Ghosts of Virginia's Tidewater

by L. B. Taylor Jr.

  It was then that we realized there was something different. While they seemed to be talking, there was no sound whatsoever. Instead, there was only an icy silence. They didn’t appear to be ghosts, because I think most ghosts are wispy or transparent, and they weren’t. You couldn’t see through them. And then we noticed. They were ghosts because they were not walking on the ground! They were elevated above it by a few inches.

  Gus and I froze. We stood still and didn’t say a thing. We felt together that any movement or sound on our part would dissolve them. On they came. They marched right by us without noticing us. It was as if we weren’t there. We could have reached out and touched them, but we didn’t. They moved past us and walked straight up to the path to the old church. When we turned to follow them, we could barely believe our eyes. The church had transformed from its present state to how it must have looked in the early 1600s, complete with steeple and all! Gus and I both gasped.

  They opened the door and, one by one, went inside. When the last gentleman entered, he turned and appeared to stare at us. Gus said he had a smile on his face. He slammed the door forcefully. Again, there was no sound. We stood there for a few seconds in stunned silence, transfixed, and then the church reappeared in its present state again.

  Neither one of us was afraid of ghosts, so we were not really scared. Still, it was minutes before either of us could speak. Then Gus finally said, “Nobody is going to believe this!” I don’t know about such things, but I think now that we had somehow gotten into a time warp for that brief instant. I have heard about such things. But how else can you explain what happened? All I know is that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I will never forget.

  PART IV

  COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG

  “MAD LUCY” OF LUDWELL-PARADISE HOUSE

  Some called her (perhaps too generously) eccentric, capricious, whimsical or odd. Others said that she was just plain crazy. Whatever it was, it is certain that she was one of a kind, and her curious behavior caused excited titters of whispered gossip in the upper strata of eighteenth-century social circles on two continents. It is probable that had she not been from a well-to-do family, she might have been committed to a mental institution early in her life. As it was, her actions were covered up, embarrassingly laughed off or otherwise explained away as those of a high-strung young lady with a flair for being mischievous.

  She was Lucy Ludwell, second daughter of Philip Ludwell III. She married John Paradise, a scholar and an accepted member of the intellectual set. Lucy lived much of her life in London and, according to one published account, “[s]tartled society by such exploits as dashing boiling water from her tea urn on a too garrulous gentleman who annoyed her.”

  Early in the eighteenth century, her grandfather had built a town residence in Williamsburg, Virginia, a handsome brick mansion. Surrounding the main house were stables, a paddock, a well, a smokehouse, a “necessary” house and a woodhouse close to the kitchen.

  The Ludwell-Paradise House in Colonial Williamsburg was the home of “Mad Lucy” Ludwell, whose spirit is heard splashing in the bathtub two centuries after she died.

  Property Lucy inherited in Virginia was confiscated by the commonwealth during the Revolutionary War because the politics espoused by her husband were alien to the cause of the colonists fighting for their freedom. In 1805, however, ten years after her husband died, Lucy set sail for America and was allowed to take up residence in what became known as the Ludwell-Paradise House.

  It was here, as she got along in age, that she again became the talk of the town for her peculiar habits. For openers, Lucy, because of her social position in London, considered herself above her friends and neighbors in Virginia. She had a haughty attitude that she made no effort to disguise. One of Lucy’s quirks was her penchant for borrowing the new clothes of her lady friends, especially hats. She viewed herself as a fashion plate of the times and seemed oblivious to the fact that everyone in town knew when she was donning loaned clothing. On Sundays, the congregation at her church always got a chuckle because Lucy regularly had her “little black boy,” a servant’s son, carry her prayer book into church ahead of her to announce her imminent entrance.

  Lucy is perhaps best remembered for entertaining guests on weird carriage rides. They were weird in that they never went anywhere. She had a favorite coach reassembled on the back porch of her house. When callers dropped by, she would invite them into the coach and then have it rolled back and forth across the porch on imaginary trips by a servant. Her fantasy carriage rides became so frequent and her other eccentricities so pronounced that Lucy began having difficulty differentiating between the worlds of reality and make believe. Eventually, in 1812, she was committed to the state asylum for the insane in Williamsburg.

  While Lucy died two years later, her spirit apparently remained attached to the Ludwell-Paradise House. A number of occupants over the years have reported hearing strange sounds there not attributable to any known physical source. Most notable of the witnesses are Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph Bares. He is a retired vice-president of Colonial Williamsburg who lived in the house for several years in the 1960s and 1970s:

  Oh, we never heard any ghostly voices, saw any levitations or anything like that. But my wife and I each experienced the same odd phenomenon on several different occasions, maybe ten or twelve separate times. And that is, we would be downstairs when we would hear the water running in a second-floor bathtub. Then we would hear a splashing sound in the tub, as if someone was taking a bath. The first few times we heard it, we went up the stairs to take a look, but there was never anything or anyone there, and no water was running in the tub. So after a while, we wouldn’t even check when we heard it. We’d just laugh and say it must be Lucy pouring a bath for herself.

  Cleanliness, it should be noted, was another of Mad Lucy’s idiosyncrasies. She was known to have taken as many as six baths a day!

  THE PUZZLING RIDDLE OF THE “REFUSAL ROOM”

  It has been described by many as the most beautiful house in America. Indeed, the stately Georgian mansion, shaded by a row of enormous old tulip poplar trees overlooking the scenic James River, remains a magnificent building even though it is more than 250 years old. Carter’s Grove, in James City County near Williamsburg, Virginia, is rich in history.

  Construction of the house began in 1750 on a 1,400-acre tract of land bought by the legendary colonist Robert “King” Carter, one of the wealthiest and most influential men of his time. The house and grounds today are privately owned, but for years up until early in the twenty-first century, they were open to the public; tens of thousands of tourists visited the plantation yearly, marveling at its majesty. For more than two hundred years, it was a showplace residence, and many lavish and memorable parties and dinners were held here for rich and famous personages.

  Like other plantation homes along the James River, Carter’s Grove also has its share of colorful legends and anecdotes. There are, for example, deep scars in the handsome, hand-hewn stair railing leading up from the front hall on the first floor. They were said to have been made during the Revolutionary War by the British cavalryman Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who rode his horse up the stairway, “hacking the balastrade with his saber as he ascended,” according to a Colonial Williamsburg publication.

  If ever there was a site ripe for the spiritual hauntings of unrestful souls, it well could be Carter’s Grove; on the grounds is the spot at which a great tragedy occurred more than 350 years ago. Here, archaeologists searching for eighteenth-century artifacts surprisingly uncovered the remnants of a colony of early settlers dating to the year 1619. The settlement was known as Martin’s Hundred, and all residents of it were massacred by Indians in 1622.

  The “Refusal Room” in Carter’s Grove, near Williamsburg, is where two young ladies allegedly turned down marriage proposals from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. According to legend, one of the ladies returns in spirit form to tear up carnation petals and scatter them about the room.


  Through the years, there have been strange occurrences at the plantation that tend to support the belief that paranormal phenomena is involved. There is, for instance, the story told by husband and wife caretakers, who were alone at the estate one evening. While doing chores in different parts of the west end of the mansion, each distinctly heard footsteps coming from the east end. The man assumed it was his wife and vice versa. Later, when they met, each learned that the other had not ventured into the east end of the house. A search revealed no cause for the sounds. A former supervisor of tour guides told of an old gardener who occasionally heard a woman playing a harp in an upstairs bedroom. No one could ever convince him otherwise, although no known source for the musical interludes was ever found.

  It is in a downstairs drawing room, however, that the most celebrated ghost of Carter’s Grove apparently resides. Longtime servants at the mansion were convinced that this room was haunted. It was here that a pretty young woman, Mary Cary, allegedly turned down a proposal for marriage in the mid-eighteenth century from an ardent suitor—George Washington! Some years later, in the same room, Thomas Jefferson offered his hand to the fair Rebecca Burwell. He, too, was rejected. This parlor subsequently became known as the “Refusal Room.”

  In the years since, some peculiar things kept reoccurring in the room. Most notably, whenever white carnations were placed in it, they were mysteriously ripped to shreds late at night by unseen hands and scattered about. No one knows who did it or why only white carnations were affected—and only the ones in the Refusal Room, whereas other flowers in the house remained untouched.

  In 1939, the Associated Press carried a nationwide article on the phenomenon, quoting Mrs. Archibald McCrea, then owner of the house. She said at the time that it was true that “something” was coming in at night to “blight her blooms.” Traps were set for mice, but they were never sprung. John Coleman, an elderly butler, said it was “ghosts!”

  When the plantation was open to the public, tour hostesses said that they, too, occasionally found the shredded petals of white carnations littered about the room. No one at the site, present or past, has offered any semblance of a rational explanation for such apparent supernatural activity. It was highly doubtful that the torn flowers were the work of a prankster, because when the house was open, tour guides were always in or near the room, and when the house was closed at night, security guards kept a close watch; there were also alarm systems throughout that would have been triggered by anyone prowling about.

  Could it be the spirit of one of the two famous spurned lovers, unable to control his emotion at being rejected? Possibly. But some believe that it may be the spectral return of one of the young women who refused. It is said that when Mary Cary watched the triumphant Continental army enter the area after the Yorktown surrender at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1781, commanded by General George Washington, she was so overcome by chagrin that she fainted away in her husband’s arms.

  So it is speculated that it may be her spirit that sometimes slipped into the house late at night to tear the carnations in a fit of anger at what might have been had she accepted Washington’s original bouquet of flowers and proposal offer so long ago.

  PART V

  RIVER AREAS

  THE RAPPING FRIEND OF THE OYSTERMEN

  At Fort Eustis, near Newport News, Virginia, there is a small, sheltered cove where the waters of Nell’s Creek feed into the historic James River. Decades ago, before the government purchased the land surrounding this area, Nell’s Creek was a haven for Tidewater oystermen. Daily they would ply their time-honored trade amid the rich oyster beds of the river, and at night some would stay in the mouth of the creek from Monday until Friday, when they would take their catch to market and head home.

  According to local lore, this particular creek was named after a young lady named Nell, who lived in the region during the nineteenth century. What has been passed down is that she was a spirited, headstrong person who fell in love with a man described as a straggler and that her father strongly objected to such a union. In fact, he allegedly told her that if she violated his wishes and married the man, he would kill her and bury her along with all of his money.

  Despite his warning, she supposedly ran off with her lover, and her father lived up to his threat. He killed her and buried her, along with his life savings, at a point on or near the creek beneath two large walnut trees. Since that time, no one is exactly sure when it all began, although the prevailing opinion is that from about the 1880s or 1890s up until the 1930s, the spirit of Nell reappeared, mostly through the psychic manifestation of knockings or rappings, to area oystermen. She apparently was a friendly ghost who provided timely news on where the best oyster hunting was from day to day, and she often played games in which she seemed to enjoy answering questions, mostly concerning numbers and figures. Why she chose to befriend the lonely watermen is a question that remains unanswered.

  The story was best told by a seventy-nine-year-old former oysterman known as “J.P.,” who doesn’t want his real name used for fear of being mocked. For many years in the 1920s and 1930s, J.P. worked the waters of the James with his father and brother.

  “I definitely believe she was there. There’s no doubt in my mind,” he says of Nell. “I’m not a superstitious person, but in this instance I do believe. I only experienced her presence once, but it was something I will never forget. My father and brother heard her many times, and they believed. And they wouldn’t tell a lie for anything. Many say it was all a myth, but a lot of people swear they heard her.” As J.P. told it, the stories about Nell began surfacing late in the nineteenth century. No one ever saw her. They heard her. She “appeared” by knocking on the cabin roofs of the oystermen’s boats.

  “It was a knock unlike any other I have ever heard,” J.P. recalls. “It was different. I can’t even describe it. I guess I was about eighteen or twenty when I experienced it. We were laid up overnight in the cove, and I was standing outside the cabin with my head tucked inside, listening to the conversation. The cabin was full of watermen, talking. There was a very distinct knocking on the top of the cabin. When I poked my head outside, it sounded like it came from the inside, and when I ducked my head inside the cabin, it was like it came from the outside. There was no way it could have been a trick or hoax. I wasn’t really scared, but I must have looked concerned, because someone laughed and said, ‘That’s just ole Nell.’”

  J.P. says that his father told him many times about the rappings. “He would never volunteer to talk about her, but if you asked, he would tell you.” What J.P.’s father said was that she “talked” through her rappings. One rap meant yes and two meant no. “In those days, people oystered over many sites up and down the river,” J.P. says. “Some would come out of the Warwick River, Deep Creek, Squashers Hole and other places. Every rock in the river had a name, and the men knew them all. So they would ask Nell how their peers were doing at other locations. Like, they would ask how many bushels of oysters did they get today at Thomas rock, near the James River bridge. And Nell would give so many knocks.”

  If the harvests were better elsewhere, according to J.P., then those asking the questions of Nell would fish those waters the next day. Invariably, their hauls improved. “Only a few of the men took stock in this,” J.P. acknowledged, “but those who did always benefited from the advice. And she was always right. If she said so many bushels were brought in at such and such a rock, it was so.”

  Nell amazed the men with all sorts of revelations. “She could answer anything she was asked,” J.P. said. “You could ask her how many children someone had, and she would rap out the number in knocks on the cabin. You could ask her someone’s age, and she knew it exactly. My father said one time a man grabbed a handful of beans out of a sack and asked her how many he had. She told him, to the bean!” In this manner, Nell carried on conversations with a number of oystermen over the years. She was especially conversant with one man, J.P. noted, “and it was told that
when he died she even appeared at his funeral by rapping on his coffin.”

  Robert Forrest, a lifelong native of the area, well remembers his ancestors talking about Nell. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’ve heard the tales. The one I remember best concerned an old man named John who was a very religious fellow. He had heard about Nell, too, and he didn’t believe the stories until the night he experienced the sensation himself. He went out with some oystermen one time just to prove there was nothing to the legend. He carried his Bible with him.

  “Well,” Forrest continued, “they laid up in the Deep Creek area that night and tried to rouse her. ‘Nell,’ they said, ‘if you’re here, rap twice on the cabin.’ Nothing happened. About thirty minutes later, they tried again, and sure enough, this time there were two sharp raps. They asked her several questions, and she responded to each of them, but John still wasn’t convinced. He thought someone was playing a trick on him, so he went out on deck. There was no one there and no boats nearby. Not only that, but the boat John was on had also been untied from its stakes and was drifting freely in the creek. John became a believer right there!”

  J.P. says that his brother was reading the Bible to Nell one night, the chapter of Deuteronomy, when the knockings on the cabin became louder and louder and got out of control. He stopped reading, and she stopped. “He never read the Bible to her again.” Deuteronomy, it may be remembered, includes the ten commandments, among which are “Thou shalt not kill” and “Honor thy father.” “No wonder Nell was disturbed,” said J.P. “All she ever told us was that her father had killed her and buried her nearby with his money. So one time my father and brother went off digging in a spot where there were two large walnut trees. Except the whole time they were there, they were pestered by large swarms of hornets or wasps, and they had to give it up.”