Ghost Hunting Virginia: Your Travel Guide to the State's Most Haunted Places (America's Haunted Road Trip) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael O. Varhola works as a freelance author, editor, and lecturer who specializes in nonfiction and travel-related subjects. Michael has had a lifelong interest in studying the paranormal and has conducted investigations worldwide. He has been a resident of Fairfax County, Virginia, since 1991. His other books include Everyday Life During the Civil War, Shipwrecks and Lost Treasures: Great Lakes, and Fire and Ice: The Korean War, 1950–1953.

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The Poe Museum
Richmond

There is no doubt that the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe lives on at the museum dedicated to him in Richmond. Whether that spirit is attended by one or more ghosts, however, is an open question.

When I was able to meet with Chris Semtner, a somewhat subdued artist in his early 30s who served as curator for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, he was quick to state that it is not haunted. During the hour or so my mother and I spent chatting with him at the museum on a bright, sunny day in early March 2008, however, he recounted episode after episode of incidents associated with the museum—many of them firsthand—that most believers would accept as clear evidence of ghostly presences.

Chris does believe that some places are haunted and claims to have lived in one that might have been. “I’m just somebody who likes to debunk things when there are alternate explanations,” he says, and he has not seen anything at the museum that he does not believe could be explained in some other way.

If Richmond is home to any ghosts at all, of course, it would certainly be reasonable that some of them might haunt the “Old Stone House,” the oldest extant building in what is one of the oldest cities in the country. None of the sites in Richmond where Poe actually lived or worked still exist, and the museum is located in a collection of four contiguous buildings that includes this aptly named structure, a 19th-century carriage house (undergoing renovation during our visit in preparation for an exhibit of comic books and graphic novels inspired by the author); a building constructed of bricks taken from the house where Poe’s mother died; and one other vintage house—all clustered around an enclosed garden.

Poe did actually visit the Old Stone House at least once, when as a boy he was part of the honor guard that accompanied the Marquis de Lafayette on a tour of the city that stopped there. It is located just a few blocks from the home in which he grew up and the offices of the Southern Literary Messenger, the newspaper that gave him his first opportunity to write professionally, primarily as a literary critic....

Chris says that a lot of the tour guides say they’re frightened of something upstairs in the carriage house. “Sometimes they claim to hear footsteps upstairs when they’re downstairs,” he said. Birds walking on the roof or acorns rolling down the roof, Chris believes, are more likely explanations (although the oak tree that once produced those troublesome acorns is no longer there).

Such tours also stop outside the carriage house, Chris says, where their participants are told that in photographs taken of one of its windows, they can sometimes see the face of a child.

People have also experienced other evidence of what they believe are hauntings inside the various buildings, and there are other museum staff members, Chris says—including a woman who also guides local ghost tours—who would swear the place is haunted.

“At the top of the stairs [in the carriage house], there’s a little bedroom display, and some of our tour guides are afraid to go into it at night because they have to go into the bedroom, turn on the light, and then lock the door behind themselves,” Chris says. “One of our guides says she would leave the downstairs door open so she could run out when she was afraid.”

Ghost stories associated with the site generally involve children and would thus not seem to have any connection to Poe at all (whose interest in young people seems to have been directed primarily at his cousin Virginia Clemm, whom he married when she was 13 and he was 26). Chris also says there are no records of any children having died in the house. As my mother pointed out, of course, children regularly died from any number of causes prior to the industrial age in America. Records of such deaths, if they ever existed, might not still survive, and it is not unreasonable to think that children might constitute a relatively large proportion of the ghosts in certain kinds of places, such as family homes. Many of the odd occurrences people have experienced at the museum are, in fact, prankish or childlike in character, Chris says, such as feeling their ears flicked or having small objects tossed at the backs of their heads when no one else is present.

“One fellow who was upstairs by himself [in the carriage house] claimed he was pinched,” Chris says, for example. And just within the past few years, he says, guests at weddings in the garden have claimed to have seen children playing there, even when it is clear that no living ones were actually there.

Chris also says that professional ghost-hunting groups have conducted experiments in the museum and generally determined it was haunted, but he is dismissive of their methodology, which he brands as flawed and unscientific (a standard he seems committed to, his background as an artist rather than a scientist notwithstanding).

Indeed, Chris—who is often the first person to arrive at the museum, sometimes while it is still somewhat dark—says he has personally experienced several anomalies that are almost classical in their association with haunted places. These have included hearing the courtyard door to the Old Stone House opening and closing in the early-morning hours when he was the only one at the site, as well as having his knocks upon walls mimicked from elsewhere in the house when no other people were there. Because these effects cannot be reproduced in accordance with the standards of the scientific method, however, Chris says he is not willing to accept them as evidence of a supernatural presence.

While that would seem to be an unduly high standard to a more naturalistic ghost hunter like myself, my mother and I certainly did not witness any evidence of hauntings while we were at the museum—although it is not likely that we would have anyway on a short visit during the day. And, while the identities of the spectral urchins some believe to haunt the place are at the least uncertain, it is a pretty sure bet that there is one unquiet spirit that does not haunt the place: Edgar Allan Poe, who could hardly be anything but pleased with this heartfelt memorial to his life and works—and to the somewhat macabre reputation it has acquired.