Ghosts of Virginia's Tidewater

by L. B. Taylor Jr.

  I stood in stupefaction! I’ll never know what made me say what I said to her. Maybe it was the strange look on her face, a very peculiar smile, one common to a contented person. Her eyes were vacant, possessing an indescribable light. They appeared almost phosphorescent. I could see that her mind was transported into another, more distant world. She didn’t speak.

  “When did you die?” I blurted out. She chuckled shyly and replied, “How do you know I’m dead? Didn’t I tell you I’d come over to America someday? Well, here I am.”

  At this point, Roger’s friend, Roland Young, interrupted and said, “I don’t know what you two are trying to put over on me, but I simply refuse to believe any of it.”

  “But this is my mother, Roland,” Roger said. “How could you not believe it?” Roland then replied, “Your mother’s sick. How could she have traveled over here?”

  “She’s dead!” Roger declared.

  Roger and his mother then started reminiscing and soon were so lost in remembering the past that Roland’s presence in the room was completely forgotten. Sometime later, Roger’s mother said, “It’s getting late, son, and I still must see your sister in Kentucky. I’d better leave now.”

  Roger said, “She then arose and handed me something. I accompanied her to the front door and was about to bid her goodbye, but she suddenly vanished. I turned to Roland, who stood transfixed. He stared at the spot where, only a few seconds ago, my mother had stood. ‘What did she give you?’ he asked.”

  “Until then, I hadn’t noticed,” Roger continued. “I opened my closed fist. It was a tiny locket, one that I had given her when I was a little child. There was an inscription on it which read, ‘To Mommy, with love, Roger.’ I showed it to Roland, who said this was all too much for him. ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘You and I have often discussed the realm of the supernatural. It is everywhere. It surrounds us, it even penetrates us. Science tries constantly to pursue it, but cannot even get near it.’”

  “The day after my mother’s apparition appeared, I received a letter from my father, in Paris,” Roger said. “‘My dear son,’ he wrote, ‘Because the news that I’m about to bring you will cause you much pain, you must have great courage. I’m sorry to relate that your devoted mother passed away yesterday.’”

  Roger concluded his description of the incident by saying, “I have often participated in intellectual discussions of the paranormal. I used to participate theoretically. But my experience with my mother’s apparition has changed things. Now I discuss the supernatural with confidence and some authority.”

  A CASE OF CRISIS APPARITION

  It is a shaded, secluded isle of serenity amid the hustle and bustle of downtown Norfolk. It has been that way for more than 350 years. In fact, the first church built on the site of the present-day St. Paul’s was known as “Ye Chappell of Ease.” It was erected in 1641 as part of the Elizabeth River Parish. Norfolk became a borough in 1736, and the present church was built in 1739.

  The building was assailed and partially burned by the British on January 1, 1776, when Norfolk was bombarded and destroyed. The church was serving as a shelter for women and children during the attack. In the Civil War, Federal forces occupied the church from 1862 to 1865. The 1.75-acre churchyard is similar to the old yards of England. There are 274 listed graves here, the oldest belonging to Dorothy Farrell, who died on January 18, 1673. Some of the stone markers bear a skull and crossbones, which simply signified death rather than the resting place of a pirate. Wedged into the far northeast corner of the churchyard is an above-ground tombstone with a strange quotation carved into it.

  “Yes,” says a church spokesman when asked, “that was a tragic case. The poor man lost his whole family. It is our only ghost story.” It also was, apparently, a case of crisis apparition. This occurs when a person, the “receiver,” suddenly becomes aware that another person, the “transmitter,” is undergoing a crisis. This may be in the form of pain, shock, emotion or death, even though the transmitter may be some distance away, in some cases thousands of miles. The most common examples of such phenomena occur in times of war, when a mother, for instance, may report seeing or hearing her son at the moment he is wounded or at the instant of his death. The theory goes that the pain and shock trigger involuntary telepathic contact between mother and son, or transmitter and receiver.

  David Duncan’s crisis apparition occurred in 1823. Three years earlier, he had married Martha Shirley, the daughter of a widow who operated the Norfolk boardinghouse, where he often stayed. Duncan was captain of the cargo schooner Sea Witch, and he took his bride on a honeymoon voyage to several Mediterranean ports. Afterward, they settled in Norfolk, and she gave birth to twins, Davis and Ann. Early in 1823, Duncan set sail again on a merchant voyage, carrying a cargo of lumber and animal hides.

  This unusual headstone, located in the cemetery of St. Paul’s Church in downtown Norfolk, marks the burial site of the wife and children of sea captain David Duncan. It represents a dramatic case of crisis apparition that occurred in 1823.

  On the night of May 12, the Sea Witch was anchored in the harbor of Genoa, Italy. Most of the crew had gone ashore to unwind, but Duncan had stayed behind and was in his cabin reading a book, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, by the English poet Edward Young. It was eerily apropos.

  Thousands of miles away, a fire broke out in the bakery beneath the rooms occupied by Mrs. Duncan and her children. Martha desperately tried to escape with her infants, but a rickety staircase collapsed, and they perished in the flames. At that precise instant, David Duncan was reading the poet’s lines that described death as an “insatiate archer” when he envisioned a fire at the foot of the main mast. He ran from his cabin, and when he reached the deck, the fire seemed to blossom. In the midst of the flames, he clearly saw the wraithlike form of his wife frantically clutching their son and daughter.

  Her screams pierced the silence in the harbor. “David! David! Save us!” she cried. And then, in a flash, she was gone, as was the fire. Although crazed with anxiety, it was not until weeks later, when his ship finally docked at Norfolk, that Duncan learned that the awful horror of his vision was real.

  And so he placed a horizontal raised tombstone, inscribed with Martha’s name and the date of death, over a single grave site in St. Paul’s churchyard. To this, he had the stonemason carve the two lines of verse he had been reading when his loved ones died: “Insatiate archer, could not one suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice and thrice my peace was slain.”

  PART VII

  VIRGINIA BEACH AREA

  THE LEGEND OF THE NORWEGIAN LADY

  Tens of thousands of tourists in Virginia Beach pass by the bronze statue of The Norwegian Lady at Twenty-fifth Street and Oceanfront each summer without knowing the gripping and incredibly sad story of why the figure is there.

  The saga began on the morning of March 3, 1891, when Captain J.M. Jorgensen sailed out of Pensacola, Florida, on the small Norwegian three-masted bark Dictator, bound for England with a cargo of yellow pine lumber. The ship carried a crew of fifteen, along with Jorgensen’s wife, Johanne Pauline, and their four-year-old son, Karl.

  Three weeks later, just north of the Bahama Islands, the Dictator ran headlong into a violent nor’easter storm and was unmercifully buffeted both by nearly hurricane-force winds and mountainous seas. Two of five lifeboats were swept overboard and lost in the surging ocean, and the ship sprung a leak. The captain wanted to attempt to ride out the storm, but the crew, described as disgruntled, virtually forced Jorgensen to alter his course and head toward Hampton Roads, Virginia, to make repairs.

  On the morning of March 27, the ship, suffering greatly from the pounding waves, was sighted off Virginia Beach. By 9:30 a.m., crowds had gathered as it passed by the Princess Anne Hotel on Sixteenth Street. According to eyewitness accounts, the spectators watched in horror as the Dictator struggled helplessly north. A little over an hour later, it foundered on a sandbar about three hundred yards offshore.

&nbs
p; The situation was now desperate. A lifesaving crew first attempted to cannon-shoot a breeches buoy line to the ship, but this failed due to the excessively high winds. By now, two of the three remaining lifeboats had also been lost. Captain Jorgensen then decided to send four of his men in the remaining boat, and somehow they miraculously made it through the crashing surf to safety. Finally, after many unsuccessful attempts, a line from the beach to the ship was secured to the top of the main mast, and a breeches buoy was sent out in hopes of rescuing those remaining aboard.

  But the ship was rolling so much in the high seas that the line would tighten and then slacken with each wave, either dunking a crew member into the ocean or throwing him high in the air. Despite this, however, the first man made it to the beach unharmed. Jorgensen then told his wife and son to try it; paralyzed with fear, she refused. So another sailor was dispatched and reached shore. Two more made it safely before darkness halted the buoy operation.

  The statue of The Norwegian Lady, on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach, was erected to note a dramatic sea tragedy more than a century ago—one with haunting overtones.

  The Dictator, having been pounded by the angry surf all day, began breaking up. As a last resort, the captain had his son strapped to his back, and they lowered themselves into the water, littered with loose boards of pine lumber. The surging sea quickly tore little Karl from his father’s back, and he drowned. So, too, did a sailor and Mrs. Jorgensen. The captain was washed ashore and found unconscious but alive.

  The next day, the figurehead of the Dictator, a carved wooden robust woman, was found and placed on the boardwalk as a memorial to those who had lost their lives. The bodies of the crewmen who didn’t make it, as well as Mrs. Jorgensen’s, were then buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Norfolk. Little Karl’s body was not found for several days, until a beachcomber saw it washed up near Seventeenth Street. The local man who discovered it didn’t realize that this was Jorgensen’s son, so he took Karl to his minister at a church south of Rudee Inlet, and the remains were buried there.

  Within days, the eerie sounds of a child crying for his mother were heard at the cemetery by a number of witnesses. After this phenomenon repeated itself for several days, it was learned that the captain’s son’s body had not been found with the others, and the connection was made. Karl’s body was exhumed and reburied next to his mother at Elmwood Cemetery. When this happened, the ghostly cries of the child were no longer heard in Virginia Beach.

  The figurehead of the Norwegian lady decayed over the years and was replaced in 1962 by a bronze memorial created by Norway’s famed sculptor, Oernulf Bast. And so she stands today, gazing out at the ocean, the scene so many years ago of a stark tragedy that took some lives but, by the heroic efforts of Virginia Beach citizens, saved several others.

  AN OBSESSION NAMED MELANIE

  Mary Bowman is a vivacious, red-haired, admitted workaholic who for years ran a successful interior design business in Virginia Beach. She also is “metaphysical.” “If you are open,” she explains, “you go beyond the five senses, which are earthbound.” The layperson would call Mary a psychic, and she wouldn’t argue. She has had such a special sensitivity since childhood. When she was ten, for example, she had a vivid dream in which her grandfather died. She awoke and told her parents. They told her to go back to sleep. An hour later, the telephone rang, and the family was informed of her grandfather’s death.

  Nothing in the conscious or paranormal world, however, prepared her for what happened in the fall of 1985. After working late at her office one night, she got in her car and headed home. As she was driving by the old John B. Dey farm on Greatneck Road, she suddenly felt a strange sensation. “There was a voice,” she remembers. “It was a young woman’s voice, and it was crying out for help.” It sounded urgent, and it seemed like the voice had singled out Mary for a specific purpose.

  As time went on, the sensation grew stronger. Each time she drove past that section of the city, she would hear the girl calling out. Mary began to form a mental image. “It scared me at first,” she says. “I saw a picture of a young girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen. She had long blonde hair and was lying down, as if she were in a coffin. She appeared to be wearing colonial-era clothes. She had billowing sleeves, and I got the strong feeling that she lived two hundred years ago.”

  There were other distinct features in Mary’s mental picture. She envisioned a big, meandering farmhouse, with a large porch in white latticework, part of which was broken, and a very clear image of a brick wall. Somehow, Mary felt, all of these things were connected. “I became obsessed,” she says. “I took off from work in the middle of the day and drove around looking for the house and brick wall. Things got crazy. I had to find out about the girl. Who was she? What did she want? Why was she calling me? I became a nervous wreck.”

  Mary consulted a well-known psychic counselor in Virginia Beach, but that proved inconclusive. She was then referred to Kay Buchanan, who also was psychically gifted. “She saw the same thing I did,” Mary notes. “We felt the name of the girl was Melanie and that she might have been a schoolteacher. We somehow sensed she had an affair with a married man, and he had killed her and hastily buried her in an unmarked grave.”

  It was at this point that Mary says she had to let go. “I wanted to help, but it had become so overpowering I was afraid the search for Melanie would consume me.” For the next several months, Mary tried to block out the vision and the sounds.

  Then, one day, as she was out in the area of the old Dey farm, she saw it: the wall! The brick wall just as she had visualized it! It surrounded a farmhouse. Mary instinctively went up to the door and knocked. When the owner answered, she blurted out the story of her obsessive dream, including the vision of the brick wall.

  “I was afraid the man would think I had escaped from the mental ward, but he didn’t even seem surprised,” Mary says. “In fact, he just said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ He led me into the garage, and there on the floor was a pile of human bones. He said some housing developers nearby had unearthed some unmarked graves in their diggings, and he had rescued the remains and was going to have them properly reburied. Everything became clear to me all of a sudden. That was why Melanie had been calling to me for help. She had been trying to tell me that.” She added that the girl must have found peace at last with the reburial, because from that instant on Mary never again experienced the vision and the voice.

  THE NON-GHOSTS OF THOROUGHGOOD HOUSE

  Is Thoroughgood House in Virginia Beach haunted?

  “Definitely not!” says Alice Tripp, a historical interpreter who worked at the house for several years.

  “Yes, it was haunted even before it was opened to the public,” declares Martha Bradley, the first curator at the house.

  “No; oh, you might hear a creak or a strange noise from time to time—after all it is a very old house and you should expect that. But I never experienced anything out of the ordinary in all my years there,” adds Nancy Baker, another historical interpreter.

  “Yes, it is haunted. I can tell you for a fact there is at least one ghost or more there, because I personally experienced presences once, and it scared the life out of me,” states Cindy Tatum, who once worked a summer at the house while she attended college.

  And so, the argument continues. Present-day hostesses contend that there is nothing to the legends, while others who worked or visited here swear that there is, or was, spectral phenomena associated with the house. What no one disagrees with is that Adam Thoroughgood and his house are both fascinating in their own rights. Captain Adam arrived in the Virginia colony in 1621 as an indentured servant. He worked hard and did well. By 1626, he had purchased 150 acres of land on the Southampton River.

  For his recruitment of 105 new settlers in 1635, he was awarded 5,350 acres of land along the western shore of the Lynnhaven River. That Thoroughgood was a prominent citizen is also established. He was named one of the original eight commissioners to Elizabeth Cit
y County, the shire from which New Norfolk and eventually Princess Anne was formed. He also was a burgess and a member of the governor’s council.

  There are, however, differing accounts as to actually when the house, said to be the oldest brick house in America, was constructed. Some historians have estimated that Adam built it as early as 1636, three years before he died. But according to the fact sheet visitors are given today, the house probably was built by one of his descendants about 1660. It is a one-and-a-half-story structure made of brick and oyster shell mortar, with huge chimneys at each end.

  The historic Adam Thoroughgood House in Virginia Beach is one of the oldest homes in America and is the site of poltergeist activity that has frightened workers and tourists alike.

  It was sometime after a major renovation in 1957 when the ghostly manifestations began to surface. Charles Thomas Cayce—grandson of the great psychic Edgar Cayce and now head of the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach—says that the ARE has received calls at times about “strange experiences” at the house, particularly in an upstairs bedroom. The callers were curious, Cayce noted, but they didn’t want to publicize it. He adds that his father, Hugh Lynn Cayce, and a physician friend of his once went to the house to look into some of the reported encounters. “A lady told them of seeing things fly off shelves, of little glass objects falling to the floor and of furniture being moved around when no one was in the house,” Charles Thomas Cayce says.

  Mrs. Bradley says that old-timers in the area told her of seeing a woman standing in the window with a lit candle before the house was opened to the public. After it was opened, she and other tour guides experienced all sorts of unexplained activities. As she showed the house to a party, including the wife of the ambassador of Denmark, Mrs. Bradley is quoted as saying, “All of us saw a candlestick actually move.” She adds that children reported the sighting of a “small man in a brown suit” A lawyer visiting from Texas also claimed to have seen on oddly dressed little man.