CHAPTER 28 America’s Greatest Haunted City (Washington, D.C.)
An overview of haunted sites in the nation’s capital reveals it to be a city rife with ghosts and places where inexplicable events have been known to occur.
CHAPTER 29 Decatur House (Washington, D.C.)
Located near the White House on Lafayette Square, this two-hundred-year-old house was tainted by slavery and untimely death and is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in the capital city.
CHAPTER 30 Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.)
Ever since President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated here by actor John Wilkes Booth while attending a showing of Our American Cousin, this small, historic theatre has been the site of strange sightings and occurrences.
Welcome to America’s Haunted Road Trip
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?
If you’re like 52 percent of Americans (according to a recent Harris Poll), you do believe that ghosts walk among us. Perhaps you’ve heard your name called in a dark and empty house. It could be that you have awoken to the sound of footsteps outside your bedroom door, only to find no one there. It is possible that you saw your grandmother sitting in her favorite rocking chair, the same grandmother who passed away several years before. Maybe you took a photo of a crumbling, deserted farmhouse and discovered strange mists and orbs in the photo, anomalies that were not visible to your naked eye.
If you have experienced similar paranormal events, then you know that ghosts exist. Even if you have not yet experienced these things, you’re curious about the paranormal world, the spirit realm. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be reading this preface to the latest book in the America’s Haunted Road Trip series from Clerisy Press.
Over the last several years, I’ve investigated haunted locations across the country and with each new site, I found myself becoming more fascinated by ghosts. What are they? How do they manifest themselves? Why are they here? These are just a few of the questions I’ve been asking. No doubt, you’ve been asking the same questions.
You’ll find some answers to those questions when you take America’s Haunted Road Trip. We’ve gathered some of America’s top ghost writers (no pun intended) and researchers to explore their states’ favorite haunts. Each location is open to the public so you can visit them yourself and try out your ghosthunting skills. In addition to telling you about their often hair-raising adventures, the writers include maps and travel directions to guide your own haunted road trip.
It is said that “Virginia is for lovers,” but Mike Varhola’s Ghosthunting Virginia proves that the state is fertile ground for ghosthunters as well. The book is a spine-tingling trip through Virginia’s sleepy small towns and historic sites, with a side trip to the District of Columbia thrown in for good measure. Ride shotgun with Mike as he seeks out Civil War ghosts at the Cedar Creek and Manassas battlefields. Travel with him to Belle Grove Plantation in Middletown where the ghost of the murdered Hetty Cooley still roams the house that was once hers. And who belongs to the disembodied voices that whisper in the Poor House Road Tunnel in Rockbridge County? Hang on tight; Ghosthunting Virginia is a scary ride.
But once you’ve finished reading this book, don’t unbuckle your seatbelt. There are still forty-nine states left for your haunted road trip! See you on the road!
John Kachuba
Editor, America’s Haunted Road Trip
Introduction
WELCOME TO Ghosthunting Virginia!
When I was asked to write this book, my editors knew me to be an established author of nonfiction books; to have a strong background in history, research, and fieldwork; and to live in Virginia and just outside of Washington, D.C. They had no reason to believe I’ve had an abiding interest in the paranormal for some thirty years. Nor, indeed, could they have known that I had been a “ghosthunter” some years before that term would have meant anything to most people.
Since moving to Virginia in 1991, I had not spent much time contemplating whether it was a particularly haunted state, much less undertaken nearly as many ghosthunting expeditions as I would have liked. My interests in such subjects had largely been subordinated by school, work, and family, and the unseen world I had once relished exploring was out of sight and, increasingly, out of mind. So, when I had the opportunity to turn my attentions to it once again through this book, I eagerly accepted.
Two years after I arrived in the Old Dominion, there occurred something that moved my interest in the paranormal from the realm of the esoteric into that of the mainstream: The X Files. There had been television shows and plenty of movies about the paranormal before this nine-season program—my favorite being Kolchak: The Night Stalker—but nothing before had been quite as successful or universally known. Though the show’s success probably was due in part to our culture’s increasing interest in the topics the show explored, I suspect that other shows about ghosthunting and similar esoteric subjects would not have been as popular in its absence.
My own affinity for the show stemmed from my longstanding interest in the supernatural, which lay not dead but dreaming within me, and I never lost my awareness that there are innumerable things in this world beyond the realm of the mundane. My guiding principal has long been that incisive phrase spoken by Hamlet to his friend Horatio (while holding a skull, no less).
“There are more things in heaven and earth,” Shakespeare wrote, “Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In short, there are countless things in this world that cannot be adequately explained by any single conventional system of beliefs.
Despite an ongoing awareness of the unseen world and knowledge of things like the ghost tours held in historic Virginia towns such as Alexandria, Fairfax, and Winchester, I was surprised to discover upon starting to research this project just how many haunted sites there are in the state and adjacent Washington, D.C. To say that this book could have a hundred chapters devoted to publicly accessible haunted sites would be a marked understatement, and to say that it could have a thousand if private venues were also included would not be inaccurate. Distilling all of the possible choices into a mere thirty chapters was not the smallest challenge associated with this project.
Suffice it to say, Virginia and the District of Columbia are fertile ground for ghosthunters and have no shortage of potential venues for investigation. And I have spared no efforts to make this guidebook as useful a resource as possible for those interested in visiting haunted sites.
In any event, my goal with this book has not been to prove or convince anyone that any of the places I visited are indeed haunted. It has been, rather, to identify sites that have ghostly phenomena associated with them, visit them, and compile their history and my experiences into a book that other people with an interest in the subject could use as a guide
