Ghosts of Virginia's Tidewater

by L. B. Taylor Jr.

  Randolph Rollins, a retired Poquoson carpenter, told of others who went looking for the lost loot. “One time they were driven off by a cloud of bees. They took that as an omen. Another time, a sudden storm whipped up and the wind nearly took down one of the trees. That scared them off and they never came back.” J.P., however, was not discouraged by all that. He was one who thought that there really was money buried somewhere in the Nell’s Creek vicinity. “If I could, I would have spent every penny I had to buy some land there,” he said, “but, of course, you couldn’t. The government owns it. I sure wish I could talk to ole Nell again. I’ve tried many times, but she’s never answered.”

  In fact, no one has heard from Nell for more than seventy years. She was a friend of the oystermen for half a century or so, but when the military took over Fort Eustis, the knockings ceased. “She must be at peace now,” J.P. surmised.

  THE REVENGE OF “DOLLY MAMMY”

  There is a striking similarity between the infamous Bell Witch of Tennessee and the ghost of “Dolly Mammy” Messick, who surfaced several decades later in the town of Poquoson, Virginia. The Bell Witch allegedly returned from death to taunt a family who had cheated her in life. A specific target was a teenage girl named Betsy Bell.

  Poquoson is located on a plat of land between Seaford and Yorktown to the north and west and just above Hampton to the south and east. It derives its colorful name from the Algonquin Indian word pocosin, which means a swamp or dismal place. It is nearly surrounded by water and is adjacent to the Plum Tree National Wildlife Refuge. Since colonial times, Poquoson has been the home of rugged and closely knit clans of watermen and farmers. Many current families can date their ancestors in the area back hundreds of years.

  For generations, area residents owning cattle let their animals roam freely in lush, marshy regions known locally as “the Commons.” Such was the case with “Dolly Mammy” Messick, a no-nonsense, hardworking and well-liked woman whose tragic story and haunting reappearances have been remembered and recounted from generation to generation.

  There is some confusion as to when she died. Some believe it was in the 1850s. And yet, according to Bill Forrest, a local resident who says that Dolly was his great-great-aunt, there is a mention in the Poquoson Waterman book, an unofficial genealogical guide, that states that she passed away in 1904 at age forty-two.

  Whatever the case, it is agreed that it was a cold, blustery day laden with dark, heavy clouds hovering over the lowlands. Fearing a storm, Dolly decided to go out into the marshlands to bring in her cows and asked her teenage daughters, Minnie and Lettie Jane, to help her. Ensconced comfortably before a fire in the farmhouse, the girls sassed their mother and steadfastly refused.

  Angrily flinging on a cloak, Dolly turned to her daughters and warned that if anything happened to her she would return to “hant” them for the rest of their lives. With that, she disappeared into the gloom. When she had not come back by dark, a search party of friends and neighbors was hastily organized, and they tramped through the swamps with lanterns, calling her name, but they found nothing.

  The next morning, a lone fisherman, easing his boat up Bell’s Oyster Gut, a narrow estuary near the Messick home, was startled at the sight of a bare human leg sticking up out of the marsh grasses. He went for help, and soon the body of Dolly Mammy was recovered. She apparently had been sucked into a pocket of quicksand. It appeared that she had desperately struggled for her life, because the rushes and grasses around her body had been pulled up. Her funeral was well attended.

  Not long after that, the haunting threat of Dolly Mammy began to be carried out. One day, her daughters went to visit nearby relations. No sooner had they arrived when ghostly knockings began to echo loudly throughout the house. Suspecting pranksters, a family member grabbed a heavy piece of wood and barred the door. Incredibly, the bar leaped into the air from its iron fastenings and flew across the room. The knockings, described as sounding like an iron fist beating on a thin board, continued and grew in intensity so much that they were heard a quarter of a mile away. The girls cowered in fear.

  While the thunderous knockings—which seemed to follow the girls wherever they went—continued as the main form of spectral manifestation, there were many other strange incidents as well. “All sorts of things started to happen,” says Randolph Rollins, a lifelong resident of Poquoson. His grandfather was a witness to some of the events.

  “I can remember him telling me about one night the two girls slept together in a bed, and the next morning when they woke up their hair was tightly braided together,” he says. “No one could ever explain that.” As the months passed, relatives and neighbors spent considerable time at Dolly’s house trying to console the distraught daughters. Rollins’s grandfather was one of them.

  “He told me many a time about being in the house when a table in the middle of the living room with a lamp on it would start shaking and jumping up and down. Then the lamp would go out, and it would be dark, and he could hear the sounds of someone being slapped. When he relit the lamp, the girls would have red marks on their faces with the imprint of a hand. He said this happened a number of times,” Rollins recalls. Once, witnesses claimed, as the girls lay in deep sleep in their bed, something lifted the bed off the floor and shook it violently. Another time, an unseen hand snatched a Bible from beneath the pillow of one of the girls and flung it against a wall.

  As in the much documented case of the Bell Witch of Tennessee, as word of the eerie manifestations circulated, curiosity seekers from all over came to the house. An army officer from nearby Fort Monroe arrived with the intention of debunking the ghost as a myth. He had his men search the house from cellar to attic and then had guards surround it to ward off any tricksters. Yet that evening, as he sat in the parlor, the knockings were so loud that they could be heard half a mile away. Then a lamp seemed to lift itself from a table, sailed through the room and landed on the mantel. Having seen and heard enough, the bewildered officer wrote in a report, “Whatever causes the disturbances is of a supernatural nature.”

  Rollins says that once when his grandfather was in the house, two skeptical lawyers showed up. The rappings were so deafening that normal conversation couldn’t be heard, and they abruptly fled. And one memorable evening, a spirit medium was invited to hold a séance in the house. It was attended by the girls and a large group of people. According to published accounts of the affair, a “shadowy figure” appeared, winding a ball of yarn. As the figure responded to various commands of the medium, the girls fainted.

  Then the medium said, “If you are the mother of these girls and are connected with these rappings [which were going on simultaneously], speak.” The girls’ names were then called out, followed by wild, shrieking laughter. That was enough to clear the room. This single “appearance” seemed to be the high point of the hauntings. When one of the daughters died, the knockings and other phenomena ceased. The mother had made good on her threat.

  There is a brief epilogue. In the lush marshes and thick grass of the Commons, through which Poquoson cows once roamed freely, there is one small patch of land on which, curiously, no vegetation has grown since early this century. It is precisely the spot where the body of Dolly Mammy had been found.

  THE CELEBRITY SPIRITS OF FORT MONROE

  There are so many ghosts, famous or otherwise, at historic Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, that it’s hard to know where to begin. One can almost take his or her pick of a celebrity specter, and chances are that “it” has been sighted at some point over the past two centuries. The star-studded list of apparitions that allegedly have appeared at one time or another include Abraham Lincoln; Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina; General Ulysses S. Grant; the Marquis de Lafayette; Indian chief Black Hawk; and a budding young author and poet named Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, the only notable who either served or visited the fort and has not returned in spirit form is Robert E. Lee, who as a young lieutenant helped with the engineering and construction of the facility in t
he 1830s.

  These quarters at historic Fort Monroe, near Hampton, once housed a young lieutenant named Robert E. Lee. A number of sites at the fort are believed to be haunted.

  The list of haunts at Fort Monroe is not limited to the well known, however. There also are numerous nameless ones, including illicit lovers and a bevy of perky poltergeists that have been accused of such indignities as smacking officers in the face with flying dish towels and tossing heavy, marble-laden tables across rooms. There are even reports, serious ones, of a reptilian monster that has been seen stirring in the ancient moat that surrounds the fort.

  Dennis Mroczkowski, former director of the Casemate Museum in Hampton, offers a thought about why so many spirits seem to frequent the site. “With the hundreds of thousands of people who have been assigned to the fort,” he says, “there’s a large population to draw from for ghosts. There have been multiple sightings of strange apparitions, and many tend to repeat themselves and become identified in people’s minds with the famous men who have been here.” He also believes that the dank and dreary corridors and the thick-walled casemates possibly could have lent inspiration to the later macabre writings of onetime resident Poe.

  The history of the area dates back to the time of the first English settlement in America. The hardy souls aboard the Godspeed, Susan Constant and Discovery saw Old Point Comfort (where Fort Monroe is located) in April 1607, at least two weeks before they dropped anchor at Jamestown. A small exploration party even rowed ashore and met with local Indians.

  In 1608, Captain John Smith checked the area out and deemed it an excellent site for a fort. Consequently, a year later, Captain John Ratcliffe was dispatched from Jamestown to build an earthwork fortification that was called Fort Algernourne. By 1611, it was well stockaded and had a battery of seven heavy guns and a garrison of forty men. A century later, there were seventy cannons at the fort, and in 1728, a new brick facility was constructed at Old Point Comfort and was renamed Fort George. This structure was completely destroyed by a fierce hurricane in 1749.

  The strategic military value of the site was recognized by the French under Admiral Comte de Grasse during the Revolutionary War when his men reerected a battery here. The War of 1812 demonstrated the need for an adequate American coastal defense, and over the next few years plans were drawn up for an elaborate system of forts running from Maine to Louisiana. Old Point Comfort was selected as a key post in this chain, and the assignment for building a new fort here was given to Brigadier General Simon Bernard, a famous French military engineer and former aide-de-camp to Emperor Napoleon I. Construction extended over fifteen years, from 1819 to 1834, and it was named Fort Monroe after James Monroe, a Virginian and the fifth president of the United States.

  Upon its completion, the fort had an armament of nearly two hundred guns, which controlled the channel into Hampton Roads and dominated the approach to Washington by way of the Chesapeake Bay. So impregnable was this bastion, and so ideally located, it was one of the few Union fortifications in the South that was not captured by the Confederates during the Civil War. It was described as an unassailable base for the Union army and navy, right in the heart of the Confederacy. Thus President Abraham Lincoln had no qualms about visiting the fort in May 1862 to help plan the attack of Norfolk. It was here, too, where General U.S. Grant outlined the campaign strategy that led to the end of the Civil War.

  And many believe it was also at Fort Monroe, a year later, that the imprisonment of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, led to one of the first and most famous ghost stories associated with the site. Davis, who had been planning to reestablish the capital of the Confederacy in Texas with hopes of continuing the war, was captured near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, 1865. His devoted wife, Varina, rushed forward when it appeared that a Northern cavalryman was about to shoot down her defiant husband, who also had been accused, inaccurately, of plotting an attempt to assassinate President Lincoln.

  Davis was taken to Fort Monroe, then the most powerful fort in the country, to prevent escape or rescue attempts. On May 23, 1865, he was placed in solitary confinement in a cell in Casemate No. 2, a stone-walled chamber, creating a painful incident that almost cost him his life and may well have provided the cause for the periodic spectral return of Varina Davis to Fort Monroe.

  A day after his imprisonment, Davis was ordered to be shackled. When a blacksmith knelt down to rivet the ankle irons in place, the angered Davis knocked him to the floor. He sprang to his feet, raised his hammer and was about to crush the Southerner’s skull when the officer of the day, Captain Jerome Titlow, threw himself between the two men. Thereafter, it took four Union soldiers to subdue Davis long enough for the irons to be secured.

  The next day, Dr. John J. Craven, chief medical officer at the fort, examined the prisoner and was shocked at his sickly appearance. He quickly recommended that the shackles be removed, and they were a few days later. Meanwhile, the determined Varina fought hard for more humane treatment of her husband, and eventually she and Dr. Craven were successful. Davis was moved to better quarters in Carroll Hall. In May 1866, Varina got permission from President Andrew Johnson to join Davis at the fort, and she brought along their young daughter, Winnie. Davis was released from captivity on May 13, 1867, traveled extensively in Europe and later retired to Beauvoir, a mansion in Biloxi, Mississippi. He died in 1889 at the age of eighty-one and today is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

  It is supposedly the apparition of the iron-willed Varina that has been seen on occasion at the fort, appearing late at night through the second-floor window of quarters located directly across from the casemate where her husband had been harshly shackled. A number of residents have reported seeing her. One awoke early one morning to glimpse the figures of both “a plumpish woman and a young girl peering through the window.” The witness got out of bed and walked toward them, but when she reached out to touch to woman’s billowing skirt, the figures disappeared.

  Varied Spectral Activity

  A wide range of psychic phenomena has been experienced in a splendid old plantation-style house facing the east sally port that is known as Old Quarters No. 1. Manifestations have included the clumping of boots, the rustling of silken skirts, the sounds of distant laughter and the strange shredding of fresh flower petals in midwinter. It is here, appropriately enough in the Lincoln Room, where the image of Honest Abe himself has been seen clad in a dressing gown and standing by the fireplace, appearing to be deep in thought. According to Jane Keane Polonsky and Jean McFarland Drum, who in 1972 published a book on the ghosts of Fort Monroe, other residents of this house have told of seeing Lafayette, Grant and Chief Black Hawk wandering about. All of them stayed at Old Quarters No. 1 during their lifetimes.

  “Ghost Alley,” a lane that runs behind a set of quarters long known as the “Tuileries,” is the setting for one of the oldest and saddest legends of the supernatural at Fort Monroe. It is here, always under the cloak of darkness, that the fabled “White Lady” has been seen searching for her long-lost lover. In the versions that have been handed down for a century and a half, she was a beautiful young woman who once lived in a Tuileries unit with a much older husband, a captain, who has been described as stodgy and plodding.

  Being of a flirtatious nature, she inevitably (and, as it turned out, tragically) attracted the attentions of a dashing younger officer, and their obvious longings for each other soon became apparent to all but the unimaginative captain. And when he left on a trip, the young lovers consummated their relationship. The captain, however, returned unexpectedly early one evening and caught the lovers. In a fit of rage, he shot and killed his wife. Ever since, she has been sighted fleetingly in a luminescent form roaming the dark alley looking for her handsome companion in hopes of rekindling their once fervent romance.

  Undoubtedly, the most famous enlisted man ever to serve at Fort Monroe, even if it was only for a few brief months, was nineteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe.
He arrived at the fort on December 15, 1828, and almost immediately sought help to get out of the army so he could pursue a career in writing. He was successful and was discharged at Fort Monroe on April 15, 1829. He is known to have returned to the area once, twenty years later, when he recited some poetry at the old Hygeia Hotel on September 9, 1849, just four weeks before his death in Baltimore.

  It is the spectral image of Poe, many have speculated, that was seen during the late 1960s at housing quarters on Bernard Road, which, by coincidence, backs onto Ghost Alley. It was here where a lady tenant of the house heard a mysterious tapping coming from the rear of a downstairs room one night in May 1968. Upon investigation, she saw the figure of a man dressed in a white shirt with puffed sleeves, a red vest and dark pants. She couldn’t see his face in the shadows, even as he turned to give her a disdainful look. In an instant, he vanished in a gray mist through a window. Oddly, it was the same window through which the woman’s son, a year earlier, had reported seeing a white mist float toward him and then vaporize. The shadowy figure was sighted once more in 1969, in a bent-over, crouching position, moving down a hallway, where it was said to have gone through a closet door without opening the door!

  Poltergeists!

  In other parts of Fort Monroe, playful and noisy ghosts have both frightened and amused but most often bewildered residents. At the Old Slave Quarters, for example, officers, their wives and children have been subjected to a series of strange shenanigans over the years. Several tenants have found their downstairs furniture rearranged or shoved into the middle of the room overnight, with no rational explanation for how or why it was done. One couple locked their pet cat in the kitchen one night in hopes that it would rid the room of mice. Inexplicably, they found the cat outside at the back door the next day, meowing to get back in.