Ghosts of Virginia’s Tidewater

At Fort Eustis, near Newport News, Virginia, there is a small, sheltered cove where the waters of Nell’s Creek feed into the historic James River. Decades ago, before the government purchased the land surrounding this area, Nell’s Creek was a haven for Tidewater oystermen. Daily they would ply their time-honored trade amid the rich oyster beds of the river, and at night some would stay in the mouth of the creek from Monday until Friday, when they would take their catch to market and head home.

According to local lore, this particular creek was named after a young lady named Nell, who lived in the region during the nineteenth century. What has been passed down is that she was a spirited, headstrong person who fell in love with a man described as a straggler and that her father strongly objected to such a union. In fact, he allegedly told her that if she violated his wishes and married the man, he would kill her and bury her along with all of his money.

Despite his warning, she supposedly ran off with her lover, and her father lived up to his threat. He killed her and buried her, along with his life savings, at a point on or near the creek beneath two large walnut trees. Since that time, no one is exactly sure when it all began, although the prevailing opinion is that from about the 1880s or 1890s up until the 1930s, the spirit of Nell reappeared, mostly through the psychic manifestation of knockings or rappings, to area oystermen. She apparently was a friendly ghost who provided timely news on where the best oyster hunting was from day to day, and she often played games in which she seemed to enjoy answering questions, mostly concerning numbers and figures. Why she chose to befriend the lonely watermen is a question that remains unanswered.

The story was best told by a seventy-nine-year-old former oysterman known as “J.P.,” who doesn’t want his real name used for fear of being mocked. For many years in the 1920s and 1930s, J.P. worked the waters of the James with his father and brother.

“I definitely believe she was there. There’s no doubt in my mind,” he says of Nell. “I’m not a superstitious person, but in this instance I do believe. I only experienced her presence once, but it was something I will never forget. My father and brother heard her many times, and they believed. And they wouldn’t tell a lie for anything. Many say it was all a myth, but a lot of people swear they heard her.” As J.P. told it, the stories about Nell began surfacing late in the nineteenth century. No one ever saw her. They heard her. She “appeared” by knocking on the cabin roofs of the oystermen’s boats.

“It was a knock unlike any other I have ever heard,” J.P. recalls. “It was different. I can’t even describe it. I guess I was about eighteen or twenty when I experienced it. We were laid up overnight in the cove, and I was standing outside the cabin with my head tucked inside, listening to the conversation. The cabin was full of watermen, talking. There was a very distinct knocking on the top of the cabin. When I poked my head outside, it sounded like it came from the inside, and when I ducked my head inside the cabin, it was like it came from the outside. There was no way it could have been a trick or hoax. I wasn’t really scared, but I must have looked concerned, because someone laughed and said, ‘That’s just ole Nell.’”

J.P. says that his father told him many times about the rappings. “He would never volunteer to talk about her, but if you asked, he would tell you.” What J.P.’s father said was that she “talked” through her rappings. One rap meant yes and two meant no. “In those days, people oystered over many sites up and down the river,” J.P. says. “Some would come out of the Warwick River, Deep Creek, Squashers Hole and other places. Every rock in the river had a name, and the men knew them all. So they would ask Nell how their peers were doing at other locations. Like, they would ask how many bushels of oysters did they get today at Thomas rock, near the James River bridge. And Nell would give so many knocks.”

If the harvests were better elsewhere, according to J.P., then those asking the questions of Nell would fish those waters the next day. Invariably, their hauls improved. “Only a few of the men took stock in this,” J.P. acknowledged, “but those who did always benefited from the advice. And she was always right. If she said so many bushels were brought in at such and such a rock, it was so.”

Nell amazed the men with all sorts of revelations. “She could answer anything she was asked,” J.P. said. “You could ask her how many children someone had, and she would rap out the number in knocks on the cabin. You could ask her someone’s age, and she knew it exactly. My father said one time a man grabbed a handful of beans out of a sack and asked her how many he had. She told him, to the bean!” In this manner, Nell carried on conversations with a number of oystermen over the years. She was especially conversant with one man, J.P. noted, “and it was told that when he died she even appeared at his funeral by rapping on his coffin.”

Robert Forrest, a lifelong native of the area, well remembers his ancestors talking about Nell. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’ve heard the tales. The one I remember best concerned an old man named John who was a very religious fellow. He had heard about Nell, too, and he didn’t believe the stories until the night he experienced the sensation himself. He went out with some oystermen one time just to prove there was nothing to the legend. He carried his Bible with him.

“Well,” Forrest continued, “they laid up in the Deep Creek area that night and tried to rouse her. ‘Nell,’ they said, ‘if you’re here, rap twice on the cabin.’ Nothing happened. About thirty minutes later, they tried again, and sure enough, this time there were two sharp raps. They asked her several questions, and she responded to each of them, but John still wasn’t convinced. He thought someone was playing a trick on him, so he went out on deck. There was no one there and no boats nearby. Not only that, but the boat John was on had also been untied from its stakes and was drifting freely in the creek. John became a believer right there!”

J.P. says that his brother was reading the Bible to Nell one night, the chapter of Deuteronomy, when the knockings on the cabin became louder and louder and got out of control. He stopped reading, and she stopped. “He never read the Bible to her again.” Deuteronomy, it may be remembered, includes the ten commandments, among which are “Thou shalt not kill” and “Honor thy father.” “No wonder Nell was disturbed,” said J.P. “All she ever told us was that her father had killed her and buried her nearby with his money. So one time my father and brother went off digging in a spot where there were two large walnut trees. Except the whole time they were there, they were pestered by large swarms of hornets or wasps, and they had to give it up.”

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.

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.

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 the 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.

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!

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.

At a two-story house next to the chapel, occupants found that a heavy chest had been moved during the night and fireplace andirons rearranged. On other occasions, footsteps heard at night ceased each time a light was turned on, drawers seemed to be opened and shut by unseen hands, doors slammed and loud bangings and hammerings occurred. Even the post commander’s quarters has been affected. There, such items as a pedestal cake stand and a Dresden figurine have been discovered broken overnight, with no apparent cause.

The stories do abound at Fort Monroe. There is even an instance of a colonel who told of sighting a “monster” swimming about in the moat that encircles the fort. It was reported to be 60 to 150 feet wide and 8 feet deep at high tide. The colonel said that whatever he saw was pretty big. He followed it to an old footbridge, where it disappeared.

The thing about all of these happenings at the fort, aside from the sheer number of them, is the consistency with which they have been told and retold over the years, in most cases by more than one person and in some instances by many. The other thing is the durability of the incidents. Some are alleged to have occurred decades or even a century or more ago. Others are much more recent. The ghostly encounters continue to this day.

Workers at the Casemate Museum tell of the relatively recent visit of an obviously shaken wife of an officer. She had heard of the many paranormal tales at the fort and wanted to share her own unnerving experience. She said that she had been in a bedroom with her two teenagers watching television one night, while her husband was in the basement. Before their startled eyes, a bedside table lifted up and flew across the room, smashing into the fireplace and shattering the marble top. She and her children screamed, and their dog went wild, pawing at the floor. Oddly, a Waterford crystal lamp that had been on the table remained unscratched.

And finally, there was the officer and his wife who were living in the quarters where Robert E. Lee was once housed. The husband was in the kitchen one night when a wet dishcloth sailed across the room and smacked him soundly in the face. He yelled at his wife, asking her why she had done that. She didn’t answer. He discovered later that she was outside the house at the time.

Had not fate intervened, chances are that relatively few Americans would ever have heard of the sleepy, peaceful little village of Yorktown, Virginia, located about fifteen miles northeast of Williamsburg. Destiny, however, stepped in more than two hundred years ago and indelibly inscribed it as a prominent name in American history. It was here, during a few days in October 1781, where General George Washington, commander of the American armies, outmaneuvered General George Cornwallis and defeated his once proud British forces during a furious siege that, for all practical purposes, ended the Revolutionary War.

Today, Yorktown remains a relatively quiet little community, its peacefulness interrupted each summer by thousands of tourists who walk the hallowed battlegrounds on which America’s independence was courageously secured. One of the most imposing landmarks here is a large brick house perched on a hill overlooking the York River. The personal history of the Nelson House is inexorably intertwined with the growing pangs of a young nation struggling for its freedom. It also played a dramatic part in the final battle at Yorktown, and therein lies a ghostly legend that has survived the centuries. The house is allegedly haunted by the spirit of a British soldier who was killed in the final fighting in 1781 by an ironic twist of luck.

A massive structure of red brick, with stone trim and ivy-covered walls, Nelson House dates to the early 1700s and has been called one of the best examples of Georgian architecture in Virginia. It was built by the ancestors of Thomas Nelson, a member of the Continental Congress, commanding general of the Virginia militia, a governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In the years preceding the war, Thomas Nelson and his bride, the former Lucy Grymes of Brandon, entertained all of the great dignitaries of the colony here. The family had to abandon the house when the British occupied the town.

On the morning of October 9, 1781, General George Washington’s men and their allied forces, including artillery, were strategically set in place to commence the final battle. The bombardment began about 3:00 p.m. General Nelson was asked to single out a good target toward which the cannon crews could direct their fire. Stoically, and without hesitation, he pointed to a large brick mansion on a hill, which he suggested might be serving as Cornwallis’s headquarters. The house Nelson indicated was his own!

Cannon fire was directed toward it, and several shells directly hit the target. One apparently penetrated a secret stairway hidden behind a panel in the dining room hall leading to a garret. According to the legend, it was here where a British soldier was hiding. He was killed by the blast, and it is his ghost that remains a sad and restless presence.

The Thomas Nelson House in Yorktown became famous during the last days of the Revolutionary War, when Nelson told George Washington to direct his cannon fire at Nelson’s own house. One of the shells is believed to have killed a British soldier hiding there, and his ghost occasionally makes its presence known.

The house remained in the Nelson family until 1907. A few years later, it was purchased by Captain George Preston Blow. The Blows entertained here in a manner reminiscent of the way the Nelsons had done so many years earlier. It was during one of these socials that the ghost made its most noted showing. Mrs. Blow was hosting a luncheon for several ladies. One of the guests asked her if the house was haunted. Mrs. Blow said, “Goodness, no.”

Apparently, this infuriated the spirit, because, according to eyewitness accounts, no sooner had she spoken than the secret door behind the panel in the dining room suddenly burst open with such terrific force that it shook the entire house and knocked against a sideboard with such violence that dishes crashed to the floor. There was a stony silence in the room, save for the muffled gasps of the obviously terrified guests. Finally, Mrs. Blow managed to say that the incident had been caused by a sudden downdraft of air. No one believed her. Fearful of a further display of psychic power, the ladies abruptly departed.

In 1968, Nelson House was acquired by the National Park Service and is open to the public. To this day, however, tour guides, when asked about the ghost, are unusually careful about their comments.

Thomas Nelson is buried in the little cemetery adjacent to Yorktown’s historic Grace Episcopal Church, built in 1697. Thousands of tourists visit this sacred site annually. Those who venture inside the building may happen upon a ghost. The figure of a woman, dressed in eighteenth-century clothing, has been seen by a number of witnesses over the years. She appears to be crying, her head buried in prayer. Some say that she is holding a lifeless child. Her identity and purpose have never been discovered.

There also are occasional sightings, dating back more than two centuries, of a spectral band of mourners in the graveyard, apparently gathered for a funeral. In 1791, Samuel Hawkins wrote in his journal:

As I walked past the old church yesterday morning, I witnessed the burial ceremony of a beloved citizen. I was uncertain of who it was, but the people in attendance were indeed upset over his passing. One of the women beside the grave fell to her knees with grief.

I thought it proper to offer my condolences, so I approached the grave site. It was then I saw the mournful group, draped in black costumes, dissolve into thin air! I now realize that I witnessed a funeral from days gone by.

Others have told of seeing the same phenomenon. In recent years, a resident jogging by the church one day said, “I saw a group of people gathered around one of the graves. I stopped to watch. The women wore black skirts that dragged to the ground, and the men wore pants which ended at the knee, with stockings that went from their knees to their feet. The men had shoes with buckles, and some had capes thrown around their necks…Something just wasn’t right with the scene.”