The Great Dismal Swamp has a long, treacherous history filled with legends and folklore, some of which has taken place as recently as the twentieth century.
This episode of Southern Gothic is part of our Campfire Tales, a series of daily podcasts released during Halloween 2022!
“In any event, the story of what happened [...] is one of the most famous ghost stories in Alexandria, maybe because it has all the elements of a classic tale: love, loss, tragedy and redemption. Or then again, maybe it’s because the story remains alive today because strange things keep happening [...]””
At 107 North Fairfax St. in Alexandra, Virginia is a three-story building that became the location of one of Alexandria’s most enduring tales of love, loss, and hauntings: The Burning Bride.
It was on the evening of June 27, 1868, perhaps the night before the couple was set to marry when 26 year-old Laura Schafer, excited for her upcoming nuptials accidentally spilled burning fuel from a kerosene lamp onto her dress. Within moments she was alight. At 11 in the morning on Sunday June 28, 1868, on what should have been her wedding day, Laura Schafer died of her injuries; her beloved fiancé at her side.
Yet many believe that Laura Schafer remains trapped in the house, forever reliving the horror of her death and unfulfilled life.
Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Va.). “Fatal and Melancholy Affair.” June 29, 1868. Newspapers.com
Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Va.). “Obituary.” July 11, 1868. Newspapers.com
Anderson, Olivia. “The Legend of the Burning Bride.” Alexandria Times. October 21, 2021. https://alextimes.com/2021/10/the-legend-of-the-burning-bride/.
Caroline and Reilly. “Old Town Alexandria.” Phantastic Phantoms (blog). May 21, 2012. http://phantasticphantoms.blogspot.com/2012/05/old-town-alexandria.html.
Cooney, Ruthie. “The Phantoms of North Fairfax Street.” Boundary Stones (blog). WETA. October 22, 2018. https://boundarystones.weta.org/2018/10/22/phantoms-north-fairfax-street.
“Creepy Tales from Old Alexandria, VA.” DC Ghosts (blog). Accessed September 18, 2022. https://dcghosts.com/creepy-tales-from-old-alexandria-va/.
Pope, Michael Lee. Ghosts of Alexandria. Charleston, SC: Haunted America, 2010.
“The Schafer House Ghosts.” Alexandria Ghosts (blog). Accessed September 18, 2022. https://alexandriaghosts.com/the-schafer-house-ghosts/.
“The True Story of Alexandria's Burning Bride.” DC Ghosts (blog). Accessed September 18, 2022. https://dcghosts.com/the-true-story-of-alexandrias-burning-bride/.
“The seventeenth century was an age when witches and demons, alchemists and sorcerers, sea monsters and fanciful creatures were accepted by Englishmen, regardless of social or intellectual station in life. [...] Virginia, with its dark forests and strange native inhabitants, must have seemed quite frightening indeed. King James I himself had written that the devil’s handiwork was ‘thought to be common in such wilde parts of the world.’ It was there that ‘the Devill findes greatest ignorance and barbaritie.’ For at least the next hundred years, Virginians would be on the lookout for Satan and his followers.””
The practice of witchcraft has a complicated history in North America. When the first colonists arrived, they did so with an already existing concept and superstition about the practice. While the most well-remembered trials in American history were in Salem, MA, when nineteen people were executed between 1692 and 1663, it is far from the only instance of witch trials during the colonial era.
On Wednesday, July 10, 1706, scores of people arrived at what is now known as Witch Duck Point on the Lynnhaven River in Virginia. They were there to witness a unique but brutal legal proceeding that would never again be carried out in the colony of Virginia– the trial of forty-six-year-old Grace Sherwood by ducking.
It is unknown exactly what happened when she hit the water, but what was clear to the folks who came that day was that Grace Sherwood survived and therefore she was must be a witch.
Burr, George Lincoln, ed. Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914.
Chewning, Alpheus J. Haunted Virginia Beach. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2006.
Davis, Richard Beale. “The Devil in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65, no. 2 (April 1957): 131-149. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4246295.
Gahan, Mary Beth. “Witch of Pungo’s church dedicates marker to her.” July 11, 2014. The Virginian-Pilot. https://www.pilotonline.com/news/article_8168fea0-b37f-5680-954a-74f67a286300.html.
“Grace Sherwood (ca. 1660-1740.)” Copyright 2020. Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/sherwood-grace-ca-1660-1740/.
“Grace Sherwood: The One Virginia Witch.” Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 69. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884. Google Books. https://books.google.com.
“Grace Sherwood, The Witch of Pungo.” February 1, 2021. Colonial Ghosts. https://colonialghosts.com/grace-sherwood-the-witch-of-pungo/.
“Grace Sherwood - the Witch of Pungo (1660-1740.) Copyright 2010. Old Donation Episcopal Church. Accessed May 1, 2022. Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20120412035254/http://www.olddonation.org/index.php?page=grace-sherwood---a-unique-story.
“The Haunting of Witchduck Road.” Updated June 7, 2021. VirginiaBeach.com. https://www.virginiabeach.com/article/haunting-witchduck-road.
Hines, Emilee. Virginia Myths and Legends: The True Stories Behind History’s Mysteries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Hudson, Carson O., Jr. Witchcraft in Colonial Virginia. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2019.
Hume, Ivor Noël. Something from the Cellar: More of This & That. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2005.
Misra, Sulagna. “A Brief History of Witches in America.” October 28, 2017. Mental Floss. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87525/brief-history-witches-america.
Ruegsegger, Bob. “Virginia’s ‘Witch of Pungo:’ Accused remembered as Colony’s Joan of Arc.” (Fredericksburg, Va.). The Free Lance-Star. October 30, 1999. https://news.google.com/newspapers.
“Va. Woman Seeks to Clear Witch of Pungo.” Posted July 7, 2006. USAToday. https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-witch-pungo_x.htm.
Virginia Historical Society. “Grace Sherwood: The ‘Witch of Pungo.’ Copyright 2022. Virginia Museum of History & Culture. https://virginiahistory.org/learn/grace-sherwood-witch-pungo.
“Witchcraft in Colonial Virginia.” Copyright 2020. Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/witchcraft-in-colonial-virginia/
In our first minisode we travel back to historic WIlliamsburg, Viriginia…
The home, first constructed in 1721, is today one of the most original surviving structures in Williamsburg; the buildings longevity is believed by many to be the reason why many believe it to be so paranormally active.
In it’s 300 year history the Peyton Randolph house served as a meeting place for American Revolutionaries, and a hospital during the Civil War. With the numerous individuals who lived and died within its walls, its perhaps unsurprising that the accounts of strange occurrences of disembodied noises are said to date back to the late 1700s.
It’s even said that Revolutionary War hero and French General Marquis de Lafayette, experienced something he couldn’t explain when staying at the house in 1824. He was one of many to have an encounter in the Peyton Randolph House.
In 1638, English colonists established their first significant inland settlement on the high ground of the Virginia Peninsula, between the James and York Rivers. In 1699 Middle Plantation was renamed Williamsburg and given the honor of serving as the new capital of the Virginia Colony. As a result Williamsburg has had a truly unique place in American history. It has been witness to practically every aspect, from the Colonial era through the American Revolution and Civil War, to its present state as a modern city with a population of over 14,000.
One of Williamsburg’s most infamous historic structures is the Public Gaol-- a place where the accused once awaited trial. Each prison cell was designed to hold six inmates shackled to the wall, and although allowances were made for the accused to spend time in the exercise yard, the overcrowding and lack of sanitation made illness a real and likely possibility.
Conditions that are said to have been so bad the some would prefer the gallows over incarceration there.
Today eerie shadows have been seen moving about the cells on the first floor without explanation, and the balls and chains on display at what is now a museum have been known to move and swing by themselves. Some have even reported hearing the disembodied sounds of prisoners banging on the wall from inside, despite the building being empty.
It was in 1619 that the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of Virginia Colony. Over the next two and a half centuries, as the colonies expanded, so too did the number of enslaved persons. Also on the rise were the number of men and women willing to risk everything in an attempt for freedom.
In Virginia, many of those men and women who fled enslavement took refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp. From as early as 1700, those men and women, known as maroons, established settlements within the seemingly inhospitable swamp.
Knowledge about what life was like in the Dismal is uncertain. But it is certainly a place of duality, where freemen escaped to, but companies brought enslaved men to work.
Although little physical evidence remains today, it is believed that prior to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, more than 2,000 people lived in the Great Dismal Swamp.
In 1816 a mysterious couple arrived in Alexandria, Virginia and isolated themselves in a room at Gadsby’s Tavern. Unfortunately, the young woman was deathly ill and in spite of receiving assistance from a local doctor, she passed away. After burying his supposed wife, the man then disappeared. Speculation on their identities continues to this day, fueled by the eerie inscription in her tombstone: “To the memory of the Female Stranger…”
In 1885, publisher James B. Ward released a small pamphlet that contained three encrypted messages that purportedly told the whereabouts of an immense treasure. Unfortunately, after a century of attempts to decipher these mysterious codes, no trace of this hidden stash of gold, silver, and jewels has been found.
As the end of the Civil War became imminent, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled his capital city of Richmond, Virginia. After leading the South for four years, he had high hopes to escape the country and rebuild a new Confederacy. So Davis took with him the entirety of the Confederate Treasury, a massive fortune of gold, silver and bullion. Yet when the Confederate President was finally captured by Union forces, this gold was nowhere to be found.
To this day, speculation runs rampant over the whereabouts and fate of that lost Confederate gold, a mystery that has grown for over a century and a half, spurring the imaginations of historians and treasure hunters alike.
The Rosewell Plantation of Gloucester County, Virginia was once the most grandiose plantation home of the British Colonies in North America; but after a fire destroyed this exquisite home in 1916, all that is left of this once great mansion is ruins.
On January 15, 1916 Dr. John C. King opened the St. Alban’s Sanatorium in Radford, Virginia; converting a former school into a modern mental health facility that he had hoped to transform by focusing on the moral management and care of those admitted. Unfortunately, his goal of assisting his patients fell short, leaving many to live lives of torment within the walls of his sanatorium.
A sanatorium built on land that had been the sight of numerous tragedies for centuries. Tragedies that pitted natives against colonists, and northerners against southerners.
