Ghosts of Virginia's Tidewater

by L. B. Taylor Jr.

  Obviously embarrassed when he realized that Ralph had heard him, Pierre gulped down his champagne, made excuses and nervously left the house. By the time all but the house guests had gone, Jane had become deathly ill and had collapsed on the drawing room floor, gasping for breath. She was whisked to an upstairs bedroom and died that evening. Although it wasn’t known then, she had been poisoned. A veil of silence and sadness descended on everyone.

  Oddly, as Jane’s body was being prepared for burial, it was noticed that her wedding ring was missing. No one could shed any light on this mystery, and she was laid to rest. A few days later, a messenger arrived from Williamsburg with the shocking news that Pierre Bondurant had been found dead in his carriage when it arrived in Williamsburg on the night of the wedding. Even more discomforting was the fact that Jane’s wedding ring had been found—in Pierre’s pocket!

  The mistress of Brandon—Elizabeth Richardson Harrison, Jane’s aunt—in an extraordinarily peculiar gesture, declared that the ring now bore a curse, and she had it embedded into the plaster on the ceiling above the spot where Jane had fallen.

  Over the years following, there were periodic reports from residents, guests and servants of seeing the wispy apparition of a young woman, in a flowing white wedding gown, who seemed to appear only in late November, and Brandon slowly began gaining a reputation as being haunted. In fact, when Helen Lynne Thomas became mistress of the plantation, fully two generations after the tragedy, the real estate agent had casually referred to a “resident ghost.”

  That fall, Helen met the spectral being firsthand. It was on a stormy dark night as she was walking past the family cemetery. Amid the weathered old tombstones, she got a glimpse of a wraithlike figure drifting toward the main house. She trembled with fear, nearly fainted and then regained her composure and hurried into the great hall. There she heard a thud that sounded like something heavy had fallen in the adjacent drawing room. She walked across the hall, opened the door and saw that some plaster had fallen from the ceiling.

  Then, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw something else—the same ethereal, white-clad phantom she had imagined she had seen outside. It appeared to hover about the room for a few seconds and then settled over the pile of plaster, as if it were searching for something. Helen could hardly breathe. Then, either the door or a loose floorboard creaked, and the figure straightened up, slid toward the door and disappeared.

  As it did, Helen screamed and fainted dead away. When she was aroused, more than an hour later, she told members of her family and the servants who had rushed to her what had happened. It was then that one of the servants, Hattie McCoy, told her about Jane Harrison and Pierre Bondurant. Hattie’s grandmother had been at Brandon on the fateful wedding day.

  After she recovered, Helen sorted through the fallen plaster and found a “blackened, tarnished wedding ring!” She had it suspended from the ceiling from a small wire several inches long. It can still be seen there today.

  BIZARRE TWISTS AT BACON’S CASTLE

  It was, to the Virginia colonists, an ominous sign of impending disaster. It occurred sometime during the latter months of 1675. A great comet appeared in the sky, sweeping across the heavens and trailing a bright orange tail of fire. Soon after this eerie phenomenon came the flight of tens of thousands of passenger pigeons. For days they blanketed the horizon, blotting out the sun. Then, in the spring of 1676, a plague of locusts ravaged the colony, devouring every plant in sight and stripping trees of their leaves.

  To the colonists, the comet was the worst sign. Many remembered that another comet had streaked across the Virginia skies just before the terrible Indian massacre of 1644. Believing in spectral omens, it was thus no surprise to them when, the following year, one of the bloodiest and most notorious chapters of the commonwealth’s history was written.

  It began on a quiet summer Sunday: some colonists passing by the Stafford County plantation of Thomas Mathew on their way to church discovered the overseer, Robert Hen, lying in a pool of blood. Nearby lay an Indian servant, dead. Hen also was mortally wounded, but before he expired, he managed to gasp, “Doegs! Doegs!” The words struck fear into the hearts of the passersby, for Hen had mentioned the name of a tribe of Indians known for their fierce attacks on white men and women.

  The Doeg raid was executed in retaliation for the killing of several Indians by planters who had caught them stealing pigs and other livestock. Such raids were not new to the settlers. They had been periodically besieged ever since they first landed in Jamestown in 1607. This latest episode proved to be the last straw for many. For years they had sought action by the aristocratic governor of the colony at the time, Sir William Berkeley, but he was reluctant to move. And so the seeds were sown for what was to lead to the largest and most violent insurrection of the colonial era up to that time: Bacon’s Rebellion.

  Dashing Nathaniel Bacon, twenty-eight years old, had arrived in Virginia only three years earlier. Well educated and well endowed, he has been described by biographers as a slender, attractive, dark-haired man with an impetuous, sometimes fiery, temperament and a persuasive tongue. Above all else, Bacon was a natural leader of men. While Governor Berkeley remained inactive and inattentive in Jamestown, planters sought out Bacon to lead retaliatory strikes against the marauding Indians. When his own plantation was attacked and his overseer killed, Bacon agreed. He proved to be a skilled and capable military commander. On one march, his forces drove the Pamunkey tribe deep into Dragon’s Swamp. Later, Bacon and his forces overpowered the Susquehannocks, killing at least one hundred Indians and capturing others.

  Berkeley, furious at the unauthorized attacks launched by the rebellious group, dispatched his own troops to capture Bacon and his men. For the next several weeks, the two men waged a cat-and-mouse game that involved daring, intrigue and bloodshed. At one point, Bacon surrendered, was brought before Berkeley and was forgiven when he repented. But then he escaped, returned with a force of six hundred men and captured Jamestown, demanding a commission to fight the Indians, as well as the repeal of some harsh colonial laws. With no other choice under the show of arms, Berkeley granted the wishes, but when Bacon set out again chasing Indians, the governor repudiated all agreements and sent his troops after the rebels.

  After several skirmishes, Bacon recaptured Jamestown and had it sacked and burned to the ground. Berkeley, who had retreated to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, meanwhile, was regrouping his forces for a final and decisive confrontation. It never came to pass. Bacon, who had suffered an attack of malaria at Jamestown, fell critically ill in Gloucester and died of dysentery there on October 26, 1676, at the age of twenty-nine. With the leader lost, the rebellion fell apart, and Berkeley’s forces captured many of Bacon’s men. A large number of them were hanged, continuing for several more months, the tragedy being forewarned by the appearance of the comet.

  Historic Bacon’s Castle, near Surry, has been the site of multiple psychic manifestations over the years, including a haunting fireball that travels between the building and a nearby cemetery.

  For three months in 1676, about seventy of Bacon’s followers occupied a large brick mansion in Surry County, just across the James River from Jamestown. Then called “Allen’s Brick House,” it has been known, ever since this occupancy, as “Bacon’s Castle.” Now operated by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, this imposing brick structure was built sometime after 1655. It stands amid a large grove of oak trees. There are two expansive, paneled first-floor rooms, two more rooms on the second floor and what has been described as a dungeonlike attic on the third.

  Accounts of ghostly hauntings at the castle have been passed along, generation to generation, for more than three hundred years. Some of those who have experienced strange sightings, noises and “presences” believe that they are manifestations of the devil. Others feel they may be the spectral return of Bacon’s supporters, still seeking redress of the grievances they held against Governor Berkeley and the col
ony so many years ago. Whatever the case, it is an undisputed fact that the happenings that have occurred at the castle through the centuries have taken many forms.

  Consider the revelations of Mrs. Charles Walker Warren, whose family once owned the mansion. When she was a young woman, early in the twentieth century, a visiting Baptist preacher who was spending the night stayed up late reading his Bible. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, he heard footsteps descending the stairs from the second floor. He later said that someone or something had opened the parlor door and walked past him. He saw no one but felt the strong sensation that he was not alone. Then, mysteriously, a red velvet–covered rocking chair began moving back and forth as if someone were sitting in it, though the preacher could see no one. He put down his Bible and shouted, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” and the rocking abruptly stopped.

  Mrs. Warren and a number of guests reported hearing footsteps on the stairs late at night many times. One visitor distinctly heard “horrible moaning” in the attic directly above her bedroom, though she was assured the next morning that no mortal could have been in the attic. On another occasion, Mrs. Warren came into the downstairs parlor one morning and found that the glass globe from a favorite nickel-plated reading lamp had shattered into tiny fragments yet, strangely, not a drop of kerosene from it had spilled onto the carpet. Also, a leather-bound dictionary had been flung across the room onto a sofa, and the iron stand on which it normally rested had been hurled to a distant corner. No rational explanation could be offered to clear this up.

  Richard Reynolds, curator of the castle from 1973 to 1981, used to tell of the time one morning at 3:30 a.m. when he was awakened by the sound of his two-year-old son laughing in his crib in an upstairs bedroom. “Daddy, where’s the lady?” the child asked Reynolds when he reached him. “What lady?” Reynolds said. “The lady with the white hands. She was tickling me.” On another occasion a few years later, a tour guide was standing in the great hall one morning, before the castle was opened to the public for the day, when “something” ran by her from the outside passageway and went through the hall into another chamber on the other side. She heard feet running on the hardwood floor but did not see anyone. As the sound of the steps was passing by, something brushed her arm and gave her a chill. The same hostess also said that there had been strange noises a number of times, most commonly loud popping and crackling sounds, which sometimes were heard by people in the reception room. They were too much for one young couple, who became so frightened that they left the castle even before the tour had started.

  These and several other incidents, however, serve merely as preambles to the most shocking supernatural appearance at Bacon’s Castle, one that has reappeared regularly at varying intervals over the years and has been seen and documented by a number of credible witnesses from several different generations. It takes the form, say those who have seen and been terrified by it, of a “pulsating red ball of fire.” It apparently rises near or from the graveyard of Old Lawne’s Creek Church, a few hundred yards south of the castle, soars about thirty to forty feet in the air, always on dark nights, and then moves slowly northward. It seems to float or hover above the castle grounds and sometimes enters an upstairs window before moving back toward the ivy-covered walls of the ruins of the church, where it disappears.

  One eyewitness, G.I. Price, a former caretaker at the castle, described the phenomenon to a local newspaper reporter this way: “I was standing, waiting in the evening for my wife to shut up the chickens, when a light about the size of a jack-me-lantern came out of the old loft door and went up a little, traveling by floating along about 40 feet in the air toward the direction of the old graveyard.”

  Skeptics, of course, contend that the fireball is merely some form of physical manifestation that can be explained scientifically. But those who have seen it, including members of the Warren family and others, could never be convinced that it was not of a mystical, spiritual nature. Some even called it an appearance of the “Prince of Darkness.” One guest reportedly had the wits frightened out of him one night when the fiery red ball sailed into his bedroom at the castle, circled over his bed several times and then disappeared out an open window.

  A former owner of the mansion told of seeing the fireball blaze overhead and enter his barn. Fearful of it igniting his stored hay, he ran toward the barn. Then the bright, glowing light turned and headed back to the graveyard. In the 1930s, members of a local Baptist church, meeting at an evening revival session, collectively saw the paranormal sphere. It is said that the praying that night was more intense than ever before in the congregation’s memory.

  What is the origin of this eerie fireball, and why does it reappear every so often? One legend offered is that a servant a century or so ago was late with his chores, and as he was walking home in the darkness, the red object overcame him, burst and covered him with a hellish mass of flames, burning him to death. Another theory is that the light is somehow tied to hidden treasure in the castle. Some money was found there years ago when two men were removing some bricks from the fireplace hearth on the second floor.

  Many old-timers, however, prefer to believe that the fireball is a periodic reminder of the brilliant comet that flashed across the same skies more than three hundred years ago, forewarning that tragedy and bloodshed would soon follow. There are, in fact, those who are convinced that spirits frequent Bacon’s Castle to this day—sad spirits from long ago, still seeking relief from their troubled and grief-stricken past.

  THE “CURSE TREE” OF JAMESTOWN ISLAND

  Just beyond Jamestown Memorial Church, which was built in 1907 upon the foundation of an original church erected in 1617, is a small, quiet, tree-shaded cemetery containing only a handful of graves. It is here where James and Sarah Harrison Blair are buried. Dr. Blair was, in the late seventeenth century, one of the leading citizens of the Virginia colony and was the chief force behind the founding of the College of William and Mary, the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the country.

  In 1687, Sarah Harrison, by popular accounts, was a strikingly beautiful young lady of seventeen who was an active participant in the social circle of plantation life along the lower James River. She has been described as vivacious, full of life and headstrong. She was actively wooed by a number of young suitors but spurned them all when she met Blair, who was said to have swept her off her feet.

  The “Curse Tree” of Jamestown Island. Here, a large sycamore tree grew between the grave sites of James Blair and his young wife, Sarah, separating the couple after death. Courtesy of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.

  After the original “Curse Tree” of Jamestown Island was cut down, a second tree sprang up, continuing to push the grave sites of James Blair and his wife, Sarah, farther apart.

  Her parents, however, were not so enchanted. There was a problem. Blair was thirty-one, nearly double Sarah’s age, and her mother and father were dead set against such a union and tried everything to break up the couple. But Sarah persisted and the marriage took place. Shortly after that, her parents, tragically, were killed in a lightning storm.

  Sarah and James Blair lived a happy life together, although it was cut short when she died in 1713 at the age of forty-two, and because of her feud with the family, she was buried behind the Jamestown Church instead of at the Harrison family cemetery. Dr. Blair lived on for thirty more years, and when he passed, in 1743, he was laid to rest at a site six inches to the left of his wife’s grave.

  Seven years later, fate intervened when a sycamore tree sapling sprang up between the couple’s tombstones. As it grew, it began to push the two stones apart from each other, crumbling them as it did. And so, a legend was born. It was believed by many that Sarah’s parents, who were unsuccessful in separating the two lovers in life, were doing so after death!

  Robert L. Ripley wrote about the bizarre incident in his “Believe It or Not!” column, calling the sycamore the “mother-in-law tree.” Others ref
er to it as the “curse tree.” In the early 1900s, the old tree, which had grown to enormous size, was cut down and removed from the site, although the broken bricks and cracked tombs were left as they were, separated.

  Within a few years, a second sycamore sapling sprang up in the exact same spot where the original tree had stood, and it flourishes today, continuing to push the Blair tombstones farther and farther apart.

  A COLONIAL TIME WARP

  The following extraordinary psychic encounter was experienced by Gerry McDowell and her late husband, Gus, in 1971. They both liked to travel and often visited interesting sites in the off-season. It was on such an excursion to Jamestown Island when it happened. They were there very early on a chilly autumn morning because, as Gerry says, “We liked to be out when no one was around so we could enjoy the solitude, and Gus liked to feed the animals.” The story is best told in Gerry’s own words.

  I can remember it as clearly as if it happened yesterday. It was real early on a Sunday morning, about 6:00 a.m. It was damp and misty. You could see the fog rolling in off the James River. I was listening to one of those audio recordings which told all about the early settlement, when I had the strangest sensation. There was a deathly stillness in the air.

  I turned around and there, coming down a path toward us was a group of about twenty people—men, women and children. They were all dressed in colonial costumes. The men wore knickers with either black or white stockings and shoes with buckles. They had on jacket blouses with white collars and very broad-brimmed hats. The ladies were wearing long gray or black dresses with shawls over their shoulders and bonnets.

  They were very animated. The men and women were talking and laughing and waving their arms as they walked. The children were running in and out of the group. I thought at first that it might be a troupe of actors who were coming to participate in a play or something. I looked at Gus, and he saw them, too. We stood together and watched as they approached us.