Ghosthunting Virginia. Michael J. Varhola
of Hill House—adapted for the screen in 1963 and 1999 as The Haunting—the main difference being that the literary character cared for her mother just eleven years.)
A few years after Violet died, the city of Dumfries acquired the house and, in cooperation with the Historic Dumfries nonprofit association, has operated it as a museum since 1976. It was around the time they were renovating it for this public use that ghostly phenomena were first recorded at the house.
Beth showed me and Jason around the Weems-Botts house during our visit and told us about some of the strange experiences she has had at the house. She had her first, in fact, during one of her initial visits to it several years ago, at one of the sleepovers the institution allows each year in October.
“Throughout the night I would wake up occasionally, because I heard creaking, groaning, old house noises, pipe-rattling noises,” she said. “I’ve been in old houses; I’ve heard the plumbing rattle, so it was not an unfamiliar sound.” She was sleeping in what is called the “Weems Room,” she said, and most of the noise was coming from the nearby parlor.
“The next day, the curator asked me how I’d slept,” she said. When Beth described to the woman what had disturbed her sleep throughout the night, “she smiled and said to me, ‘There’s no plumbing in this house!’”
Beth went on to describe another incident, which occurred during a visit by a group of high-school students after Beth had begun working at the house. They were in the upstairs bedroom used by Violet, which is in the oldest part of the house, and has a window that used to look out onto an open area prior to the building being expanded but now faces only a brick wall. She and one of the students were talking in the room and the window, just a few feet away from them, was closed.
“I turned to point to the window to explain something and it was open,” she said. “We both kind of looked at it, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s just our ghost saying “hello,”’ and he chuckled. I talked some more to him, and when we looked back at the window it was closed again.” None of the other windows were open and there was no breeze and no one else had been present.
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