one, the sunlit vegetation framed in the mouth of the tunnel was flattened out and a little streaky, like an Impressionist painting (and similar to the some of the effects that can be applied to an image on a computer with a graphics program). In the other, the appearance of the woods outside the tunnel was similar to that in the first, but the mouth of the tunnel was bent downward along its right edge and upward along its bottom edge—as if its bottom right corner were being pinched—and a wedge-shaped segment of floor had taken on the appearance of dark waves, making it look as if it might have been taken from inside a sea cave.

  I certainly don’t expect that a couple of odd photos and an impression of indistinct voices should convince anyone else that any particular place is a haunt of troubled spirits. But of all the places I visited while researching this book, the tunnel on Poor House Road is the one that gave me the greatest sense of disquiet when I was there. And it is one of few that still raises the hair on the back of my neck and sends shivers up my spine when I recall the voices I heard and examine the strange photos that I carried out of it.

  In this image, the sunlit vegetation framed in the mouth of the tunnel was flattened out and a little streaky, like an Impressionist painting.

  CHAPTER 25

  Virginia Military Institute

  LEXINGTON

  All [VMI] cadets … are required to live in the Barracks. Running under these castlelike structures is an underground netherworld known as “the Catacombs.” The strange, mysterious noises coming from the dark, dank cellars have never been satisfactorily explained. Neither has the frightening presence that has terrified many courageous cadets … [an] otherworldly thing [that] is said to have a hideous yellow face with a scar that bleeds.

  —Daniel W. Barefoot, Haunted Halls of Ivy

  OFTEN REFERRED TO AS THE “West Point of the South,” Virginia Military Institute has a rich history that began decades before to the Civil War and is inextricably linked to the history of the state whose name it bears. A highly ranked academic institution that combines an austere, physically demanding environment with strict discipline, it is the oldest state-supported military college in the United States. It is also likely among the most haunted colleges in the country.

  VMI was founded on November 11, 1839, on the site of the Virginia state arsenal in the city of Lexington. Its first graduating class, that of 1842, was relatively small, and included just sixteen cadets. The school grew steadily, and in 1850 construction began on new barracks, allowing the corps of cadets to expand. A year later, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—the man who was to become its most revered faculty member—came to the college as professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy.

  Jackson had not yet acquired his nom de guerre at that point, of course, and was only a major when in 1859 he led cadets into what is now West Virginia to help suppress abolitionist John Brown’s rebellion (they arrived in Charles Town in good time to see the fiery insurrectionist hanged).

  In the years that followed, VMI cadets and alumni played a critical role both in training Confederate military forces and directly participating in combat. Cadets were called to active military service fourteen different times during the Civil War and, under the leadership of Jackson, were sent to train recruits at Camp Lee in Richmond. Fifteen alumni rose to the rank of general in the Southern armies, and VMI graduates were considered to be some of the best officers in both the Confederate and Union forces (many of them remaining loyal to the U.S. government even after secession).

  VMI’s proudest moment occurred on May 15, 1864, at the Battle of New Market, when cadets, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-two, fought as an independent unit, a first in U.S. military history. General John C. Breckinridge, commander of the Confederate forces, held the young men in reserve as long as he could, committing them to battle only after Federal troops broke through his lines.

  “Put the boys in,” Breckinridge commanded as he saw the Union forces taking control of the battlefield, “and may God forgive me for the order.” Not only did the cadets hold the line, however, they eventually managed to advance, capturing a Union artillery emplacement and winning the battle for the Confederacy. In the process, they suffered ten killed in action and forty-two wounded.

  The following month, during the Valley Campaigns of 1864, Union forces shelled and burned VMI, almost completely destroying the campus and forcing it to temporarily move its classes to Richmond (cannonballs can still be seen embedded in the stone walls of some of the buildings). When the capitol of the Confederacy was evacuated in April 1865, the corps of cadets was disbanded until after the end of the war.

  Today, the VMI campus covers 134 acres—12 of them designated as the Virginia Military Institute Historic District and listed on the National Register of Historic Places—and is home to more than 1,300 cadets during the school year.

  All cadets are housed in the sprawling, five-story New Barracks, which was completed in 1949 (the Old Barracks, now designated a National Historic Landmark, stands on the site of the arsenal upon which VMI was founded). Its two wings surround a pair of quadrangles connected by a sally port, and all of the rooms open onto stoops facing one of these quadrangles. Four arched entryways lead into the barracks, and these are named for George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, George Marshall, and Jonathan Daniels (a VMI graduate and Episcopal seminarian who was killed in 1965 as a result of his participation in the Civil Rights movement).

  With such a colorful history, it is little wonder that so many ghost stories, paranormal phenomena, and local superstitions have become associated with VMI in the years since the Civil War.

  The statue known as “Virginia Mourning Her Dead”

  One of the most well known involves the statue “Virginia Mourning Her Dead,” by sculptor Moses Ezekiel—himself a VMI graduate who was among those injured at the Battle of New Market—beside which are buried six of the cadets slain in the battle, the other four resting at places of their families’ choosing (although all ten are honored with markers). The statue is located near the center of campus, where people have reported hearing groans issue forth from the life-sized statue of a grieving woman and to have seen tears flowing from her metallic eyes.

  Another of the most famous phenomena associated with the institution—although, while paranormal, it is by n
o means clear if it is ghostly in nature—is the massive painting in Jackson Memorial Hall by Benjamin West Clinedinst depicting the charge of the VMI cadets at the Battle of New Market. Many people who have found themselves alone in the three-story Gothic Revival chapel have claimed to see the figures begin to move across the surface of the picture, and to hear the sounds of battle emanate from it.

  Other legends related to the painting state that anyone in the building alone at midnight who touches the painting and then turns around will see spectral figures in the seats behind them (either the cadets killed in the battle or their mourning families, depending upon which version of the story you hear).

  The third phenomenon most commonly told about VMI involves a ghoulish figure with sallow face and bleeding scar that has been dubbed “the Yellow Peril.” What this thing is or how it relates to the history of the institution is somewhat unclear, but it has terrified cadets who have witnessed it, and has often been described as if it were seeking something.

  With the exception of the Civil War years, cadets have walked picket posts during the school year, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, since the founding of the college. Many of the incidents of ghostly activity at the college have been reported by cadets on guard duty, and the long, lonely nighttime hours of such patrols have certainly contributed to what people have seen over the years.

  Ghost stories are, in fact, “a favorite topic of cadets,” according to Colonel Keith E. Gibson, VMI’s director of museum operations. “When study is over, they begin to conjure up their own stories of ghosts at the institute.”

  “Jackson Memorial Hall lays claim to two ghosts—if there are in fact ghosts at VMI. The hall is named, of course, after the celebrated Stonewall Jackson, and is also the location of one cadet suicide. That was in the 1960s, and is the stuff of which ghost stories tend to be made. Cadets vaguely know that story and the parts they don’t know they fill in anyway. That’s the nature of these things. Interestingly, there are very few specific stories that have been passed down in cadet lore.” He did mention one, however, that we had not read about prior to our visit.

  “There are always the suspicions that Little Sorrell, Jackson’s horse, is a ghost at VMI,” Gibson said, and that the mounted hide of the horse “comes alive here in the museum. Perhaps it’s true, but I have been here at all hours of the night and morning, and I’ve never actually witnessed that.” The horse itself is not stuffed and its remains, other than its hide, are buried on the grounds of the VMI campus.

  Signs of construction were evident during our visit, the most obvious project underway being a new block of barracks that will replace the ones built in the 1940s and eventually house up to 1,500 cadets. Other improvements currently being made to the 169-year-old campus include renovations to all the academic buildings and the construction of a VMI Center for Leadership and Ethics.

  Most of the cadets had already gone home for the summer when we visited VMI in May 2008, and many of those still there were in the process of heading out, so the campus was not crowded. We were shown around by Dominique Baker, the cadet in charge of campus tours, who was staying at VMI for the summer semester between her junior and senior years. Like most of its students, she has herself sensed some strange things at the school and heard any number of related stories which, she said, tend to assume a very individualistic nature.

  The grave of Little Sorrell, Stonewall Jackson’s horse

  “If you stop any cadet and say, ‘Tell me a VMI ghost story,’ I guarantee you will not be told the same story twice,” she said. One thing many of them have in common, however, is where they take place.

  “Most of the ghost stories I’ve heard have been set in the barracks,” Baker told us. “When you’re a Rat (i.e., a freshman), you have to live on the fourth floor, and you run up and down the stairs all day long. Every year you get to move down a floor and the first classmen live on the bottom floor. The fifth level, where you can see the turrets,” are where many ghostly phenomena have been reported and where cadets are rumored to have disappeared.

  Baker also pointed out the lamp posts surrounding the barracks, which have also been the focus of stories and spectral sightings.

  “I call them ‘suicide lamps,’” she said. “Apparently, sometimes after cadets would get drummed out for honor violations, instead of just continuing with their lives, which would have been awful anyway, they would hang themselves on these lamps. Last year, I was lucky enough to have one right outside my window.”

  While most of what she has personally encountered has been relatively innocuous, and taken the form of things like doors inexplicably flying open, Baker does not question the essential basis of the various stories.

  “Obviously, we do think the barracks is haunted to the max, because so many people have killed themselves there,” she said. “It’s creepy and I know it’s haunted. There’s no doubt about it.”

  While some might think that construction of a new block of barracks might allow the cadets to finally live in a nonhaunted environment, that is not likely, and the seeds of ghost stories associated with it have already been sown.

  “Unfortunately, one of our construction workers died there,” Baker said, and this has unnerved some of the cadets. Her roommate from last year, she said, is adamant about never living in the unfinished Third Barracks, which she maintains are already haunted.

  To prove to us that every cadet has their own ghost stories, Baker stopped almost every cadet we passed and asked what they knew about the campus’s haunted legacy. We were regaled with numerous variations on the basic stories we had been hearing about the place.

  One cadet, for example, gave an account of something that happened to a friend during his freshman year when he was on a guard detail that required him to periodically check on one of the cannons set up outside the barracks.

  “He came out to check it and saw somebody in a Civil War uniform,” cadet Jordan Combs told us. “He thought it was a reenactor, so he yelled at him to see what he was doing, and the guy took off running.” The cadet followed the uniformed figure between two buildings toward a wood line, just feet behind him the whole way. And as soon as they entered the trees, the mysterious figure simply disappeared.

  Colonel Gibson is somewhat philosophical—and very diplomatic—in his attitudes about whether or not the VMI campus is haunted. Despite the vast amount of ghostly lore that has been generated about VMI, he said that he does not believe the campus is haunted per se.

  “I think that there is a great spirit that resides over the institute,” he said. “Whether it takes the form of a ghostly presence is not clear. But I think that members of the cadet corps definitely have a sense that they are in a place where great things have happened and there is thus an atmosphere about it.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Ghosts of the Valley

  WINCHESTER

  In Winchester, the oldest city west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, spirits abound. It is a strange mixture from the spirit world; heroes who fought in the War for Southern Independence as well as from the American Revolution, to those spirits who are still with us for reasons known only to themselves.

  —Mac Rutherford, Historic Haunts of Winchester

  WINCHESTER MAY VERY WELL BE the most densely haunted city in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. While I don’t have any statistical data to support that suspicion, I did hear more credible firsthand accounts of ghostly presences there than anywhere else I visited while working on this book—and had some personal experiences of my own to reinforce them.

  Located at the north end of the Shenandoah Valley, Winchester is the northernmost community of any size in the state; little more than hills, forest, and a few hamlets can be found in the fifteen or twenty miles between it and the West Virginia state line to the west and the Maryland line to the north. It is an old town, its first non-native settlers arriving in 1729, and is the earliest city in the state to have been established west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. That fact
alone can go a long way toward explaining its apparently high incidence of hauntings.

  Winchester is somewhat off the beaten track, at least when compared to more traditional tourist destinations like Williamsburg, and it has far fewer published accounts of haunted venues than does that Colonial-era city. By all accounts, however, the city of about twenty-five thousand living residents has scores of haunted sites and virtually every historic building along its Old Town Pedestrian Mall is reputed to have one or more ghosts residing in it.

  My wife and I spent the better part of three days investigating a number of the purportedly haunted sites in and around the historic city.

  FRIDAY

  We began our ghosthunting expedition in Winchester at the historic Fuller House Inn, a bed-and-breakfast that is itself reputed to be haunted, where we spent the last weekend in April 2008. While the main part of the sprawling, three-story house was constructed in 1854 and incorporates elements of the Federal and Greek Revival architectural styles, its oldest portions date to 1780 and were built as servant quarters for a plantation that was once located near the site. A later, Italianate-style section was added sometime after the Civil War.

  Namesake for the inn is Dr. William McPherson Fuller, a prominent dentist from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who purchased the property in 1859 around the time he was married and in anticipation of needing a larger home for his family. (His original, smaller house, on nearby Braddock Street, was used by Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a headquarters during the Civil War and is now operated as a museum.) He raised his family in the home and dwelled there until his death in 1913 at the age of eighty-seven.

  Proprietor Debby Johnson and her husband Richie Oram have lived in the Fuller House for more than a decade, and turned it into Winchester’s first bed-and-breakfast in 2002. While both of them have had numerous ghostly experiences in Winchester, neither have had any in their own house. Many other people they know have, however, including Debby’s daughter Avery, Richie’s sister Lindy, a psychic friend, and numerous guests. In particular, people have seen the specter of a soldier in some sort of historic uniform standing on the stairway next to the room in which we were staying.