Dreadful Places

by Aaron Mahnke

  Later, when Stanley headed home, he asked his wife if her mother had been on the porch that day. No, she told him. She’d been away all day in Richmond.

  In Hollywood Cemetery, just north of Belle Isle, there are other stories afoot. The graveyard was established in 1849, and it is the final resting place of a number of important figures. Former U.S. presidents James Monroe and John Tyler are buried there, along with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. There are also two Supreme Court justices buried there, along with twenty-two Confederate generals and more than eighteen thousand soldiers.

  The soldiers are honored with an enormous stone pyramid that reaches up beyond the trees, and even though no one is buried beneath it, there have been several reports of moans heard coming from the stones. Others have claimed to have felt cold spots near the base. But it’s really a nearby grave that’s the site of the most activity there.

  The grave belongs to a little girl who died at the age of three from a childhood illness. And standing beside her tombstone is a large cast-iron dog. According to the local legend, the dog once stood outside her father’s grocery store, but when she passed away in 1862, it was moved to her grave to look after her.

  That might not be completely accurate, though. In the early 1860s, many iron objects were melted down to be used for military purposes, and so the dog was most likely moved to the cemetery as a way of protecting it. That hasn’t stopped the stories, though—stories that include visions of a little girl playing near the grave, or the sounds of barking in the middle of the night.

  Nearby on Cary Street is the historic Byrd Theatre. It was built in 1928 and named after the founder of Richmond himself, William Byrd. The space inside is enormous; it can seat over nine hundred on the lower level, and another four hundred or so in the balcony. And it’s up there that some of the oddest experiences have taken place.

  When the theater opened its doors in December 1928, Robert Coulter was the manager, and he continued to serve in that role all the way up to 1971, when he passed away. For over four decades, he was a permanent fixture in the theater, often found sitting in his favorite seat up on one side of the balcony. And if we can believe the stories, Robert never left.

  The current manager has been told by a number of people that they’ve seen a tall man in a suit sitting in the balcony at times when no one else was up there. Others have physically felt someone pass by them while they were operating the projector. The former manager has even been seen on more than one occasion by employees locking the front doors at night, as if he were coming out to help them.

  The stories that are whispered about places like the Byrd Theatre aren’t alone. There are dozens of locations across the city that claim unusual activity and equally eerie stories. But none can claim to have played host to a flesh-and-blood monster.

  None, that is, except for one.

  DEAD ENDS

  In 1875, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway was looking to connect some track in Richmond to another spur seventy-five miles to the south. Newport News was down that way, and that meant the ocean and shipping. It was a gamble to make their railroad more profitable in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and its increasing demand for things like coal, something mined in western Virginia.

  Part of the new railway line would cut through Richmond near Jefferson Park, and it was decided that a tunnel would be constructed for the track to pass through. Trains would enter on 18th Street, and then exit four thousand feet away on the eastern end, near 31st Street. It was one of those ideas that sounded perfect on paper. Reality, though, had a few complications to throw at them.

  Richmond sits on a geological foundation of clay, as opposed to the bedrock found in other parts of the state. It’s the kind of soil that changes consistency depending on the season and weather. Rainy months lead to more groundwater, and that swells the clay. Dry months would cause the opposite. As you could imagine, it’s difficult to build on ground that constantly changes density.

  During construction, there were a number of cave-ins. Between the project’s inception in 1875 and its completion six years later, at least ten men died while working in the tunnel. Even after it was opened, water had a tendency to seep in and cause problems, something that went on for decades.

  Around 1901, though, alternative routes were created, and the Church Hill Tunnel was used less and less. But when the railroad wanted to increase capacity in 1925, they remembered the old tunnel and began work to bring it up to modern standards. Maybe now, they thought, they could do it right.

  By the autumn of 1925, the tunnel was playing host to a crew of brave men, supported by a work train powered by steam. They were slowly making their way along the length of the tunnel, making repairs, improving the engineering, and hopefully making the tunnel safe for future use. But even after claiming so many lives decades before, the tunnel didn’t seem to be done just yet.

  On October 2, while doing what they had been doing for weeks, dozens of men were working inside the tunnel when the ceiling collapsed. Most escaped, but five men were trapped inside, buried alive. And to make matters worse, the steam engine exploded when the weight of the debris pressed down on it, filling the tunnel with steam and dust, and contributing to even further collapse.

  According to the story as it’s told today, something did in fact walk out of the tunnel, but it wasn’t human. They say it was a hulking creature, covered in strips of decaying flesh, with sharp teeth and a crazed look in its eyes. And because witnesses reported that blood was flowing from its mouth, many have since referred to it as the Richmond Vampire.

  No one could explain why the creature was there. Some suggested that it had been attracted to the carnage and had come to feed. They say that’s why the early rescue attempts only found one of the five missing men, still seated at the controls of the work train. There was no sign of the other victims of the tragedy, though, so some suggest that perhaps the vampire had something to do with that.

  Witnesses say that the creature fled out the eastern end of the tunnel, past the gathering crowd of workers, and then made its way south to Hollywood Cemetery. Some of the workmen who had managed to escape the collapse and witness the creature’s getaway were able to give chase, following it through the graveyard for a distance. And then, they claimed, it slipped into one of the tombs, the final resting place of a man named W. W. Pool.

  Pool, it turns out, was a relatively unknown accountant who had died just three years before. According to the local legend, this made sense. The blood on the mouth, the jagged teeth, the return to the mausoleum—all of it pointed to one undeniable fact. And the story quickly spread across the city, becoming one of the premier legends of Richmond.

  Pool was a vampire, of course.

  It’s said that people returned to the cemetery for many nights, eagerly waiting to see if the vampire would emerge from his hiding place once more, but there are no other stories that tell us what happened next. If the Richmond Vampire had been active before the Church Hill Tunnel incident, it seemed he went into retirement immediately after it.

  Like many tales of local lore, this story ends on an unsatisfying note. Just as the mysterious creature’s trail from the collapsed tunnel finally ended in the shadowy doorway of a cold mausoleum, the story of what happened seems to end in shadows of its own.

  Much like the tunnel itself, it was now nothing more than a dead end.

  ALTERATIONS

  A funny thing happens somewhere between real-life events in the past and the stories we tell each other around the campfire or dining room table. Much like the tried-and-true telephone game, where the message is passed from person to person through a long chain of possession, these old stories shift and change.

  The change is never visible; the tales adapt to a new culture, or take on elements that are only relevant to a particular generation. But after decades, sometimes even centuries,
these stories stand before us transformed. Which is the difference between history and folklore, after all. With history, there’s a paper trail, a clear image of the original that time and distance have a more difficult time eroding. Folklore is like water, forever shifting to fit the crevice as the rock breaks down.

  Richmond is an old city by the standards of most Americans. Yes, there are older places on the East Coast, but Richmond has a storied history that makes it feel almost timeless. Jamestown. The Revolutionary War. The Civil War and the Confederacy. American history would be lacking something essential without the role Richmond has played through it all.

  Some of that history is unchanged, but some, it seems, has undergone deep transformation over the years. And the prime example of that is the story of the Richmond Vampire.

  The collapsed tunnel and the train inside it are all fact. There’ve even been modern-day efforts to recover the train and clear the rubble, but the tunnel is now flooded with the same groundwater that made it unstable in the first place. The events of that dark October day in 1925 were real, though—at least, to a degree.

  A lone survivor did crawl from the wreckage, as the story tells us. His teeth were sharp and his mouth was bloody. Even the condition of his skin, hanging from his body like wet linen bandages, is documented fact. But the survivor had a name: Benjamin Mosby.

  He was a twenty-eight-year-old employee of the railroad and was described as big and strong. At the moment of the accident, he had been standing in front of the train’s open coal door, shirt off, covered in sweat, and shoveling fuel into the fire. When the tunnel collapsed, the boiler burst under the pressure, washing Mosby in a flood of scalding water.

  He somehow survived, crawled free from the rock and twisted metal, and walked to safety. He died the following day at the local hospital. And it was his appearance—with bloody, broken teeth and skin boiled from his body in ribbons—that fueled the story we still whisper today.

  It’s almost a cliché to say it, but it’s true: sometimes the real-life events that birth a legend turn out to be more frightening and horrific than any folktale could ever be.

  SOME TRAGEDY TAKES no effort at all to happen. One moment life is perfect and normal and everything we expect it to be. Then it changes in an instant. No warning. No chance to avoid it. It just happens.

  Natural disaster is one of those agents of tragedy that seem to sneak up on us and bring ruin into our lives. Fire, flood, tropical storms. Just watching the news each night can give us a glimpse into yet one more episode of pain and suffering that no one saw coming.

  Other tragedies, though, exist only because we have ushered them into our world. Sometimes that “we” has been humanity as a collective, and sometimes it’s been just one broken individual. Genocide or patricide, school shootings or terrorism—regardless of the source, these are tragedies that couldn’t have existed without human involvement. It doesn’t make them any less painful, mind you. Sometimes it even makes them worse.

  These moments of tragedy are, thankfully, very spread out. We have a chance to breathe and move on. But give a city enough time and those tragedies can start to pile up. The older the place, the deeper the pain. A murder here, a disaster there. Throw in a war or two for good measure. Soon its entire history can feel like one long nightmare.

  Nowhere is that more true than in the city that most would call the Big Easy. Underneath its eclectic architectural mix of old Creole, French, Spanish, Victorian, and even Greek Revival, amidst the parties and lights and music that all seem to pulse through the streets like blood, there’s something darker.

  Because there’s one thing that’s hard for anyone to deny: if it was tragic, painful, or eerie, it probably happened in New Orleans.

  A DARK PATINA

  It’s safe to say that New Orleans is one of those cities that just about everyone has an impression of, whether correct or incorrect. It’s a cultural icon, and a showcase of just how textured and diverse America’s history truly is.

  We can blame much of that on the age of the city. The city, which celebrated its tricentennial in 2018, was founded by the French Mississippi Company in 1718. Other than the early settlements of New England, many of whom can claim incorporation in the early to mid-1600s, there are few places in the United States that are as old as New Orleans. And that age has brought the city more than its fair share of pain and tragedy.

  It was land that had once been occupied by the local Chitimacha tribe of Native Americans, and the Europeans, of course, took it from them. From the outset, it was seen by everyone as a valuable territory. Sitting at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi River, it acted like a doorway into the heart of the continent, and for nearly fifty years the French controlled the gate.

  When the French and Indian War came to a close in 1763, a treaty was signed between Great Britain, France, and Spain. One outcome of that document was that New Orleans fell under the control of Spain, which held on to the city until the French reclaimed it in 1800. Three years later, Napoleon sold it to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase.

  The War of 1812 brought the first major dose of tragedy to New Orleans. In late summer of 1814 the British attacked Washington, D.C., and burned the White House, the Capitol, and much of the rest of the city. Then they turned their eyes to New Orleans, that doorway into the heart of America.

  It was Andrew Jackson, future president of the United States, who was charged with defending the city as over eleven thousand British troops marched toward it. And he found help in one of the most unlikely places: two brothers known across the city as pirate outlaws.

  Jean and Pierre Lafitte were smugglers who operated out of their blacksmith shop in New Orleans. In Star Wars terms, Jean was the Han Solo of the pair, the daring sailor and smuggler of illegal goods. Pierre, in contrast, was Lando Calrissian, managing the business and acting as the public face of the operation. But after American naval vessels captured their offshore hideout in the fall of 1814, the Lafitte brothers found themselves in legal hot water.

  They found salvation, though, in a deal with Andrew Jackson. In return for gathering troops and supplies for the approaching battle—things like sorely needed gunpowder and flint—Jackson promised to pardon the brothers and turn them into heroes. The brothers delivered the supplies, the Americans won the battle, and Jackson made good on his word—although he had to become president to do so.

  Today, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop is a bar on Bourbon Street, and one of the oldest buildings in the French Quarter. And with a past as daring and dangerous as Lafitte’s, it’s no wonder that stories of ghosts still echo through the establishment. The most common sightings speak of a figure who sits at the bar near the fireplace, dressed in the attire of a late eighteenth-century sailor.

  Ghosts aren’t unique to old bars, though. Just outside the borders of the French Quarter sits the historic St. Louis Cemetery Number 1. Founded in 1789, it’s the oldest and most iconic cemetery in the city. In some ways, it has an appearance and atmosphere similar to Highgate Cemetery in London. It’s a maze of small aboveground vaults, many playing host to entire families. It’s crowded, and old, and feels more than a bit creepy.

  But it’s not what’s inside the tombs that gets talked about the most. Visitors to the cemetery have frequently encountered mysterious figures, ghosts who apparently haunt the narrow spaces between the tombs.

  One common sighting is a man known as Henry Vignes. He’s said to have been a young sailor who was scammed out of his family tomb by a dishonest landlady. When he died, his body was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and because of that, he still wanders the cemetery today, searching. Multiple visitors have claimed to see him approach, and after he asks where the Vignes tomb is, he’s said to turn around and vanish from sight.

  Another frequent sighting is the ghost of a young man known only as Alphonse. Witnesses claim that they�
�ve seen him floating toward them and asking for help finding his home. Others say they’ve seen him gathering flowers from random graves before walking off with them. Maybe he’s lonely, or perhaps he’s just looking for a little beauty in such a somber place. No one really knows.

  St. Louis Cemetery Number 1 plays host to dozens of well-known figures from the early days of New Orleans. But the most famous resident, according to most, is someone that very few graveyards in the country can lay claim to: a real Voodoo queen.

  SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MAGIC

  When the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people from Africa against their will and deposited them all over the New World, these people—Africans from dozens of distinct tribal groups, cultures, and languages—were forced to find a common ground. At home, they might have been rivals, or even enemies. In captivity, though, unity meant survival.

  Today we call it the African diaspora, the dispersal of the continent’s cultures and peoples and beliefs throughout the world. And everywhere the seeds landed, they sprouted into something slightly different. What was known as Vodu in Africa became Voodoo, Hoodoo, Vodun, and more. And each had its own character and uniqueness.

  Voodoo is considered to be a religion, with its own core beliefs and leaders. The Voodoo of Louisiana has a distinct flavor thanks to what’s called syncretism, the blending of its practices and beliefs with those of the Catholic Church. Much as the Church has priests, Voodoo honors practitioners called kings and queens.

  A Voodoo queen was someone who conducted ceremonies and ritual dances, sometimes before crowds in the thousands. To earn a living, these queens would make talismans for others to purchase and use. Things like gris-gris bags, which were filled with all sorts of ingredients, then blessed with intention and meaning. These bags function similarly to crosses, and are even worn around the neck.