Ghosthunting Virginia

by Michael J. Varhola

  Middletown was ground zero for much of the savage combat that took place in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War, and is just a few miles from the Cedar Creek Battlefield. The proprietors of the Wayside Inn managed to cater to both sides during the war, however, and—by diplomatically offering hospitality to blue and gray alike—they managed to avoid being destroyed by either of the opposing armies, like so many other homes and businesses in the embattled valley.

  This neutrality and modicum of safety maintained by the inn did not prevent fighting from sweeping into the town on more than one occasion, and soldiers were cut down on the Valley Pike right in front of the establishment. Some of them were buried on the grounds of the inn and their bodies remain interred there to this day, a number of markers attesting to this grim fact.

  The history of the Wayside Inn significantly predates that of the Civil War, of course, and goes right back to the Colonial era, being founded just fourteen years after the end of the American Revolution. It was located right on the “Old Wagon Road,” a thoroughfare through the valley that had been used as long as anyone could remember. Business picked up substantially when the inn was made a stagecoach stop and relay station for horses on the Valley Pike, an improved, ninety-three-mile-long highway started in 1834 that ran southwest from Winchester to Staunton and was supported by toll booths every five miles. (It is today known as U.S. Highway 11 and is no longer a toll road, most travelers preferring the parallel Interstate 81 anyway.)

  After the Civil War, the Wayside Inn continued to provide hospitality to travelers, and in the early part of the 20th century the inn expanded and prospered in response to automobile traffic through the Shenandoah Valley.

  In the 1960s, a financier and antique collector from Washington, D.C., thoroughly renovated, refurbished, and redecorated the inn and reinstated much of the 18th-century atmosphere that is now associated with it. Much of this was undone in 1985, when a devastating fire nearly gutted the establishment. Through great effort and dedication, however, it was restored and remains today a comfortable place for travelers.

  My wife, Diane, had not availed herself of the substantial hot breakfast our host Richie had generously cooked for us that morning at the Fuller House Inn in Winchester, where we had spent the previous night, and had been warbling about hunger since we exited the interstate at Middletown. I was not yet overly hungry but we had been planning on visiting the Wayside Inn anyway, so after a quick reconnoitering drive from one end of town to the other, I flipped a U and headed back to it. By the time we got there, there was no question of her waiting in the car, and we went straight in for a bite.

  I was pleasantly surprised to find the dining room sumptuously appointed with antiques and period-looking furniture, the wait staff attired in Colonial-style garb, and the menu replete with delicacies of the sort more often associated with faraway Williamsburg (“authentic regional American cuisine” in the words of the establishment). Among other things, these included spoon bread, country ham, and a variety of game, seafood, and desserts. I kept it simple and ordered a bowl of the peanut soup, a specialty of the Old Dominion since its earliest days that is a favorite of mine, while my wife ordered a more substantial club sandwich accompanied by some coleslaw she found especially agreeable.

  Sustenance taken care of, we turned to the task at hand, namely getting a sense for whether or not the Wayside Inn was actually haunted. I had read a number of ghost stories associated with the inn, most of them related to its role in the Civil War, the many soldiers who had passed through the doors during the conflict, and those who had been slain and were buried nearby. Much of this lore involved sightings, by both staff and guests, of spectral soldiers in or around the inn.

  While the managers of some establishments try to control what their subordinates say about such things, we discovered that was most assuredly not the case at the Wayside Inn. Indeed, everyone we talked with there was immediately and cheerfully forthcoming about their own experiences with and knowledge about its apparently haunted nature.

  The first person we talked to was our waitress, Sandy, who, like the other women working in the dining room, was dressed in 18th-century-style garb, complete with mob cap. As soon as we identified ourselves and explained our mission, she mentioned that another group of ghosthunters had recently been at the inn and conducted an investigation in one of its older rooms, something we were hearing increasingly at the places we visited.

  Sandy confirmed that many people consider the Wayside Inn to be haunted, confirmed that she herself believed it to be so, and noted that she had heard many accounts from other employees and guests to support this. She also said she has personally had some strange experiences in the two years she had worked at the inn and recounted a few of them to us.

  “See the leaf on this table?” she asked, indicating a hinged extension on the table at which we were sitting. “As long as I’ve been here it’s been up, it’s never been down, because it’s a wooden leaf and it’s hard to get down.”

  “I was in here one day—and, as a matter of fact, one of the other girls was working with me—and I had just wiped this table off” and then went off to continue cleaning up elsewhere in the dining room, she said. Then, when she “came back to set up [the table], the leaf was down. It can go down, but it’s very, very hard” and, furthermore, has a locking mechanism to keep it in place. She was, naturally, spooked by the episode, and asked the other woman working then if she knew anything about it, but she said she did not. With some difficulty, she managed to pull the obstinate leaf back up and then set the table.

  This dining room used to be the “old servant kitchen” and is believed to be one of the most haunted sections of the Wayside Inn.

  We continued to munch our authentic regional fare at the haunted table (or the table in the haunted dining room, whatever the case might have been), and before long Sandy came back with Anna, nicknamed “Grandma,” a member of the housekeeping staff who had worked at the inn for more than twelve years.

  Anna affirmed her belief that the inn was home to ghosts and told us about a number of episodes that she and her coworkers had experienced while working at the inn. For her, these had included passing through areas of very cold air in the hotel.

  “You can just feel like something’s around you,” she said, and that it does not feel like just cold air. She also said that one of the young women she worked with had sometimes heard a baby crying in the “old slave kitchen,” an area now used as a dining room that had once been used by slaves as a kitchen and was supposed to be among the earliest original sections of the inn.

  Our lunch finished, we decided to explore the sprawling historic inn, the areas of which include seven antique-filled dining rooms with names like the Lord Fairfax Room, the Portrait Dining Room, and the Old Servant Kitchen (aka, the “old slave kitchen”). Our waitress, Sandy, appeared while we were looking around and led us to the latter, a small, dark, completely enclosed, wood-paneled dining area filled with many original furnishings. We found this little room to be especially interesting based on its appearance alone, and it was easy to see why it has had a number of ghostly incidents associated with it over the years. We spent about fifteen minutes there, poking around and taking pictures and, while we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, it would be fair to say that we could easily imagine the presence of lingering spirits there.

  The last person we talked to during our visit was Hannah, the young woman working at the front desk of the inn. Right off she mentioned—echoing a theme that was recurring for us during on our trip to the Shenandoah Valley in particular—that a number of previous groups of ghosthunters had visited the inn in the recent past. She noted that one in particular had visited the previous Halloween and had conducted a séance in one of the guest rooms upstairs.

  While she had not personally experienced any ghostly episodes at the inn—attributing this to the fact that she worked days and not nights—she, too, expressed her belief that the inn is haunt
ed. Part of what convinced her of this, she said, was not just the many episodes she had heard from other people who had experienced weird things at the Wayside Inn, but that many of them experienced the same sorts of things.

  One such episode she recounted to us involved a lady who has been coming to stay at the Wayside Inn for the past five years. During her most recent trip, she became distraught after feeling something invisible brush against her while she was alone in her room.

  Besides passing on to us some of the establishment’s ghost lore, Hannah also very accommodatingly gave us the keys to the inn’s two oldest rooms—appropriately named one and two—so that we could take a look at them and snap a few ghosthunting photos.

  No ghost orbs or anything else out of the ordinary turned up in the photos we took and—other than the sense that something certainly could have been present in the old slave kitchen—we didn’t personally sense or experience anything distinct or specific at the Wayside Inn that would have suggested it was occupied by spirits. One thing, however, is for sure: every one of the people who worked there that we talked to claimed to be convinced that it was indeed haunted, and that has got to count for something.

  DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

  Washington

  America’s Greatest Haunted City

  Ford’s Theatre

  Decatur House

  CHAPTER 28

  America’s Greatest Haunted City

  WASHINGTON

  If there is a common denominator to these Washington ghosts, it is one of near-European romanticism and a degree of intrigue and mystic involvement that you will never find in other cities in America.

  —Hans Holzer, The Ghosts That Walk in Washington

  AN OVERVIEW OF HAUNTED SITES in the nation’s capital reveals it to be a city rife with ghosts and places where inexplicable events have been known to occur. In fact, if you search long enough, you will discover that practically the whole city is haunted, and that the unresolved business of more than two centuries has bound within it an uncanny number of ghosts. Those who work in the city rush past dozens of possibly haunted places every single day, most of them oblivious to the uneasy spirits who dwell there. But Washington, D.C., most certainly is, as the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper wrote in 1891, “America’s greatest haunted city.”

  I have lived in the Washington area about two decades altogether, worked or conducted business there over the years, and have heard many stories of ghostly phenomena associated with it.

  “There is … a general acceptance of the occult” in Washington, psychic researcher Hans Holzer wrote in 1971, suggesting that it may be “because the business of government in itself is, by its very uncertainty, prone to cause a certain curiosity for knowledge beyond the five senses.” To whatever extent that was true nearly four decades ago, it appears to be much less so today, and neither openmindedness nor a sense of humor seem to be traits associated with the directors of possibly haunted historic and governmental sites in or around the nation’s capital.

  Many parts of Washington are also less accessible today than they were prior to September 11, 2001, and the uneasy spirit of that day persists in the city as palpably as any ghost. In the downtown area in particular, where a great many government buildings are located, a number of streets have been closed to vehicular traffic and nearly all of them are lined with Jersey barriers and huge, car-bomb-proof concrete planters. Ghosthunters will now find that security requirements have made it much more complicated to get into the White House, the Capitol, or any number of other high-profile sites.

  All of that said, there are still many enticements for ghosthunters in Washington, D.C. This book is concerned only with sites that are both believed by many to be haunted and are also publicly accessible. It furthermore concentrates on sites with some historical merit that are in areas that are most easily and safely visited.

  Beyond readily visited sites in the safer sections of the city, there are also throughout the District innumerable places that are believed to be haunted but which are closed to the public, either because they are on private property or within restricted government facilities. Ghosthunters affiliated with the military or other government agencies might have access to reputedly haunted places like Fort McNair—where those convicted of conspiring to assassinate Lincoln were confined and four of them were subsequently executed—or St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, half of which has been taken over in recent years by, of all things, the Department of Homeland Security.

  Two particularly interesting publicly accessible sites are the Decatur House and Ford’s Theatre, both located in D.C. Northwest, and each with a chapter devoted to it in this book. A number of other significant purportedly haunted sites are described more briefly on the following pages of this chapter.

  Ghostly phenomena begin at the geographical center of the city—on Capitol Hill—and radiate out from it. Many are associated with the Northwest quarter of the city, which we will venture into after exploring the Hill a bit.

  Numerous ghost stories have been associated with the Capitol building itself over the years and it is widely believed, by those inclined to believe such things, to be haunted. Indeed, if conflict, strong emotions, and unresolved issues are among the basis for ghostly phenomena, then it certainly makes sense that it would be. Phenomena people have reported over the years have included seeing figures animate and move about in Statuary Hall; a variety of ghosts—including people purported to have been killed in the building and the ubiquitous Civil War soldiers—throughout the building, especially the Rotunda; and a black cat that is supposed to appear in the basement just before a national disaster occurs (e.g., the 1929 stock market crash, the 1963 Kennedy assassination).

  Just to the northeast of the Capitol is the Supreme Court building, located at the site of the Old Brick Capitol. That long-gone structure was used by Congress for five years after British troops burned the Capitol in 1814, after which it subsequently served first as apartments, then as a Union prison during the Civil War, and finally as headquarters of the National Woman’s Party, before being torn down in the 1930s to make way for the current building. By virtue of the Supreme Court’s location on the site of the earlier building, it is rumored to be haunted by a number of ghosts. These include career politician John C. Calhoun, who dwelled in the building while serving in Congress and dreading the prospect of the coming Civil War; Confederate spy Belle Boyd, confined in the prison during the war; Henry Wirtz, commandant of the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, who was hanged in the prison courtyard; and various other unnamed prisoners and guards.

  Another reputedly haunted site on Capitol Hill is the Library of Congress. Paranormal phenomena that have been reported in its labyrinthine stacks over the years have included inexplicable banging sounds and heavy exhibit cases moving on their own. One specific story, supposedly corroborated by library staff, involves a police officer who helps people lost in the stacks find their way out and then, before disappearing, tells them he was killed several years before.

  Moving westward off the Hill along Pennsylvania Avenue will take the ghosthunter past various storied and ostensibly haunted locations (and, after about a half mile, within a block or so of Ford’s Theatre). One of these is the National Theatre, at 13th and E Streets, which was built in the 1830s and is still a popular venue for live entertainment that my wife and I have attended a number of times over the years. We did not witness anything supernatural during our visits to the theatre, but have heard some of the legends surrounding it. One involves an actor who was supposedly slain by a jealous colleague and buried in the establishment’s basement, which is strictly off limits to the public (this is sometimes cited as corroboration of the legend, despite the fact that such areas often have restricted access).

  The National Theatre

  Just a block past the National Theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue is the Willard Hotel, a grand and historical edifice that has been rightfully called “the Residence of Presidents,”
and housed many executives prior to their moves to the nearby White House. (It has always been one of my favorite hotels anywhere and has a personal connection, having been designed by an ancestor. Many years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a weekend in its upper-story Woodrow Wilson suite, and can honestly say I felt the spirit of the city while I was there, if not any specific ghosts). Ulysses S. Grant was one of the luminaries who lived at the hotel and has subsequently been not so much seen in it again as detected in the lobby by the smell of the stogies that were an omnipresent element of both his life and death.

  Two more blocks along Pennsylvania Avenue—which is closed to vehicle traffic soon after it passes by the Willard—will bring a visitor to the White House, likely the place with the greatest reputation for being haunted in the capital city. Foremost among the ghosts said to haunt the executive mansion is Abraham Lincoln, and those who claimed to have encountered his shade there include Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands during a visit to Washington.

  Other ghosts purported to have been seen in the White House include Abigail Adams, associated especially with the East Room, where she continues to hang laundry in death as she did in life; Dolly Madison, who is said to have appeared to gardeners, possibly in a perpetually annoyed response to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson having her prized rose bushes moved; and a spectral Redcoat arsonist from the War of 1812, who people have seen trying to set fire to the place with a phantasmal torch. And President Harry S. Truman on more than one occasion said he could sense the presence of his predecessors, especially those he believed had been handed messes not of their own making.