The dogs were tied to a tree, and the group walked through the cornfields and down the entrance road. A couple of the young men swore that they heard the sounds of a drummer coming from the Rosewell site, but when they got there they found nothing. They then retraced their steps back to the car. Just as they did, the dogs began barking furiously at the back window, and the hair on the dogs’ backs stiffened. John and the others looked out the window, and a few yards away they all saw an African American man—suspended four or five feet above the ground! John’s sister, Carol, began screaming hysterically, and they drove off, spinning the tires in the dirt. They had the distinct feeling that the man, or whatever it was, was following them, so they sped up.
A mile or so down the road, they stopped, got out and looked back. The man was gone. There was one small tree, only about an inch in diameter, at the side of the road, and it leaned out over the lane. Without warning, the tree began shaking violently, but there was no breeze, and they could see no cause for it. Terrified, they jumped back into the car and raced away. This time they didn’t stop until they got back to civilization, and they pulled up under a streetlight. They got out and walked around the car. It was covered with dew. One of the group called the others to the rear of the car. There, in the dew, were the crystal-clear impressions of a baby’s hand and a man’s hand with a missing index finger.
Perhaps the scariest phenomenon of all at Rosewell was experienced by Raymond West, a local maintenance worker. He and a friend were joy riding with two young ladies when they decided to visit the ruins. It was about two o’clock in the morning, and the story is best told in West’s own words:
A scary scene: the skeletal remains of Rosewell.
There was an old dirt road that ran for about half a mile leading up to the place. As we made the last turn, there before us was an old black car with 1930s license plates blocking the driveway. It had old half-moon windows in the back and was facing away from us. It stunned us. I slammed on the brakes. You could see the car real well in the headlight beams. It was eerie.
Then, as we sat there in silence, we saw the head of a woman rise up in the rear window, and she stared at us. She had coal-black hair and a deathly ashen white face. We panicked. I tried to get the car in reverse, but the gears kept sticking, and all the time that woman kept looking at us, unblinking. Finally, I got the car in gear, and we burned rubber getting out of there. We pulled back a few hundred yards and then stopped. We were pretty shook up, but we decided to wait until daylight and check things out. There was no other way out of there, no other roads, paths or anything. If that car left, it had to go right past us.
At daybreak, we drove back down the driveway to the spot where we had seen it, and there was nothing there! The car and the woman had flatly disappeared. There were no tracks or anything. We looked everywhere but could find nothing. I tell you, I never believed in ghosts or anything like that, but to this day I can’t explain what we saw or why.
All these and other mysterious manifestations possibly help explain why the artist-author James Reynolds once wrote: “Certainly, tremendous doings took place within the fire-riven walls of Rosewell. And what stories one hears of hauntings! All I hear seems in keeping with the magnificence and stature of this barren, deserted house.”
THE MULTIPLE MYSTERIES OF OLD HOUSE WOODS
Of all the ghostly legends of Tidewater Virginia, perhaps none is more widely known—or has been told, retold, written and rewritten more often—than that of Old House Woods, also called Old Haunted Woods, located near the tiny crossroads town of Diggs in Mathews County, northeast of Gloucester. The colorful stories that have been passed down from generation to generation for more than two hundred years about this fifty-acre patch of pine woods and marshlands near the Chesapeake Bay contain some of the most bizarre and unusual psychic phenomena ever recorded.
Consider, for example, swashbuckling pirates burying stolen gold; retreating British soldiers hiding colonial treasure during the Revolutionary War; a full-rigged Spanish galleon that vanishes in thin air; skeletons in knights’ armor wielding threatening swords; mysterious groups of shovelers digging furiously late at night; and ghost horses and cows that appear and disappear before one’s eyes.
“Yes, it’s true. All those tales and more have come out of Old House Woods,” says Olivia Davis, a lifelong resident of the area. She should know. Her great-great-grandfather, James Forrest, bought this land in 1838, and it was kept in the family and farmed for more than a century. Old House Woods got its name, simply enough, from a large frame house that had a wood-covered plaster chimney and stood in the midst of the surrounding forest in the late 1700s. Later, after being abandoned for years, it fell into disrepair and thereafter became known as the “Old House.”
“In the days before television, computers and even radio, telling stories was a popular pastime here,” Olivia says. “Old-timers used to gather in the woods on Sundays and swap yarns. I can well remember my grandfather, Silas Forrest, talking about ghosts, and it was spellbinding.” There are scores of others, residents and visitors alike, who also swear by them. And then there are those who have personally experienced the phenomena in one form or another. There is no way they will ever be shaken from their beliefs.
There are, allegedly, three reasons why Old House Woods are haunted. According to one legend, the crew of a pirate ship came ashore here in the seventeenth century, buried their treasure somewhere deep in the woods and then returned to sea, where they perished in a furious storm. That explains, say proponents of this theory, why mysterious figures have been seen digging in the woods on dark nights by the lights of tin lanterns. They are the pirate ghosts returning to claim their loot. In 1973, Richmond Times-Dispatch staff member Bill McKelway wrote, “Some say Blackbeard, the infamous Edward Teach, intercepted the treasure and then murdered the men who were hiding it.”
A second possible reason may also have occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century. After being defeated at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Charles II of England was said to have considered coming to Virginia. In preparation for his trip, a group of followers dispatched several chests of money, plate and jewels to the colony by ship. However, for some unexplained reason, the riches never reached Jamestown. Instead, the ship sailed up the Chesapeake Bay and anchored in waters at the mouth of White’s Creek near Old House Woods. There, the treasure was offloaded, but before it could be safely hidden, the Royalists were attacked and murdered by a gang of indentured servants. In their rush to escape, these bondsmen took only part of the spoils, planning to come back later for the rest. But they, too, ran afoul of the elements. A sudden storm struck the bay, and all hands on board drowned when their ship capsized.
It may well be that the storms that took the lives of both the pirates and the renegades account for one of the many Old House Woods ghost traditions—that of the “Storm Woman.” She has been described by those who claim to have seen her as “a wraith of a woman in a long nightgown, her long, fair hair flung back from her shoulders.” Reportedly, whenever black clouds gather over this section of the bay, foretelling a coming gale, her figure rises above the tops of towering pine trees, and she wails loudly to warn watermen to take cover.
A third theory about the hauntings concerns an event that supposedly happened in late 1781, just before Lord Cornwallis’s army was defeated by George Washington at Yorktown. The legend is that two British officers and four soldiers were entrusted with a huge amount of money. They slipped through enemy lines and headed north, hoping to find a British ship on the Chesapeake Bay. They managed to bury their riches in Old House Woods before they were found and killed by a unit of American cavalry. Thus, it may be their spirits that still hover over the site in eternal guard.
Whether one subscribes to one or more of these theories, or to none at all, they do offer some possible thoughts into why certain sights have appeared to a host of people in the area over the years. And the sightings have been prolific and explicit, howev
er far-fetched they may sound today. One of the most celebrated incidents is attributed to Jesse Hudgins, described as a respectable merchant of unquestioned integrity, who ran a store in the town of Mathews Court House in the 1920s. Hudgins told of his experiences to a Baltimore Sun newspaper reporter in 1926, and he swore to its authenticity:
I do not care whether I am believed or not. I am not apologetic or ashamed to say I have seen ghosts in Old House Woods. I have seen them not once but a dozen times. I was 17 when I first actually saw a ghost. One October night I sat by the lamp reading. A neighbor whose child was very ill came asking me to drive to Mathews for a doctor. We had no telephone in those days. I hitched up and started to town. The night was gusty, clouds drifting over the moon, but I could see perfectly.
Nearing Old House Woods itself, I saw a light about 50 yards ahead moving along the road in the direction I was going. My horse, usually afraid of nothing, cowered and trembled violently. I felt rather uneasy myself. I have seen lights on the road at night, shining lanterns carried by men, but this light was different. There was something unearthly about it. The rays seemed to come from nowhere, and yet they moved with the bearer…
I gained on the traveler, and as I stand here before you, what I saw was a big man wearing a suit of armor. Over his shoulder was a gun, the muzzle end of which looked like a fish horn. As he strode, or floated along, he made no noise. My horse stopped still. I was weak with terror. I wasn’t 20 feet from the thing, whatever it was, when it, too, stopped and faced me. At the same time, the woods about 100 feet from the wayfarer became alive with lights and moving forms. Some carried guns like the one borne by the man or thing in the road; others carried shovels of an outlandish type; while still others dug feverishly near a dead pine tree.
As my gaze returned to the first shadowy figure, what I saw was not a man in armor, but a skeleton, and every bone of it was visible through the iron of the armor, as though it were made of glass. The skull, which seemed to be illuminated from within, grinned at me horribly. Then, raising aloft a sword, which I had not hitherto noticed, the awful specter started towards me menacingly.
I could stand no more. Reason left me. When I came to it was broad daylight and I lay upon my bed at home. Members of my family said the horse had run away. They found me at the turn of the road beyond Old House Woods. We could not lead Tom [the horse] by these woods for months afterwards.
Hudgins’s story, strange as it may seem, was corroborated some years later, according to newspaper accounts. One report noted:
A Richmond youth had tire trouble at a lonely spot along the road near the haunted woods one night very late. As he knelt in the road, a voice behind him asked, “Is this the king’s highway? I have lost my ship.” When the youth turned to look, he beheld a skeleton in armor within a few paces of him. Yelling like a maniac, the frightened motorist ran from the spot in terror and did not return for his car until the next day.
Perhaps the most unusual phenomenon sighted in Old House Woods is the legendary ghost ship. It allegedly has been seen by many. One of the most vivid accounts was given more than eighty years ago by Ben Ferbee, a fisherman who lived along the bay shore early in the twentieth century:
One starry night I was fishing off the mouth of White’s Creek, well out in the bay. As the flood tide would not set in for some time, I decided to get the good fishing and come home with the early moon. It must have been after midnight when, as I turned to bait up a line in the stern of my boat, I saw a full-rigged ship in the bay, standing pretty well in. I was quite surprised, I tell you. Full-rigged ships were mighty scarce then. Besides that, I knew I was in for it if she kept that course. On the ship came, with lights at every masthead and spar. I was plumb scared.
They’ll run me down and sink me, I thought. I shouted to sailors leaning over the rails forward, but they paid no heed to me. Just as I thought she would strike me, the helmsman put her hard aport and she passed so close that I was almost swamped by the wash. She was a beautiful ship, but different from any I had ever seen. She made no noise at all, and when she had gone by, the most beautiful harp and organ music I ever heard came back to me.
The ship sailed right up to the beach and never stopped, but kept right on. Over the sandy beach she swept, floating through the air and up to the Bay Shore road, her keel about twenty feet from the ground. I was scared out of my wits. I knew it was not a real ship. It was a ghost ship! Well, sir, I pulled up my anchor and started for home up White’s Creek. I could see that ship hanging over Old House Woods, just as though she was anchored in the sea. And running down to the woods was a rope ladder, lined with the forms of men carrying tools and other contraptions.
When I got home my wife was up but had no supper for me. Instead, she and the children were praying. I knew what was the matter. Without speaking a word, she pointed to Old House Woods, a scared look on her face. She and the children had seen the ship standing over the woods. I didn’t need to ask her. I started praying, too.
Soon after, Ferbee and his family moved from the area.
Many others claim to have sighted the fabled ghost ship. One was a fourteen-year-old Mathews County boy. “There was a big sailing ship floating in the marsh,” he recalls. “It had two or three masts and was made of wood. There is only a foot of water there, but it looked like it was floating. It was the kind of ship the pirates used. We watched it for about 100 yards more and then it just disappeared. I went home and told my mother, but she just laughed. She said everyone knew of the stories about the ghosts here.”
Another who saw the phantom galleon, and many other things, too, was Harry Forrest, a farmer-fisherman who lived only six hundred yards from the edge of the woods. “I’ve seen more strange things in there than I could relate in a whole day,” he once said before his death in the 1950s.
I’ve seen armies of marching British redcoats. I’ve seen the “Storm Woman” and heard her dismal wailings, and my mother and I have sat here all hours of the night and seen lights in the woods. We have seen ships anchor off the beach and boats put into shore, and forms of men go to the woods. I would see lights over there and hear the sound of digging.
I was out fishing right off the beach one day in broad daylight when I saw a full-rigged ship headed straight for me just 100 yards away. I rowed to shore as fast as I could, and just as I got on the beach, she started drifting, and she lifted and sailed straight to Old House Woods, and you heard the anchor chain clank.
There is a site near the center of the woods known as the “Old Cow Hole.” Forrest believed that treasure was buried here. He once took a newsman to the area. The reporter described it as being a “small circular pool of gray water which seemed to swirl and yet was dead still.” “This is where they buried the money,” Forrest told him. “I think they must have killed a pirate and put him with it. There’s everything in there. You hear chains rattle sometimes.”
While Forrest claimed that he was not afraid of the dead, even though he believed that the dead come back, one experience he told of shook even him to the marrow:
Once, I went out on a brilliant November night to shoot black ducks. I found a flock asleep on a little inlet where the pine trees came down to the edge of the water. As I raised my gun to fire, instead of them being ducks, I saw they were soldiers of the olden time. Headed by an officer, company after company of them formed and marched out of the water.
Recovering from my astonishment, I ran to my skiff and tied up on the other side of the point. Arriving there, I found a man in uniform, his red coat showing brightly in the moonlight, sitting upright and very rigid in the stern. I was scared, but mad, too. So I yelled to him, “Get out of that skiff or I’ll shoot.” “Shoot and the devil’s curse to you and your traitor’s breed,” he answered, and made as if to strike me with the sword he carried. Then I drew my gun on him and pulled. It didn’t go off. I pulled the trigger again. No better result. I dropped the gun and ran for home, and I’m not ashamed to say I swam the creek in doing it, too.
Forrest also used to tell of seeing a white ox lying in his cornfield one night:
I went out to drive him away. When I reached the spot where the animal was lying, I saw that it was a coffin covered with a sheet and borne along by invisible hands just at the height pallbearers would carry a corpse. I followed until it entered the woods. The sheet only partly covered the coffin. Well, sir, the following Wednesday they brought the body of Harry Daniels ashore from Wolf Trap lightship. Harry was killed when the boiler blew up. As the men carried him up the beach to the waiting hearse, I recognized instantly the coffin I had seen borne into Old House Woods!
Still another tale that has been printed in both newspapers and books involved a farmer’s wife who lived adjacent to the woods. One evening, at dusk, she went into a pasture to bring home some workhorses. She drove them down a lane toward the barn. Arriving at the gate, she called to her husband to open it. He did not respond, and she opened it herself. As she did so, her husband came out of the barn and laughed at her, saying that he had put the team in the stable two hours before.
“Don’t be foolish,” she said. When she turned to let the team pass through the gate, instead of two horses standing there, she saw two headless black dogs scampering off toward Old House Woods. “That woman,” says Olivia Davis, “was my great-grandmother.” Over the years, there have also been numerous reported sightings of headless cattle wandering aimlessly in the woods.
Through the decades, there have been many mysterious disappearances in the region, involving both humans and animals. None has been satisfactorily explained. In 1950, Harry Forrest wrote of one:
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