Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 22, 2014 21:59:22 GMT -5
Wraiths of Williamsburg
Delightful Williamsburg, Virginia, is a town not so much frozen in time as purposefully arrested in time, a village preserved by determined historians. Many present-day residents occupy grand brick Federal-style homes, while others inhabit charming wooden cottages, a number of which are painted in muted shades of blue, green and grey. Sheep graze in a fenced meadow within the town’s confines and muscular dray horses pull wagons through its streets in summertime.
Williamsburg was intact but largely dilapidated in the 1920s when multi-millionaire John D. Rockefeller bought the old part of the city and set about restoring it, refurbishing more than 500 buildings and landscaping 90 acres of gardens and greens. Since that time, tourists have marveled at the impeccable 18th-century oasis, impervious to intrusions by the mechanized world. There are members of the local population so steeped in the past it isn’t at all unusual to see townsfolk in the fashions of a long-ago era traversing the oyster-shell, cobblestone and brick sidewalks of the former Virginia capital. But are they all role-playing? Could some of them be apparitions of the distant past out for a stroll in a location that still looks like home?
Anonymous Ghosts. No one can say with certainty when the strange stories about the Peyton Randolph House (above), located at the corner of Nicholson and North England streets, began to circulate. Built around 1715, the dwelling was purchased in 1724 by John Randolph, a renowned lawyer and clerk of the lawmaking House of Burgesses who became the first Virginia-born colonist knighted by the king for his service to the Crown. When Sir John died, his home passed to his son, Peyton, who in 1774, was chosen by his Revolutionary peers to be the first president of the Continental Congress.
The Peyton Randolph House has welcomed many important visitors, particularly in its early days when such military leaders as George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette dined there. But it also has known its share of tragedy. A child of the Peachy family, who occupied the house before the Civil War, fell from a tree and died. Other residents met untimely deaths in later years, including a young former Confederate soldier, who lived in the house while attending the College of William and Mary and died of tuberculosis in his bedroom. It also is said that a despondent gentleman shot himself while seated by the fireplace, and there have been other suicides. Misfortune has hovered over the property like a cloud.
On occasion, people have heard heavy footsteps and jangling spurs coming from upstairs. One tour guide witnessed a gentleman in 18th-century attire seated in a downstairs room, however, he vanished as she approached. Several guests have encountered a mysterious old woman who seems to frequent an oak-paneled bedroom on the second floor. Her appearance was described in 1962 by Helen Hall Mason, who slept in the bedroom once occupied by Peyton Randolph. She awakened after midnight to see an elderly woman in a long nightgown standing at the foot of the bed apparently summoning her. When Mrs. Mason asked the agitated figure what was the matter, the specter silently withdrew. The following day, Mrs. Mason was astonished to learn she was not the first to encounter this nocturnal visitor. In fact, for more than a century, people have been talking about the old woman wringing her hands in distress, however, thus far, no one has discovered who she is or what message she is attempting to convey.
After the Governor’s Ball. Events that evoke deep passions – even if they remain hidden – often have consequences that linger beyond the moment and sometimes send out ripples still felt, or observed, decades later. Such is the case of a seemingly trivial incident that took place more than 200 years ago on Williamsburg’s Palace Green. It was there, one block west of the Peyton Randolph House in the 1770s, that Lady Ann Skipwith sought refuge during a grand ball at the governor’s mansion. Dressed in a red satin gown and matching high-heeled slippers, she rushed from the mansion at the top of the green to a house halfway down its western edge, the home of George Wythe (above). What she hoped to escape remains a mystery, but many believe Lady Ann – who had recently married a rich planter by the name of Peyton Skipwith – may have been enraged as a result of jealousy. A spirited, quick-tempered woman in her 30s, it was said she and her sister, Jean, were rivals for Sir Peyton’s love – perhaps the two sisters clashed at the ball. What is known is that many years later, after Ann’s death, Sir Peyton married Jean. In her dash across the green, Lady Ann broke the heel on her slipper, entered the Wythe House half-shod and raced up the wooden stairs, clumping like a peg-legged pirate. While no one will ever know the circumstances, the impression the woman made was so intense that a rumor arose that she had killed herself or suffered a fatal injury on the stairs.
The legend has persisted for two centuries, and many have reported hearing the alternating click and thump, like that of someone who has lost a shoe, ascending the stairs of Wythe House at midnight. One visitor even caught a glimpse of a beautiful young woman in a bright red Colonial-style gown vanishing down the hall. While Lady Ann did not, in fact, end her life in Williamsburg – she died much later at her home in Mecklenburg County – her spirit may have expired in the house. Whatever happened to the lady that long-ago night, it was of such magnitude that she continues to repeat the incident in the hereafter.
The Anniversary Ghost. According to legend, another spirit, that of George Wythe himself, makes a fleeting appearance at the Wythe House ... but only once a year. In 1806, Wythe was spending most of his time in Richmond and had taken his nephew, namesake and heir, George Wythe Sweeney, into his home. Around May 24 of that year, Wythe and some of the household servants became violently ill and approximately a week later, a teenage boy died. Wythe himself, who was age 79 or 80, lingered until June 8, when he, too, succumbed to what was determined to have been arsenic poisoning administered by Sweeney, an unprincipled young blackguard who drank, gambled and forged checks on his uncle’s bank account. During the time he lay in bed dying a horrible death, Wythe still had the presence of mind to change his will, disinheriting Sweeney, who was later charged with murder. It is said that at the moment of Wythe’s death, his apparition briefly manifested 50 miles away in the Williamsburg home he loved so much, and that every June 8 since, his apparition appears.
Soldier in the Attic. If you walk from the Palace Green toward Merchants Square and continue westward to the College of William and Mary, you come to one of the few buildings in Williamsburg still used for its original purpose: the college president’s house (above). The foundations of the brick Georgian mansion – which is almost an exact replica of the Brafferton Building constructed a few years earlier – were laid in 1732, the year George Washington was born. With the exception of a short period when it was commandeered for military use during the American Revolution, it has been occupied without interruption by the president of the college. However, the years of military tenancy has left a bizarre legacy. Twentieth-century repairmen found the remains of a skeleton, possibly that of a soldier from Revolutionary times, hidden away in the attic, and many residents have complained of hearing disembodied footsteps at night – always in the same area, on the stairs between the second and third floors. No one has determined the origin of the bones discovered in a crawl space above the third-floor ceiling, but L. B. Taylor, Jr., author of The Ghosts of Williamsburg, reported the skeleton was “pressed into a brick wall,” suggestive of inhumane treatment. After the skeleton was removed, the wife of the then college president informed Taylor it was possible for the first time in generations to get a cantankerous door on the third floor to remain closed. Before that, it often opened of its own accord.
The skeleton was not the only vestige of war. The place also seems to host an 18th-century French soldier, possibly a hangover from a time when the building served as a hospital. During the final weeks of the Revolutionary War, as French and American troops sought to out-maneuver the British at nearby Yorktown, General Lafayette used the president’s house as a shelter for the wounded. The French were forced to evacuate in 1781 because of an accidental fire, the damage from which was afterward repaired during a four-year project financed by France. Unfortunately, the work did not remove all traces of those who suffered within its walls. For generations, families and servants have heard the footsteps of what they believe to be the spirit of a French soldier – who died in a small back room – making his way up a creaky staircase.
The Beat Goes On. The campus of William and Mary may appear pastoral today with its 18th-century brick buildings resting in an expanse of green, but when the college was young, life was definitely on the raw side. The people of Williamsburg still lived in uneasy peace with the neighboring American Indians, whom they had displaced. There were attempts to integrate the two cultures and one well-intentioned effort has left a vestige of the period: the Brafferton Building (above), just south of the college president’s house. If the stories are true, for more than two centuries, the handsome edifice has been haunted by the restless souls of Indian boys who were taken from their homes and forcibly educated in the ways of the English settlers. Brafferton was built in 1723 with a donation from Robert Boyle, a famous British scientist. Boyle had heard of the villagers’ attempts to provide American Indians a European education and wanted to provide a permanent house for the students, who had been staying in local barns and other outbuildings. Dozens of teenage braves came – many against their will – leaving family and familiar ways behind. Because they repeatedly attempted to escape, at night, they were locked in Brafferton House. In such close confinement, one group became ill with tuberculosis, several died and the experiment ended unhappily in 1736.
The spirits of some of those boys who once occupied the Brafferton Building still seem to be in residence. According to legend, the revenant of one of the boys can sometimes be seen running through the woods near the campus at night. Following his confinement to Brafferton, the student made a rope ladder and climbed down every night from an upper-story window. Once outside, he would run nonstop until almost sunrise, before returning and collapsing on the floor. His nighttime marathon provided a taste of freedom, but one morning, he did not return, and he was found lying in the woods, dead of exhaustion.
Today, some say that on certain nights, sighs and moans can still be heard behind closed doors in Brafferton. One newspaper reporter who lived in the building for a summer told of hearing phantom footsteps when he was alone on the third floor. On one particular night, he was suddenly awakened by an odd noise in the wee hours of the morning and realized after a moment that he was hearing the regular beat of an Indian drum. Believing someone was playing a devilish trick, he jumped out of bed, rushed through the halls, checking rooms all the way down to the first floor ... and discovered the house was empty. After this particular incident, he slept with the lights on.
Carter’s Grove. Construction of Carter’s Grove Plantation (above) on the northern shore of the James River was started in 1750 by one of the richest men in Colonial America, Robert “King” Carter. Unfortunately, he died before the home was completed and the property passed to his grandson, Carter Burwell, who finished the mansion and expanded the plantation. A British artisan was engaged to supervise bricklayers and cabinetmakers, who turned the edifice into a masterpiece of the finest craftsmanship money could buy. At its zenith, Carter’s Grove encompassed close to 300,000 acres.
What has come to be called the “Refusal Room,” the wood-paneled drawing room on the first floor, is so named because of two offers of marriage that supposedly took place in the parlor. One involved young George Washington, who allegedly asked Mary Cary for her hand in matrimony. The second suitor was Thomas Jefferson, who proposed to Rebecca Burwell in the same room. Both men were rejected by the young ladies, who, for reasons unknown, passed up opportunities to become the wives of two of the most important men in the newly-formed nation. The spirit haunting the Refusal Room has a bizarre way of making its presence known: white carnations left unattended are torn to pieces, their petals scattered on the floor. Some say the angry ghost who destroys the flowers is that of one of the famous spurned men. Others believe the apparition is a woman – regretful and furious over what might have been.
Sources: Eliot Marshall, Discovery Travel; Haunted Williamsburg; Visitor's Guide to Williamsburg; and George Wythe: Founding Father.
