Ghosthunting Virginia. Michael J. Varhola
is that anyone who acts inappropriately for too long is ultimately going to suffer some unhappy consequences—whether legal, spiritual, or otherwise.
For a good example of what not to do, check out a recent episode of the British ghosthunting show Most Haunted, during which the cast visited a purportedly haunted shipyard named Cammell Laird. Especially appalling was the behavior of the female host, who kept snapping orders at any ghosts that might have been present. Members of the crew said demeaning things about them, and a narrator made reference to “goading” ghosts into revealing themselves. The capacity of ghosts to visit various misfortunes upon people is limited, but if it is at all possible to call them down on oneself, this sort of behavior is probably the way to do it. Beyond that, people who act this way are creeps.
Determining exactly what ghosts are is beyond the scope of this book, and throughout it terms like “ghost,” “phantasm,” “specter,” and “spirit” are used fairly synonymously and are not intended as technical terms indicating manifestations with specific and differing characteristics. This is, after all, primarily a travel guide, not a tome devoted to the classification of earth-bound spirits, which would be of little practical use to most readers.
That said, the term “ghosts” runs the gamut from nonsentient residues of spiritual energy that can be detected by various means, to intelligent manifestations that can make their presences felt in various ways. My sense is that the vast majority of hauntings are of the lower order and that it is quite possible to have subtly haunted sites that are never identified as such due to a lack of investigation.
All of the places described in this book are believed to be haunted. Some people were quite forthcoming about discussing haunted places while others were more tight-lipped for whatever reasons.
One thing I have encountered while investigating potentially haunted places is the phenomena commonly known as “orbs,” which are sometimes captured in digital photographs. No one can be involved with ghosthunting for too long without stumbling across the ongoing debate over these spherical objects and what they might be. Some people believe orbs are manifestations of spiritual energy. Others—including many veteran ghosthunters—dismiss these phenomena for a various reasons, a common one being that orbs are nothing more than a byproduct of low-light photography and represent an improperly developed spot on an image.
I am definitely of the former school of thought. In short, in the years since I have been using a digital camera, I have taken tens of thousands of pictures under all sorts of conditions. Of all those pictures, the only ones that have displayed orbs are ones I took at fewer than a half dozen locations, all of them reputed to be haunted. To me, these phenomena are compelling evidence of what I believe to be some sort of spiritual energy and a hallmark of haunted sites.
But the point of this book is not for me to convince anybody of anything. It is, rather, to provide a tool that prospective ghosthunters can use to help them find haunted sites, conduct their own investigations, and draw their own conclusions. I wish you the best of luck and look forward to hearing from you as you conduct your own visits to the sites listed in this book!
Michael J. Varhola
Springfield, Virginia
July 2008
NORTHERN
Alexandria
Arlington
Abingdon Plantation
Clifton
Dumfries
Manassas
Manassas National Battlefield Park
Occoquan
Woodbridge
CHAPTER 1
Arlington National Cemetery
ARLINGTON
We are met on a great battlefield … We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. … But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
—Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address”
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY is a necropolis, a city of the dead, in the truest sense, and in its 640 acres rest more than 320,000 U.S. military service personnel and their spouses. If it were a city of the living, it would be the 57th largest in the country, falling right in between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Bakersfield, California. There is, in fact, only one U.S. military cemetery that is larger—Long Island National Cemetery—and not by much, with somewhat more than 329,000 internments as of this writing. As an active cemetery, Arlington’s population of souls—resting in peace and unquiet alike—is constantly growing and, on average, some twenty-seven funerals are conducted at the cemetery every weekday
Arlington National Cemetery clings to a wooded, riverside stretch of the Virginia hills across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., its main entrance being directly adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial. It is the final resting place for veterans of all of America’s military conflicts, from the Revolutionary War up through the current and ongoing actions in Afghanistan and Iraq (from which the number of internments steadily grows). Hundreds of the nation’s most famous veterans are buried at the site, including Audie Murphy, Creighton Abrams, Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, Omar Bradley, Joe Louis, Glenn Miller, John F. Kennedy, and Phillip Sheridan.
It was during the Civil War that the cemetery was opened—veterans of earlier wars being moved there after 1900—and the site was originally part of the 1,100-acre Arlington Mansion plantation. This estate was, in fact, the property of Mary Anna Custis Lee, the wife of Confederate military commander Robert E. Lee and the granddaughter of Martha Washington. As casualties from the protracted insurrection grew into the tens of thousands, however, the federal government needed new cemeteries for them, and Union leaders decided that the grounds of the rebel leader’s home would be both convenient and appropriate.
“The grounds about the mansion are admirably adapted to such a use,” wrote U.S. Army Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs in his recommendation that the estate be confiscated for this use. His suggestion was heartily approved, and on May 13, 1864, Private William Henry Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry became the first military serviceman to be interred in Arlington National Cemetery—about a month before the site was officially designated as a military cemetery. He was followed over the next year or so by another 16,000 of his brothers-in-arms.
Not everyone was happy about this, of course, and the members of the Custis family, of which Lee’s wife was a scion, were enraged by it. They would not have been in favor of killing so many Yankee soldiers if they had liked them in the first place, and having their home turned into a cemetery for them seemed like a deliberate affront. By all accounts it was, and Union soldiers were buried right in Mrs. Lee’s