HAUNTED
(Discussion Board Files
courtesy of Matt Muller)
Subject: Re: college ghosts
From:
M1ROBINS@vax1.acs.jmu.edu (MICHAEL J ROBINSON)
Date:
Message-ID:
<3o5r3a$9rq@doc.jmu.edu>
In
<Pine.Sola.3.91.950424152234.29140A-100000@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu>
bveihman@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu
writes:
Goody, a chance to delurk...
Well, here at
about a young woman who hung
herself in the
larger buildings on campus.
It now houses the Administration offices). Nobody
that I've talked to seems to
know anything about the hanging incident itself,
but the story goes that at
night if you look up at the tower you can see the
woman hanging in the window.
Well, I've seen it.
Or,more accurately, I've
seen what can be imagined to be the ghost. I'm a
firm believer in extreme
possibility, but in this case it was fairly obvious what
people were seeing. Anyway,
one night I looked up at the window and saw a
shadow in the window of what
looked like a skirt and a pair of legs hanging
in the window. I looked
closer and realised that it was simply the shadows
of various cross-beams that
just happened to look like the infamous ghost. I
I suspect that here are more
ghost stories floating around campus,but I've
yet to come across them.
-M
I'm thinking about spending
this summer visiting haunted places around VA,
anybody got any ideas for
good places to check out?
Fromnetcom.com!netcomsv!decwrl!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!acpub.duke.edu!jfurr
Sat May 28 10:59:52 1994Xref: netcom.com alt.fan.joel-furr:668
rec.arts.prose:1825 alt.folklore.ghost-stories:5145Path: netcom.com!netcomsv!decwrl!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!acpub.duke.edu!jfurrFrom:
jfurr@acpub.duke.edu (Joel Furr)Newsgroups:
alt.fan.joel-furr,rec.arts.prose,alt.folklore.ghost-stories,bburg.generalSubject:
Ghost storySupersedes: <2rudq5$k1j@news.duke.edu>Followup-To:
alt.fan.joel-furrDate: 25 May 1994 02:50:41 GMTOrganization: Moderator,
alt.configLines: 643Message-ID:
<2ruee1$kfj@news.duke.edu>NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu I wrote this a long time ago -- a
non-fiction, chatty account of a cool old theater. It's not immortal prose but I still get
requests for it, so here's a repost for old times' sake. The Ghosts of the
Lyric: Part I: The Lyric Theater: An
Unusual Place Part II: The Ghosts of
the Lyric Part III: The Lyric Today
Part I: The Lyric Theater: An Unusual Place
The stories I have to tell you are set at the old Lyric Theater in
downtown
desire to explore; the
boiler room with Russell's 55-gallon drum of stale popcorn; the odd crawl
spaces ABOVE the projection booth where we found stacks of 1940's-era
phonograph records, hopelessly warped.
There were all manner of little nooks and crannies in the Lyric
building, stuck as it was in the middle of a city block, part of one huge
interconnected building that elsewhere had stores on the street level and
apartments above. The Lyric was owned by the Kelseys but the land it sat on was
the property of the HCMF corporation, the local real estate barons with a
finger in every pie and little interest in preserving a fine old movie theater
when there were rent checks to be cashed.
The money that had to be paid to HCMF
was in large part the reason for the perpetual cycle of weekly losses, and Beth and Bud believed that
HCMF would like nothing better than to take the Lyric and raze it and replace
it with modern apartments, which would probably have made them a lot of money since the theater
was a block from campus. Nevertheless,
Grandfather Kelsey was still hanging on and while he was, the Kelseys managed
to keep the place open. I had the vague
idea that they had money saved up from the flush years of decades past and that
they were paying the deficits out of that, but for all I really knew, they were
taking out huge loans each week to keep paying the power bill. It wasn't the sort of thing I felt
comfortable inquiring into. So while the
place stayed open and the one dozen or two dozen people per night came in to
see the movies the Lyric had to show, I'd drop by as often as I felt safe doing
and would chatter with Beth and Bud until 11:00
when they'd lock up and I'd help them with closing. There were certain
things that had to be done each evening and eventually I learned them and was
able to help out. They had to make sure everyone was out of the place, then
lock up. Then Bud would go up to the
projection booth and start the movie feeding off the big platter it had
collected onto and backwards onto another platter for the next showing. Or, if the movie was being shipped out in the
morning, we'd collect it into two
massively heavy movie canisters and lug it down the back stairs to the street
entrance. Beth would go down to the right-side emergency
exit passage and get the piles of wooden
lap boards out for the students to use in classes the next day, and wheel out
the overhead projector and microphone and slide projector and get them all set
up. We'd take all the cups and napkins
from the snack bar and lock them in a closet so the students wouldn't fill them
with soft drink "post mix" (the syrup that gets combined with soda
water to make the actual beverage) and splash it around, as they had done back
in the days when Beth and Bud didn't know better than to leave the cups sitting
out. Fortunately, the actual cleaning of the theater was not a chore we had to
do; that was taken care of by an extremely old, senile man named Russell. Russell came in late at night, usually long after we left, and would
clean up the spilled candy and popcorn and drinks and clean the restrooms and all
the other distasteful things that one has to do in a place frequented by sloppy
college students. Russell liked to
collect things; Beth and Bud laughed hysterically when it occurred to them to
show me his fifty-five gallon drum full of stale popcorn. Apparently he took all the leftover popcorn
from the evening's showings and collected it in the aforementioned drum which he kept in the
boiler room, a room accessed by a mostly-hidden panel located in one of the
emergency exit passageways. Beth had asked
him about the drumful of popcorn and Russell had told her that he saved it up
for his "pups."
"Pups?" Beth had asked, and Russell had assured her that the
dogs he raised for sale loved to eat the stale popcorn. Beth never failed to go into conniptions if
you mentioned Russell's cornfed "pups." Russell also collected used drink cups,
combs, burned-out fluorescent light tubes... assortments of all of these would
turn up in closets and storage areas and the back stairwell to eventually be
thrown out by Beth or Bud or one of the other theater employees. Once, he had retrieved some burned-out,
dusty, singed-looking fluorescent light tubes from the garbage, had stuck them
in a box, marked the box "new," and placed them safely away in a
closet for future use. Beth and Bud
eventually stopped trying to understand why he did these things; they simply
took each newly-found cache as a
pleasant discovery to be examined for possible actual usefulness and then
disposed of once the diagnosis had come up "negative." Russell never seemed to mind; in fact, he
seemed to be pleased when he noticed the absence of his prizes and would take
it as an impetus to search for new and even more interesting treasures. Part
II: The Ghosts of the Lyric This
narrative will shortly take a turn into a more mysterious vein, but before I
got to that part, I wanted to explain
to you what kind of place the Lyric Theater was when I was spending some
evenings there chatting with my friends.
It was a nice old place, although it was disintegrating slowly. Beth and Bud were nice too; they were big
Grateful Dead fans, frequent wearers of tie-dyed shirts, the sort of people who
I figured would always be fairly happy no matter what they were doing. I was glad that I got to visit with them, and
happy also that I got to look around the theater and find out about all the
little cubbyholes and dark corners that I'd never known about back when I was a
kid and attending movies there. Let me
begin this part of the narrative by saying "I don't believe in
ghosts." It's almost obligatory, I
think, to begin a true-life account of a "haunting" with that
disclaimer, so as to keep the reader from thinking that they're in for another
credulous narrative from an under-skeptical lunatic. I really don't believe in
ghosts. I've never heard of any
"documented evidence" on the subject of ghosts that didn't turn out
to be misinterpreted or manufactured upon subsequent examination, and you'd
think that if there really were such things someone would have been able to
call in scientists and settle things for once and for all. However... (long
pause, deep sigh), I do have a few stories to relate that strike me as being
pretty close to saying "If there aren't such things as ghosts, you tell me
what it was I heard that night." I
present them here not as evidence of the existence of ghosts but rather out of
a desire to share my puzzlement with the reader. At first, it didn't occur to me to be spooked
about all of the old out-of-the-way places I came across while exploring the
Lyric. I was generally not the sort of
person to get myself all worked up over creaks and cold drafts, especially when
there were neat things to be looking at.
I really did like poking around, so I wasn't going to spoil things for
myself by imagining haunts. All this changed in a hurry one night when Beth and
I were in the projection booth, high above the theater, watching Bud do what he
had to do to get the movie off the platters and back into the cans to ship out
the next day. It was a quiet night, and
we'd long since shooed everyone out and locked the doors and gotten the stuff
out for the morning's classes. All that
remained was to stow the movie away and we'd split, perhaps to go over to the
nearby Cellar beer-joint for a pitcher of something cold and effervescent. Then, during a lull in the conversation,
there came a loud shriek, basically what one would expect to hear if you had a
banshee close at hand, coming from just outside the booth and over to the right
hand side of the balcony. All three of
us reacted in the same way: we blinked and snapped our heads around to stare in the direction the
noise had come from. "What the hell was that?!" I asked, extremely
startled by the volume of the shriek coming from what I had every reason to
believe was a completely deserted balcony. Beth and Bud looked at each other,
then at me, and then Beth shrugged, and said "We hear things like that all
the time." "What is
it?" I wondered if it was some sort
of equipment in the walls rasping against something. Ever the skeptic, I was looking for a
reasonable expectation before jumping to the conclusion that it was ghosts. Bud
spoke up, matter-of-factly. "We
assume it's a ghost. Like, there's no
one in the theater and even if someone had hidden in the restroom and then
sneaked up here to scare us they'd have no way to get out without coming to us
and saying 'Can I get out?'" This
was true, since even the emergency
exits were locked at night for reasons I wasn't sure of. Intrigued by the bland way Bud accepted the
fact that a loud shriek had come from a deserted balcony in an empty,
locked theater, I wondered what else
had happened in the past to accustom them to such things going on? "We assume that there's a woman's ghost
haunting the building. Every so often we
hear her screaming from over in the direction of the ticket booth." Beth pointed down through the floor and to
the right, in the approximate direction of both the ticket booth on the floor
below and also the direction the scream had seemed to come from. I'd thought of it as more or less on the same
floor as us, but then again it hadn't lasted long enough to stop and
triangulate its position. "No
kidding," I said. "Does she
ever say anything, or does she just scream?" I was being facetious, not expecting the
answer I got. "No, sometimes she
says 'Let me out, let me out.'"
I thought Beth was kidding but
from the look on her face, I realized that she wasn't. Now I began to get the impression that there
really was more going on here than I had originally thought. I was still mostly expecting to go downstairs after
Bud finished and find something parked out on the street that could have made
the noise we'd heard, but Beth and Bud seemed to take it as just another odd
occurrence in a string of odd occurrences. The fact that all three of us had
heard it and registered shock was another point in favor of it being something
requiring more explanation than I had handy. Bud finished his work and he and I
each carried one of the heavy movie canisters down the back stairway to the
street door. On the way, we passed many
little openings stuffed full of old fliers and boxes of junk, and a door that
was nailed shut, and more boxes of junk, and an opening that led off to a dead
end, and so on down to the door. Where
once I'd just poked around and wondered what all that stuff was kept lying
around for, now I was eyeing the door and the dead-end opening with a little
suspicion and a little edginess. Bud,
for all that he had much more experience with the noises, could just as well
have been walking down Main Street at
high noon as using the dark, cluttered back stairway of a haunted theater at
eleven thirty in the evening. He didn't seem nervous or worried so I just
shrugged and went on down and out to the street, where we met Beth coming out
of the main doors and locking them behind her. "Do you really hear things like that
often?" I asked? They maintained
that they did. For two people who had to work three nights a week in a place
where they regularly heard eerie screams late at night, they were pretty
composed, I thought. We were all fairly
tired that particular night, so we didn't stick around to discuss the
"ghosts." Beth and Bud went on
home and I went off home too and mulled it over. The next night, after class, I
came back and sat in the foyer with them and we talked about the ghosts. Beth said that there were actually three or
four places within the theater that had ghosts or ghostlike phenomena
associated with them. The first was the
screaming woman, who usually just shrieked wordlessly but sometimes screamed to
be let out of wherever it was she was trapped.
For some reason, Beth and Bud focused in on the origin of the sounds; they
both went to great lengths to explain how it had seemed to come from the direction of the ticket booth. They usually heard it when they were up in
the balcony, but one time Beth had been in the ticket booth itself, which sat
just in from the street in a large entrance way open to the weather, and had
heard the screaming coming from directly above her, from the other side of the
ceiling and perhaps coming from the rooms directly above. I asked the obvious question: did they know
of anyone who'd been walled up alive in the theater? I asked this facetiously, of course, but
their story seemed to indicate that a spirit of a woman was trapped in some way
in the offices or ceiling above the ticket booth. The answer?
"Well, a workman WAS killed when the Lyric was getting
built..." Not the answer I'd
expected, but it did make me stop and think.
If ghosts did haunt the place they died, it might mean that some of the
"paranormal activity" in the theater might be caused by the ghost of
that workman. And, in fact, there were
some stories that made one think again of this workman who'd been killed
there. Beth said that she sometimes
heard a man stomping around on the stairs leading up to the balcony and
sometimes on the old back steps leading from the balcony and projection booth
to the street. A good place to hear and sometimes see odd
things was the balcony steps, they said.
If you stood on the steps up to the balcony, still in sight of the candy
and drink station in the lobby, you could often feel a chill brush past you and
now and then you'd be able to hear and see faint mutterings and shadows from up
above. Bud had several stories
concerning voices he'd heard in
places where he could definitely attest that no customers or Lyric
employees had been. He said that he had
once or twice been up in the balcony and heard a voice speaking quietly to
itself down in the main seating area, in the area of seats nearest the
screen. He'd looked out from the balcony
and seen absolutely no one anywhere out in the seats, and yet here was this
quiet voice speaking to itself. With the
Lyric locked up tight so no one could get out without a key, it would have been
tough for someone to hide there to fake the "ghost" and then sneak
out after Bud had left. And what would
have been the point? Beth and Bud were
both so blase' about the whole mess that
anyone who stayed behind in the Lyric night after night to try to startle them
would quickly have gone mad watching Beth and Bud yawn and lock the place up
and leave night after night. A similar
story involved a man and woman talking in the balcony one night when Bud was
tidying up downstairs. He started up the
balcony steps to take care of the movie and
heard them talking and waited a few minutes for them to resolve their
conversation and head on out. When they
didn't come down past him, he went on up and found the balcony area empty. Since the back steps leading down to the
street required one to use a key to get out of the building, the people couldn't have gotten
out, so either they had hidden themselves in one of the dead-end passages off
the back stairs or in the crawl space above the projection booth, neither of
which sounded likely, or they had vanished into thin air. The idea of anyone
staying around after closing might have made sense if the Lyric had ANYTHING
worth stealing, but it didn't. The
projectors were these massive, far-too-heavy-to-move pieces of equipment that
used carbon arcs for lighting. Wandering
into the projection booth was like wandering into a mad scientist's workshop
and if a thief had found him or herself there, the first reaction would likely
have been to curse at the junk and
head for the exit. Vandalism was by far
the greater problem for the Lyric management and employees. People would tear most anything apart if it
was left out for anyone to get their hands on the next morning. That nothing substantial ever turned up
smashed or wrecked by some "stay-laters" makes me think that some
other explanation was needed to explain the Lyric "ghosts." None was forthcoming at the time, and since
Beth and Bud had no explanation
either save that it might possibly have something to do with her
great-grandfather who had spent a lot of time in the building during his life,
we went on to talk about other subjects.
A few nights later, Beth and Bud were in fairly perky moods when I
dropped by, and Bud asked me if I wanted to see what was behind the
screen. "Sure," I said, not
really expecting anything in particular but willing to look. Once we had closed up, Bud led the way to the
right-hand emergency exit passageway and opened a locked panel a few feet above
the floor in the left-hand wall. Beth
hopped up, and then I climbed up, and Bud followed. We were behind the screen, in the vast emptiness of the old
stage. It was fairly dark but Bud turned
on a few lights that revealed just how large it all was. High above us, if you turned to look, there
were openings that led into rooms, or something, but there was no way to get to
them. I pointed and asked and Beth told me that those were the old
dressing rooms, used when the theater had offered stage productions. The stairs and catwalks that led to the
dressing rooms were long gone. Bud said
he had been up and in them, finding nothing all that exciting to look at, but I
didn't think to ask how he'd gotten
up there because he was leading us over to another locked panel, this one in
the floor of the stage near the middle of the screen. Bud opened the panel, and looking down into
the opening, I saw just blackness. Bud said that if you jumped down you'd find
yourself in a tunnel leading along underneath the stage. "Hmm," I said, for some reason
none too enthusiastic about jumping
down into a pitch-black tunnel leading into the bowels of a darkened
theater. "A friend and I once got
some flashlights and went down there. It
was spooky as hell." Bud placed a
great deal of emphasis on the phrase "spooky as hell." I could see why. It was dark down there. "We crawled down the tunnel until we got
to this grate. It felt cold. Like there was something just beyond it
waiting for someone to come through."
Anticlimactically, he finished, "We got the hell out of there." "Why don't you shut the hatch?" I
suggested? Beth grinned at me and Bud
shut the hatch. Once it was shut, Bud
pointed out that the old orchestra pit was still down under the theater. If you stood in the front row of seats, there
was a semicircular area of floor between
the seats and the screen where the old pit had been covered over. Bud theorized that the tunnel beneath the
stage might well have led to the covered-over orchestra pit; the grate might
have been the entrance to the pit. We
had just been talking about the voices in the seats that Bud had heard one
night, and I think we all started to wonder if there might have been any
connection between the voices and what I privately thought of as the
"malevolent force" beyond that
grate. Perhaps someone was buried
under the floor in the old orchestra pit.
Once our thoughts started down that avenue we could keep coming up with
new ways to scare ourselves, so we got out of there and locked the stage access
panel back. Before we left that night,
Bud showed me the boiler room, located beneath the stage and accessed through a
panel at the back of a little niche that seemed made for a garbage can to sit
in, there in the emergency exit corridor.
That was when I found out
about Russell's popcorn. The drum was
three-quarters full and a whole stack of empty, soiled popcorn tubs was sitting
next to it. I wondered how an aged man
such as Russell would be able to get the drum of popcorn out when the time came
to take it off to feed to his "pups."
Perhaps he emptied it into smaller containers. One might never know. One day the popcorn would
be there and the next night it would be gone.
It was a few evenings before we resumed our explorations of the haunted
areas of the Lyric. Back up in the
balcony one night, Bud mentioned that if I climbed up on top of the tank of the
old, disconnected commode that sat in a closet off the projection booth, I
could get up to a place above the booth, looking out over the suspended ceiling
of the theater itself. Not to be a
coward, I climbed up, getting quite dirty from the accumulated soot and dust as
I climbed up out of the closet and into a dark area lined with cinder blocks
beneath the metal support beams. There
was a whole stack of old, warped records up there, and I took a few and hopped
back down into the booth to see if any of them had familiar artists. None did.
They were all the "Johnny Doe Band" or "Jackie
Sings," with faded color jackets and dates from the 1940's and
1950's. I assumed that they'd once been
used to provide music for the
theater... but why would they have been stowed up in the ceiling? Who knew.
I climbed back up and past the stack of records and looked over a low
wall of cinder blocks where the projection booth wall continued on up past its
ceiling, and looked out over the top of the theater. In the dim vastness of the theater, I could
see metal struts and beams, all supporting the weight of the ceiling and
lighting, and far across the theater, at the stage end, I could see a catwalk
of some sort. Once I'd noticed it I
could see it running back toward me, stopping part-way across. I assumed that it might have been there for
changing of lights or something. For
some reason, though, my imagination started to click, wondering who or what
might be out there on the catwalk.
Before I knew it I was half-imagining something coming along the catwalk
toward me, something headless and dark.
I ducked back down and into the projection booth, having actually seen
nothing but having managed to spook myself
considerably nevertheless. Back
down in the balcony after we left the projection booth, I asked Bud what was on
the other side of a door that one could see in the balcony wall, half-blocked
by chairs and painted over. I'd asked
this before but forgotten his answer. He
replied that it led to the offices, he thought, although he didn't remember
which office had a door that didn't go anywhere. I'd never been up in the Lyric offices, which
looked out over the theater marquee, since there wasn't any way to get from the
Lyric proper into them. You had to go
out to the street, down past Carol Lee Donuts, and back in another entrance
that led to a stairway and up to the
offices. Bud said he'd take me up there
sometime. It was nothing all that
exciting, he said, but I just wanted a look around. So, a couple of weeks later, I asked Bud if
he'd show me around up there, since
he'd just gotten through telling Beth that he'd come in early the next
afternoon to set up a new movie. He said
"Sure, come on by and we'll go look." So, I did.
I found Bud up in the projection booth, about five-thirty in the
afternoon. He left what he was doing and
we went back out to the street and up to the offices. The offices themselves were pretty humdrum,
typical dusty old offices with pictures and things from Beth's father's
high school days and even further
back than that. Bud then showed me the
rest of the rooms, after having showed me each of the offices. We went into a storeroom full of junk,
passing right by another door as we went.
I stopped and opened the door we'd passed by. Dark.
That was my first reaction. The
hallway was none too well lit and the room beyond the door was not lit at
all. More than that, it seemed to be
full of a kind of inky blackness. I kid
you not when I say that I felt a kind of awareness in the room. I was still standing there, staring worriedly
into that room with the hair on the back of my neck standing up, when Bud came
back, having noticed I was not
following behind him. "Joel, I
would close that door." I closed
it. I looked at Bud and said
"Ack." He nodded and said
"I know. That was why I passed that
door by." I looked at him, then at
the door. "Wow," was all I could say.
We poked around a little more, but it really wasn't that impressive a
place; it was just a set of offices with old movie schedules and projector
parts and boxes of cups sitting around.
Except for the Door. When we left
and went back into the theater, I was thinking furiously. For one thing, that room was just precisely
situated to be on the far side of the painted-shut door in the balcony
wall. For another, it was more or less
right above the ticket booth. For a third, it seemed alive, or perhaps dead
would be a better way of putting it.
Well, whatever it added up to, I left the theater that day certain that
I would not go into that room for any amount of money. Not unless I had about six floodlights and a
Bible and a crucifix and about six
gallons of holy water with me. I don't
know what works against ghosts but I was fairly sure one was in there and that
was good enough for me. Part III: The Lyric Today The Kelseys sold the Lyric to HCMF a few
months later, shortly after Beth's grandfather passed away (I think that was
it), and I happened to be driving by one night by just as Beth and Bud and Mr.
and Mrs. Kelsey were leaving the theater for the last time. I didn't know that was it, but Beth looked pretty upset, and with all
four of them leaving the theater on a week night around ten o'clock I felt
something had to be up. I parked and got
out of my car and walked down to where they were standing talking to each
other. Bud told me that they had just
done their last walk-through of the Lyric; the next day they'd give the keys to
the HCMF people and that would be that.
They'd essentially given the Lyric to HCMF in return for canceling all
the accumulated debts. (I think.) None
of them were exactly happy about it, and there was nothing I could say that would cheer things up. With the sale of the Lyric, Beth and Bud
suddenly had three more nights a week to do things in, so from that standpoint
it was nice for them; they had not been getting paid for their time so they
didn't even lose money in the process.
HCMF tried to keep the Lyric open, using the old Lyric staff who'd
worked for Beth and Bud and the Kelseys, but even with staff that knew the
operation there was just no way you could make money at it. Even without having to pay themselves rent,
the amount that they had to make to pay off the movie distribution companies
each week before they could make any profit was way more than they could take
in each week. Eventually the Lyric
closed its doors for good and wound up being used only when Virginia Tech
needed it for some reason. The Virginia
Tech Union showed films there for a while (even going so far as to sell the
incredibly stale candy that had been left over from when the Kelseys had owned
it) but when the student center on campus re-opened that was it. Since the Lyric occupies the center of a
block, with apartments above parts of it and stores all around it, no one
can just go in and demolish it and build
something on the site. So until someone
comes up with the money to gut the insides and put something else there, or
comes up with the where-withal to restore the theater and use it for theatrical
productions or something people would come to, the Lyric will remain closed and
shuttered, with only its ghosts for company. Copyright 1989 Joel Furr
From: cpowanda@nova.umuc.edu
(Carrie Powanda-Croft)Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-storiesSubject: More NoVa
HauntsDate: 17 Jan 1995 09:53:53 -0500Well, hello to all from Northern
Virginia. Let's see which ones I can
remember. I'll state up front that none
of these have happened to me, but a few I have heard first hand. Let's start with more Occoquan tales, which
are secondhand stories. There is a ghost that has made her presence known to
several merchants. For those who are
unfamiliar with Occoquan, it is a small, historic town, more like a small
shopping district, on the banks of the Occoquan river, which is in the vicinity
of the Potomac, near DC. Anyway, this is
the ghost of what some people think is the widow of a sailor. Apparently, when stores get new merchandise
in, she will go through the merchandise, sometimes rearranging stuff that has
been put on the shelves. Merchants know
she has been visiting because she leaves flower petals around, in boxes, or on
the stairs, or wherever. She has also
been seen descending staircases with a basket of flowers. Another ghost is a
woman who lived at the corner of one edge of town. She died within the last year or two. She was pretty much the matriarch of
town. She was a mayor at one point, I
think. Anyway, her absolutely favorite
thing to do was to sit in her rocking chair on the second floor, looking out a
window and watching what was going on in town.
After she died, the house was converted into some shops. The merchants would hear the squeaking
rocking chair. Going up to the second
floor, they would see the chair moving, although no one was anywhere near
it. (Apparently, some of the woman's
possessions were still in the house.)
Finally, the merchants got rid of the rocking chair, but would still
hear it squeaking. After about six
months, the merchants left, and the building still hasn't found new tenants.
That's all I have time for now. I will
post some more later this week, if you want. Let me know! Carrie From:
cpowanda@nova.umuc.edu (Carrie Powanda-Croft)Newsgroups:
alt.folklore.ghost-storiesSubject: NoVa Ghost Stories IIDate: 20 Jan 1995
08:09:50 -0500OK, OK, OK. Thanks for
your responses! I was pleasantly
surprised and encouraged to tell some more Northern Virginia ghost stories. Hello to all neighbors and ghost fans
alike. First, let me state that this are
my personal thoughts, yada, yada, yada.. (OK, now that that's out of the way,
let's get down to business, shall we?)These are a continuation of the stories
about Occoquan, a small historic shopping area on the Occoquan River, which
feeds into the Potomac eventually. This first story I heard first-hand from the
owner of a small bookstore in town. The bookstore used to be a small grocery
store for the people who lived in the town.
It had been in the family for many, many years. The father died of a heart attack inside the
store. After his death, his son (or
brother, I can't remember which) took over.
The son also died in the store, in the same spot as his father. I should state that these men were well-liked
in Occoquan. After the last man's death,
the family boarded up the store and it was left vacant for about five years or
so. Finally, the now-owner of the bookstore convinced the family to sell him
the property and open the bookstore. When the owner first went into the
building to do some renovation, he had a few strange experiences. He was doing some construction, measuring
pieces of wood and marking them with a pencil.
He would put the pencil down and turn around to do something with the
wood. When he turned back around, you
guessed it, the pencil would be on the other side of the room. It gave him the creeps the first few
times. He would leave very quickly and
come back when he was braver. What made
him feel braver was what he described as a feeling of warmth and happiness that
came over him. He interpreted that as a
sign that the men were happy that he was in their store. One of the men also
had a bit of a mischievous personality.
One time, the owner was presenting a series of speakers about one
subject or another. An attractive woman
was one of the speakers. After her
presentation, a greeting card (the store also sells cards) flew from its rack
and landed at her feet. The card was of
the romantic sort and had "I love you" printed on it! Books have also
been known to fly off shelves and unaccountable noises have also been
heard. Overall, the owner is quite happy
to have the ghosts there. They are a
benign presence and he likes their company.
Plus, I'm sure they're great for business, too! The other story involves
some weird happenings outside at an intersection of two streets. One of the town's residents heard an awful
commotion outside--shouting and guns being fired. Because this is an extremely small town with
very little violence, she became quite concerned. She either looked out her window or went
outside and saw nothing. Several other
people also heard the commotion, but saw nothing. After some research, it was discovered that a
significant skirmish occurred there during the Civil War. Probably people were hearing the noises from
the battle in progress. Related to this, there's a patch of road surface near a
curb on one of the streets that is constantly having to be repaved. The reason is that civil war bullets and such
keep on rising to the surface. They just
seem to work their way up from the ground below. Pretty neat, huh? Well, I guess I better go. I'll see if I have time to send some more
next week. Happy hauntings!Carrie
Subj: Re: Blackbeard's ghost
Date: 95-05-22 21:32:44 EDT
From: Susananita@aol.com
To: ghost-stories@netcom.com
From: Susananita@aol.com
To: ghost-stories@netcom.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The headless body was thrown overboard
and legends say the body swam around the
ship 7 times before sinking. Blackbeard supposedly burried part of his vast
treasure on Ocracoke Island.
Many people have searched
(in vain) for it. Many treasure hunters have been scared off the trail of the
treasure by what they claim is a headless ghost. They believe the ghost is that
of Blackbeard. Some
say he is searching for his
head while others say he is protecting his
treasure. Either way,
many have claimed to see the headless
ghost
of the pirate Blackbeard.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Blackbeard probably knew the
U.S. eastern seaboard better than
any topographer of his
day.
I live in southeastern
Virginia where tales abound that Blackbeard
(Edward Teach) buried looted
booty up in a 50-acre area of what
is now called Old House
Woods (or Old Haunted Woods) in
eastern Mathews County,
VA. Fishing late at night, watermen have
reported seeing an
illuminated full-rigged ghost ship gliding up White
Creek, (a tributary of the
Chesapeake) and sailing right over the
shore and into the woods
itself, with sailors leaning over the rails
and lanterns swaying as it
passes by. One fisherman even reported
hearing harp and organ music
from the vessel as it passed his fishing
boat in the creek.
Other interesting sightings
include those of two sailors digging
feverishly in the woods by
lantern-light, with a man standing by
giving orders and
brandishing pistols. It was thought that
Blackbeard had his diggers
put to death after the treasure was
successfully buried. This
custom, pirates believed, held dead men's
spirits earthbound to
protect the treasure from being carted off by
someone else. And supposedly there are a couple newspaper
accounts from the 1920's
about several late-night travelers being
accosted by a luminous
skeleton figure in the road wearing a
transparent armor and
threatening any trespasser with a gleaming
thrashing sword. Makes you
want to go up there and do a little
camping, doesn't it? ;-)
The area boasts of more
ghosts; from that of a long haired, night-
gowned woman warning fishermen and
watermen of severe
weather, to the ghostly
figures of British soldiers who buried yet
another stolen treasure box
in the woods but later killed by
American revolutionaries.
The reason for their ghostly return is to
continue the search for
their buried goods.
I found the information for
these stories from a book called 'The
Ghosts of Tidewater .... and
nearby environs,' by L. B. Taylor who
writes quite extensively
about the true and exaggerated stories of
Virginia's historical past.
Additional tidbit:
In one of his more recent books, Taylor
relates that his story of
Old Haunted Woods prompted a
Richmond man to ask him for
detailed directions to the
area. The man was never sure if he found
the right spot but at one
point he got out of his car and started
walking around. He began to experience a really weird, creepy
feeling that he couldn't
account for and a few moments later was
suddenly overtaken by a huge
black swarm of horseflies. He says
the flies were enormous,
about the size of a quarter each. When he
bolted for his car, the
swarm followed. Once enclosed inside, he
still had to killed off the
ones that got in with him. Finally he
shot off
down the road with the swarm
trailing behind. He thought he lost
them for good when he
circled around a large opened field only to
discover that the flies had
taken a short-cut across the same field to
catch up to him. The black swarm followed his vehicle for six
miles
when the terrified man from
Richmond saw them no more.
Sue
Susananita@aol.com
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Subject: Re: Blackbeard's
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