The Vanishing Cemetery
It was during the Depression, in the late 1930s, when a young couple moved from the Midwest to Tidewater Virginia. The husband had been lucky. He had gotten a job through the Works Progress Administration to survey drainage ditches surrounding the Great Dismal Swamp. He and his wife seemed to have a deep attraction for the mystic beauty of the swamp. They often walked is paths and trails on weekends.
One day, the young man was out walking alone while his wife stayed home tending to a sick child. He followed an abandoned and overgrown logging trail. Presently, he came upon a small family graveyard. He knelt down beside the ancient tombstones, dating from the late eighteenth century. He knew that his wife would enjoy seeing the old markers. So, as he backtracked, he carefully marked the spot where he had made his discovery. The entrance was next to some live oak trees, past a clump of three hollies and the stump of an old pine that had been splintered by lightning. He then counted his paces back along the logging road.
The following Sunday, he excitedly took his wife down the trail. He passed the stump and the holly trees and turned into where he had found the tombstones. There was nothing there! Instead, the couple found only an open, clear glade. The man was thoroughly puzzled. He rechecked his markings. He was sure that this was the exact spot. They searched for hours, to no avail, and finally had to return home when darkness began to fall.
The next day, the man went to Sam Smith’s general store and told Smith about what had happened. Smith smiled and nodded. He said that he had heard the same story many times. He told the man that if you go looking for the graveyard, you never can find it. It may be there, because a few people have stumbled upon it, Smith said, but no one has ever found it twice.
AN OMNIBUS OF OLDE TOWNE HAUNTS
The Olde Towne section of Portsmouth, Virginia, is a fascinating, well-preserved repository of some of the most elegant early American architecture in the nation, with superb examples of Colonial, Federal, Greek Revival, Georgian and Victorian houses. Homeowners obviously have taken great pride in their dwellings, yards and gardens in this one-square-mile antique oasis, and there is enough wrought-iron flavor to remind one of New Orleans’s famous French Quarter.
Olde Towne is also a psychic gold mine, with one of the greatest concentrations of ghosts in the commonwealth. At last count, there was something like twenty-seven separate specters haunting the houses within this area of a few square blocks. And what a marvelous setting they have, amid all of the gargoyles and turrets, the dank basements and musty attics. The rich, colorful tales of the supernatural here have been told and retold for generations and have resulted in a popular annual ghost walk each Halloween week. Here, then, is a sampling of these regional spirits.
The Grieved Slave
In 1987, Cathi Bunn and her family moved into the historic Grice-Neely House at 202 North Street. The first portion of this English basement home is believed to have been built sometime in the 1750s, and it still contains some original wooden-pegged rafters. Interestingly, there is a place on the rear façade of the building where a rather large window has been bricked over. Cathi says that in the 1850s, a medium held a séance in the house and told the owners that when the next person living there died, they should be lowered out of this window, and then the window should be taken out and paved over with brick. By doing this, the family would forever ward off evil spirits.
The Grice-Neely House in Olde Towne Portsmouth houses the ghost of a murdered slave.
Cathi became personally acquainted with the resident ghost here in a somewhat frightening manner. “I was all alone one night,” she recalls, “and I decided to take a nice hot bath. I left the door slightly ajar and was soaking when I heard footsteps in the hallway. I thought my husband and kids had come back, but it wasn’t them. It sounded like someone with no shoes on. It came right up to the bathroom door and then stopped. I was scared. Then the steps continued, which was quite strange, because there was a solid wall where it kept walking!”
Cathi adds that earlier tenants of the house also met the ghost, one of them face to face. “A college student was staying in one of the bedrooms,” she says, “and one night he woke up to find an African American man standing at the foot of his bed. Then ‘he’ dissolved, like a mist.” A female tenant once saw the same apparition standing on the circular staircase. She froze when she realized that she could see right through him. There have been numerous other sightings. One resident was so frightened by the sounds of someone running across the attic floor above his room that he wanted to keep a gun by his bed. Cathi told him, “What’s up there you can’t shoot, because I think it’s already dead.”
In her efforts to track down the origins of the spirit and why it is still in the house, Cathi learned of a legend that clearly fits the description of what has been seen and heard over the years. It is, she believes, the ghost of a former slave named Jemmy, who was stabbed to death in the early 1800s by his master, who was having an illicit affair with Jemmy’s wife. He periodically reappears, searching for her.
The Headless “Graduate”
The Ball-Nivison House in Olde Towne Portsmouth was built about 1780. Bob Albertson’s family has lived there for more than three quarters of a century, and for a long time during this period there was a resident ghost here with very predictable habits. “We treated him just like another member of the family,” Albertson says. “People can live with ghosts. They’re not malevolent. He goes his way and I go mine. We never tried to pass it off as a haunted house, but I have to admit, a number of things have happened here that aren’t supposed to happen, and I can’t explain them.”
The manifestations that he and others in the family have been subjected to seem to follow a precise pattern. The specter always goes one way, from the library to the hall door. There, it lifts a heavy antique latch-lock adorned with a lion and unicorn, opens the door, walks up the steps and stops by a bedroom door. “I can tell you this,” Albertson says. “That latch is so heavy it couldn’t blow open or open by itself.”
The Ball-Nivison House in Olde Towne Portsmouth is the scene of considerable paranormal activity, including the sighting of a headless ghost.
Only Albertson’s mother has seen the spirit, and she says that it was without a head. She saw it once more than forty years ago. It appeared to her wearing a black robe similar to a graduation gown, and it seemed to make the sound of labored breathing. She said that there was something like a mortar board resting atop its shoulders. “For many years, I have heard of a legend of a headless horseman riding down Glasgow Street in the dead of night,” Albertson says. “Our house is almost at the foot of Glasgow. People can make what they want of it.”
A Prophesy of Death
How would you like to know the precise day on which you would die? That, apparently, is what happened to Reverend John Braidfoot, a Scotsman who became the second rector of Trinity Church in Portsmouth in 1773. Following the Revolutionary War, during which he served as chaplain of the Continental army, Braidfoot had a difficult time maintaining his ministry. It was an era when many churches closed, but the reverend continued to live in the rectory at the Glebe and regularly visited his neighbors in need.
The grave site of Reverend Blaidfoot, in Portsmouth, who was told of the day he would die by a ghost.
One night, while driving home in his buggy, his horse stopped suddenly. Blocking the road was what Braidfoot later described as an apparition. There was an eerie silence, and then, in a rare occurrence, the apparition spoke. It told the reverend that he would die at home on the following February 6. This grim prophesy was repeated three or four times over the next few months.
According to the reverend’s great-granddaughter, who recounted the legend a century and a half later, Braidfoot’s wife decided to have a dinner party on February 6 to take her husband’s mind off of death. In the midst of the festivities, the reverend excused himself and went up to his room. When he did not return, members of the party went up to look f
or him.
He was dead!
The Girl Who Was “Born to See”
“She was,” says Gabrielle Bielenstein, “‘born to see.’ Isn’t that a marvelous expression? It means, of course, that a person is psychic. Some people are born with perfect pitch, and some can play the piano by ear. She was ‘born to see.’”
Gabrielle is talking—in the darkened, high-ceilinged parlor of her magnificent Art Nouveau home at 328 Court Street in Olde Towne Portsmouth—about the teenage African American girl who worked for Gabrielle’s mother more than half a century ago. It is called the Maupin House, the family name, and it was built in 1885 because Gabrielle’s grandmother, Edmonia, wanted to live on Court Street, since it was the most fashionable section of the city. The house has about twenty rooms, including six bathrooms, a beautiful spiral staircase and exquisite wood paneling throughout. Behind it was a splendid walled garden.
Gabrielle and her identical twin sister grew up in the house, and the young girl came to work here in the early 1940s, during World War II. Almost immediately, she began to “see” things that others didn’t. “There had been some strange occurrences in the house before,” Gabrielle says, “but we never paid much attention to them. One would hear tales. Some of the other servants would talk occasionally about a rocking chair rocking on its own on the front porch. We would hear noises that sounded like someone descending the staircase when no one was there. Things like that.”
The Maupin House in Olde Towne Portsmouth was the site where a servant girl displayed psychic abilities far beyond the normal five senses.
The new girl, however, saw, felt and sensed presences in and around the house almost from the day she began work. And, with uncanny accuracy, they perfectly fit descriptions of past residents, both animal and human. Consider, for example, the buried pit bulls. “My mother, Florence, had about given up on having any children before my sister and I came along, so she had lots of pets,” Gabrielle says. “Now, you have to understand this was at a time when these dogs were very rare. Few people knew what they looked like.”
She continued:
My mother didn’t have much luck, and most of them died very young and they were all buried in little pine coffins in a corner of the yard. When the young girl came to work for us, there hadn’t been any pit bulls around for years, and I don’t believe she had any way of knowing what they looked like. Yet she told us she saw the dogs playing in the yard. When she was asked to describe what they looked like, she said they were just like Miss Julia’s dog. Miss Julia was a neighbor who had a Boston Terrier, which closely resembles a pit bull. How did she know what those dogs looked like unless she saw them?
The girl also saw the apparition of Miles Portlock. Born a slave before the Civil War, he had been a servant to Gabrielle’s great-grandmother. “We considered him a part of the family, and as a child I can remember him sitting at the kitchen table and drinking ice tea,” Gabrielle says. “He died about 1939 or 1940, somewhere around the age of ninety, well before the girl came to Maupin House to work. Yet she said that she saw him in the garden with his cane, and she described him perfectly, too.”
And then there were the sightings of Miss Edmonia, Gabrielle’s grandmother. The girl said that she saw an “old woman” on the staircase at times. Gabrielle explains:
We had a lot of photos in the house in those days, but there were no recent photos of Edmonia before her death, because she refused to have any taken after she reached middle age. She had been a beautiful woman.
We took the girl around to view all the photos, and she immediately picked out an earlier portrait of Edmonia, and said that was who she saw. She said it was the same person, only she was much older now. How did she know? How did she pick that one picture out of all the ones in the house? She had no way of knowing what Edmonia looked like. I can’t explain it.
Gabrielle Bielenstein, mistress of the Maupin House in Olde Towne Portsmouth, tells of the young girl who once lived there and displayed rare psychic abilities.
The Maupin House is one of the most popular stops on the annual Olde Towne Ghost Walk at Halloween. Someone always plays the part of old Miles Portlock and tells the stories of the ghostly legends and the young girl who was “born to see.”
THE MAD POLTERGEIST OF PORTSMOUTH
It was known simply as the house on Florida Avenue in the Mount Hermon section of Portsmouth, Virginia. It was torn down several years ago. It probably is just as well. There was a time, half a century ago, when the old house at 949 Florida Avenue was the talk not only of the town but also of the entire country. For a brief period in September 1962, the residence became a whirlwind of psychic activity that lasted several days, frightened the wits out of the chief of police and newspaper reporters, among others, and drew unruly crowds of thousands who demanded to see what was going on.
It had begun, innocently enough, on a Thursday afternoon about 4:00 p.m. Charles and Annie Daughtery were living in the house at the time with their great-great-grandson. The Daughterys were described as being very old; Annie was said to be close to one hundred. A little horse vase, sitting on a sewing machine in the hallway, fell on the floor three or four times. Annie, who said that she didn’t know what ghosts or haunted houses were, and was not afraid of them, told her great-great-grandson to take the vase and set it outside. Just then, a bottle of hair lotion inexplicably sailed through the air and struck her in the back of the head.
By the next day, accounts of the mysterious happenings had circulated throughout the neighborhood and beyond and had come to the attention of local newspaper reporters. It had been alleged that a carpet eerily rose off the floor by itself; vases jumped from mantelpieces and hurtled over people’s heads; and a mattress slid off a bed and onto a floor, all in front of the incredulous Annie. The phenomena had not been witnessed by her alone. Friends and neighbors had seen these occurrences, too, although many didn’t stay long. They had fled in stark fear. One who reportedly had run out of the house was the local chief of police.
By Saturday, the events had become so celebrated that when Joseph Phillips, a Norfolk newspaper staff writer, entered the house along with a photographer, a mob of more than two hundred people had gathered outside. “I didn’t believe in ghosts—until Saturday,” Phillips began his front-page article. But, he added, he “got goose pimples while dodging flying household objects that crashed to bits on the floor. I saw weird things happen, but I don’t know what caused them.”
When Phillips entered the house, he stood by a buffet with Mrs. Marion Bivens, a neighbor. She asked him if he had felt the buffet move. She looked scared. He hadn’t felt anything. Suddenly, a vase that had been on the mantelpiece in the living room crashed into the hallway wall at the front of the house, apparently rounding a corner in the process. Phillips and the photographer ran to the living room. There was no one there. As they ran, a cup from the buffet in the dining room shattered at their feet. At this point, Mrs. Bivens ran from the house in terror.
“Then I saw an empty tobacco can fly toward me from the buffet,” Phillips said. “It was in the air when I saw it. It crashed and rolled to the floor at my feet.” Phillips’s subsequent story of his experience drew even more people to the area, and when a wire service article ran a day or two later, crowds grew to enormous proportions. Police estimated that twenty thousand curious onlookers congregated there one day, and they ordered out the fire department, hoses ready, in case a riot broke out. Some in the horde of people stormed inside the house and demanded to “see the thing.” Several were arrested, and finally the Daughterys had to move out of the house and stay with relatives until the excitement died down.
William G. Roll, then a student with the Parapsychology Lab at Duke University, showed up to investigate. He said that there were enough witnesses to support the likelihood that the disturbances in the house were caused by recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK. Roll claimed that the flying objects and loud noises were not necessarily the work of a ghost. Rather, he
believed that they were the work of the living, not the dead.
“Our focus on RSPK eruptions has been on the individual who is at the center of the disturbances,” he told a reporter, adding that usually such occurrences are sparked by tension or certain neurological features. Maybe so, but that was a difficult theory to swallow by any of the scores of people who were in the little house on Florida Avenue during the few days when all hell broke loose. They didn’t have a rational explanation, but they knew what they saw. As reporter Phillips summed it up, “I didn’t believe this nonsense before. Now I’m not so sure.”
A MOTHER’S LAST GOODBYE
The late Roger Rageot, a native Frenchman who lived in Norfolk, Virginia, most of his life, was first and foremost a naturalist, but he also could be called an explorer, author, photographer, artist and a museum officer. For example, he was curator of the Norfolk Museum of Natural History from 1951 until its closing in 1967. He also had a fascination with the supernatural and once told of a touching psychic event he personally experienced when he was still with the museum.
Roger Rageot. Illustration by Brenda Goens.
Late one winter evening, Roger and a friend were talking in his office when the doorbell rang unexpectedly.
I got up to open the door. There stood my mother! A four-inch snowfall lay on the ground, and she stood so small and frail, with snowflakes blowing around her. There is nothing really unusual about one’s mother ringing your doorbell late at night. But I knew my mother was dying of bone cancer, a continent away, in a hospital in Paris, France! And I was in Norfolk, Virginia.
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