Ghosthunting Virginia

by Michael J. Varhola

  After checking in at the Fuller House Inn, Debby gave us a ride down to the historic center of town in the traditional London cab she and Richie use and, once there, gave us an overview of the downtown.

  Debby then showed us around a restaurant called the Village Square that is in a haunted building she used to own and where she had a number of paranormal experiences. We chatted a little bit with the bartender, Ted, who confirmed that weird things do tend to happen in the building.

  “One time, I was walking past the Tea Room,” Ted said, describing one of the rooms toward the back of the restaurant, in its oldest section. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw “a big white object,” which he assumed was Dan, the restaurant’s white-clad chef. When he reached the kitchen, however, he discovered Dan there, which prompted him to go straight back to the Tea Room to see what had caught his eye. Nothing was there, and even now, he said, it sends shivers up his spine to think about it.

  Ted also mentioned a door to the basement that is supposed to remain unlocked when the restaurant is open and locked when the establishment is closed, but which will become relocked for no apparent reason when the staff is working. And in the area called the Piano Room, there is an ongoing problem with flickering lights, even though an electrician has repeatedly inspected the wiring and confirmed that there is nothing wrong with it.

  Cork Street Tavern

  Our next stop was the Cork Street Tavern, which is in an antebellum building, one block off the city’s pedestrian zone, which includes among its claims to fame being shelled during the Civil War. More pertinent to us were rumors we had heard about a ghost that lurks about a particular table and trips people walking past it! We asked to sit at the haunted table when we went in and were duly escorted to it.

  The first person we chatted with was our waitress, Sharon, who told us that the area around the table is indeed haunted by the spirit of a man that regularly trips the waitresses—herself included—and female guests (Diane was very careful while maneuvering around the table and did not suffer any mishaps). We learned a little while later that this had happened to a customer as recently as the day before.

  Sharon said a number of other spirits are believed to haunt the establishment, including that of a woman who sits near one of the windows and calls out the name “John.” (We later learned that an owner of one of the homes that now comprise the Cork Street Tavern was named John, as was a co-owner of the first restaurant on the site, John Hoffman, either of which might be relevant to the manifestation in question.)

  Current owner Joel Smith chatted with us for a few minutes about the lore associated with his restaurant.

  “It’s haunted,” was the first thing he said to us of his establishment, which he has run since 1985. “Over the years, I have easily witnessed 150 to 200 different incidents” of a paranormal nature.

  Joel went on to explain to us that what is now the Cork Street Tavern was originally two different Federal-style homes built in the 1820s, and that the area we were sitting in had actually been the alley between them. The buildings were unified probably around the 1880s, after which they housed a succession of businesses, including a feed store and an African-American Baptist church from about 1900, and became a restaurant for the first time in 1932. It expanded its operations in the 1960s, purchasing adjacent property that is now the kitchen of the current establishment, and continued to operate up through the early 1970s. Several owners ran it over the following decade, and it finally went out of business in 1983, after which the building was almost completely gutted.

  Joel and a number of business partners acquired the building and some adjacent property and, after thoroughly renovating it, opened the Cork Street Tavern in 1985.

  “We used to have a fair amount of things happen in here,” Joel said. “Two or three of us would be sitting around late at night after everything was closed having a late meal. The outside door would be locked, but we’d hear that inside foyer door creak open, and we would hear footsteps.” The steps would then come right up to a point nearby and then stop. “And there were a lot of times when it sounded like people were eating, plates clanking, that sort of thing.”

  “I’ve probably had more happen here than anybody else,” Joel said. “Maybe because I’m the sole surviving original owner. There were almost half a dozen of us originally. And I’m here at all hours, twenty-four hours a day.” Joel lives in an apartment above the restaurant.

  “When you are lying in bed at one o’clock in the morning, and all of a sudden all the lights in the building suddenly turn on, you kind of freak out,” he said. “Okay, I can understand light going out, but all the lights coming on—what the heck! That’s something that continues to this day.”

  Other experiences Joel has had include seeing a tall man in dark formal clothes with a top hat walking past open doors of the room he has been in while otherwise alone in the building. He had just woken up the first time it happened.

  “I jumped out of bed and ran out in the hall to see who the heck was in my apartment,” he said. “But there was nobody there.”

  He said several other people working in the building have had similar experiences, including a dishwasher who also saw the dark-clothed man walking from one part of the building to another. Based on his investigation into the history of the place, Joel’s theory is that the man might be John Hoffman, the owner of the original restaurant on the site. Part of his reasoning for this is the spectral female voice we had heard about from our waitress that, in addition to humming or singing indistinctly, he and many other people have heard calling out the name “John.”

  Joel said as much as six months might go by without anything paranormal happening, but then several things will happen in a short period of time, as had been the case recently. For better or worse, we did not see anything while we were there.

  Once we had finished up at the Cork Street Tavern, we headed back to the Fuller House Inn, rested a little, and then got ready for the evening. We had hit it off pretty quickly with Debby and Richie, and the four of us spent the evening drinking, dining out, and chatting about the haunted history of Winchester and the Fuller House Inn.

  SATURDAY

  We started the day with a fortifying English breakfast courtesy of Richie, who was experimenting with menus for the pub he was getting ready to open in the fall of 2008. We then headed out to spend the day investigating a number of sites in and around the vicinity of Winchester, including Mount Hebron Cemetery, Belle Grove Plantation, Cedar Creek Battlefield, and the Wayside Inn (the latter three of which have their own chapters devoted to them in this book).

  Mount Hebron Cemetery

  We had decided to eat that evening at the Village Square and, after resting up a little in the early evening, headed over there for dinner. Half of what is now the restaurant was once owned by Debby Johnson, our hostess in Winchester, and run as an antique shop called Stone Soup. She had told us about a number of really weird things that had happened to her and others while she was there, including sightings of a spectral young woman in archaic attire, spots of extremely cold air, and the heavy tread of ghostly bootsteps headed toward Indian Alley, the narrow thoroughfare that runs behind the buildings on the west side of the Loudon Street pedestrian zone.

  One of the most profound and mysterious episodes at the site involved a Miami-based writer named David Salway, who Debby allowed to spend the night at the shop while he was working on a book about haunted sites in the 1990s.

  “He slept downstairs in one of those two older rooms,” she said, referring to the original portion of the shop. “He had a sighting, and he was so flipped out” that he went home immediately and decided not to finish writing his book. Debby never learned exactly what he had witnessed that had shaken him so badly.

  Debby also told us that Richie had had some strange experiences in the shop, which included hearing his name called when no one else was there and feeling a cold presence pass through him.

  Ghosts did not harass us d
uring our evening at the Village Square and, while we were enjoying an excellent meal, co-owner David Smith sat with us for awhile and chatted about the haunted history of his restaurant. It is located in what was originally two different buildings, and had been opened in just one of them about five years earlier.

  When David and his partner Joerg Eichmann decided to expand their operations, they purchased the adjoining building, which at that point was being used for Debby’s antique shop, and had previously served a number of different functions since the 19th century, including a drugstore that ran a speakeasy in a hidden basement during Prohibition. We were actually eating in one of the two oldest rooms in the building—by all accounts the most haunted ones—near the back of the restaurant, and the trapdoor leading into the basement was evident nearby (this subterranean area is popular with ghosthunters, who like to spend the night in it).

  David was averse to using the word “haunted” to describe the spectral inhabitants of the property, and preferred to say that “there are others living here besides human beings. There are ghosts living here.”

  “We do know that there is a mother, Jeanelle, and her little girl,” David told us. “For the most part, they were over here, and we never really had much of anything over on the other side until we expanded.” After the two buildings were unified, however, the ghosts—especially that of the little girl—started to become active in areas where they had not been previously been noticed.

  “She can be a little bit mischievous—things like knocking glasses off of counters,” David said of the child. “So, the staff knows not to set glasses too close to the edge of the counters, where she can reach up and get them.” He said glasses have even flown off tables at which guests were sitting and that this has scared some of them.

  Most of the restaurant staff members cope pretty well with working in a haunted establishment. A few years ago, however, one of them, a man from Mexico, reacted very badly to his discovery that the place was haunted, and had some sort of a nervous breakdown. Some of his relatives ultimately had to remove him from the room above the restaurant where he had been living and put him on a plane back to his homeland.

  After finishing up at the Village Square, Diane and I wandered back to our lodgings, stopping briefly near the tomb of Lord Fairfax, namesake of the county we live in, who is buried in the churchyard of the Christ Episcopal Church. His phantom is reported to have been seen here but did not manifest during the few minutes we were there.

  Back at the Fuller House Inn, Diane passed out, and, mustering my second wind, I got ready to conduct what paranormal investigator Carl Kolchak liked to call a “midnight interview.”

  Debby had mentioned that other people had sensed a ghostly presence in her creepy, cluttered, 18th-century basement, so I figured that would be a good place to hang out for awhile, get some pictures, and see if anything turned up. So, between eleven o’clock and midnight I headed downstairs with my camera and tripod and started shooting images. It was definitely eerie, with crumbling masonry, big patches of orange mold, and some sort of old coal bunker that looked like it would be ideal for dissolving bodies in acid. I kept looking over my shoulder the whole time I was down there, half expecting some horrible thing to pop out from some shadowy corner and pounce on me.

  SUNDAY

  It was not until I went back upstairs, downloaded my photos, and started to peruse them that I found something tangible to unnerve me. There, peering out at me from a photo of a mirror I had taken, was a misshapen, spectral face, with large hollow eyes and open mouth!

  I knew I needed to go back into the basement for a closer look at that mirror in order to help determine whether what I was looking at was likely paranormal in some way. I woke Diane up, showed her the picture, and asked if she wanted to accompany me. She wasn’t having it. So, I headed back downstairs, found Richie, and showed the image to him, explaining that I really didn’t want to go back into the basement alone. He was up for it, so we ventured into the basement.

  What we found upon examination of the mirror was an odd dust pattern that produced the effect of a face. It is certainly conceivable that some paranormal force formed it into this pattern, but probably more likely that it did not, and in any event what the camera had picked up was not some ghostly face.

  Richie and I retired to the room at the inn that he has transformed into a tiny facsimile of an English pub, and he told me about the full-sized pub—the Union Jack—he was at that time building in a historic building on the pedestrian mall. The property he had acquired for it was the old Union Bank, a building unique in Winchester because of its cast-iron façade. The lower two levels of the building had most recently been used as a jewelry store, and the third level had simply been sealed off. It had a somewhat shadowy past that involved rumors of a dishonest bank manager in the 1930s being caught embezzling and, as a consequence, blowing his brains out on the premises. Because of this, at least in part, the property had a reputation for being haunted.

  “Do you want to check it out?” Richie asked me around 1:30 A.M. as we sipped our vodkas and orange juice.

  “Sure!” I said. We had one more drink as we collected our cameras, tripods, flashlights, and other equipment and tossed it into Richie’s truck. Then we headed off for Indian Alley and the rear entrance to the bank building.

  Temporary lighting illuminated the inside of the building, which was gutted and under construction. We spent about an hour in the place, with Richie filling me in on what various areas had been used for and how he was transforming them, a particular point of pride being the fifty-foot wood bar he planned to install. The place consisted of a ground floor that ran the distance from Loudon Street at its front entrance to Indian Alley at its rear; a small second level that gave most of the first level a two-story ceiling; a third level maybe three quarters as long as the ground level; and a long, low, irregularly shaped cellar.

  I took more than one hundred pictures, with particular emphasis on the small, second-level area, which Richie said had been the bank manager’s office and was thus probably where he had committed suicide. I also got a picture of Richie there, looking westward out the back window of the building toward Indian Alley, over which a full moon had risen. The cellar was especially grim, with a damp, uneven floor and a ceiling too low for even a couple of relatively short men to stand upright. Richie said he planned to dig it out, and I wondered what he might end up finding underneath the dirt and rubble when he did.

  We headed back to the Fuller Street Inn, mixed up a couple of Bloody Marys, and downloaded our photos. We started by running through them quickly, paying special attention to the images I had taken on the second level, to see if anything jumped out at us. Something did, but it wasn’t from the second level.

  On one of the shots I had taken on the third floor, we could see a large, distinct, blue-green orb high up in the center section of the three-pane window that dominated the end of the room facing onto Loudon Street.

  “Is that the moon?” Richie asked me.

  “No!” I said, scrolling over to the image I had taken of him a few minutes before the one we were looking at, which showed the moon outside the window to the west. Loudon Street, however, was exactly 180 degrees opposite, to the east. And, the directional limitations aside, the height of the building across the street meant that the moon would have been appearing in front of it, which obviously wasn’t possible.

  Closer examination of the photos revealed two sequential images shot from the second level up the stairs into the third in which faint orbs could be discerned, one higher than the other, as if it had been drifting slowly upward when I took the images. Two more images, these taken in the basement, revealed numerous pale gray orbs, floating in the air like spectral jellyfish. One of the images was one that Richie had taken of me, crouching in the damp cellar, the spheres clustering around me.

  Rumors that the old Union Bank building was haunted were, apparently, correct.

  Dawn was not far off when I stu
mbled back up to our room and collapsed into bed. It was not too many hours later that Diane woke me and told me Richie was up and cooking breakfast. Impressive. I got up, threw on some clothes, and headed downstairs for some coffee. Though I’m not much of a breakfast person, ghosthunting in the middle of the night really does seem to burn a large amount of energy, and I tucked into Richie’s delicious English breakfast, complete with fried tomato, with enthusiasm.

  Richie and I shared our experiences of the night before with Debby and Diane, discussed the profound evidence of haunting we had found, and mulled over the implications that the ghostly presences might have on his pub. We decided at that point that we would need to return to Winchester once it was open and continue our investigation of the site.

  Diane and I left Winchester exhausted and with the sense that it really was a town where a great number of spirits dwell side by side with the living. We were also pleased to have had such a productive visit and made such good new friends. And, while we were satisfied with the results of the ghosthunting we had done for the time being, we also knew that this old and haunted place warranted a much deeper investigation.

  CHAPTER 27

  Wayside Inn

  MIDDLETOWN

  Guests and hotel workers alike … have reported seeing the ghostly images of Civil War veterans “milling around” in the lobby on occasion.

  —L. B. Taylor Jr., “Non-Paying Guests at the Wayside Inn”

  SINCE 1797, THE WAYSIDE INN has provided food, drink, and lodging to travelers through the Shenandoah Valley, a fact that has allowed it to claim to be “the oldest continuously operating inn in America.” This venerable institution is located in Middletown, a small, community with a current population of somewhat more than one thousand souls and is located about fourteen miles southwest of Winchester and thirteen northwest of Front Royal.