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.