September/October 2004

Trick or Treat

In the spirit of the season, here are a number of historic ghost stories—most of them true

by Montague Gammon III

The development called Williamstown was laid out in Norfolk just after the turn of the last century. Among the earliest inhabitants of its three-story Victorian homes was a married couple whose last name was July. The fact that the wife, whose given name really was June, called her husband “Old July” suggests that he was significantly her senior.

In later years they found that their circumstances were much diminished. By the time of World War II, they were living on a pittance, their children long moved away, with none in Norfolk to look after their needs. They withdrew to their own company, as couples often do when they have neither the means to entertain nor the desire to socialize.

Younger neighbors who occasionally dropped by to see if the old couple needed help were brusquely rebuffed by Mrs. July; but this seemed unremarkable, as a generalized crankiness and disinterest in chitchat, coupled with an unwillingness to admit to needing aid from the younger generation, are common among the elderly. Though it was always June who came to the door, all assumed that Old July was somewhere about, perhaps being cared for by his devoted wife.

That supposition was not entirely inaccurate.

Years passed, and one day June fell so ill that she called for help; she was taken to a hospital, where she died. The house remained vacant for such a space of time that neighbors grew concerned that it could become a hangout for undesirables and asked the City to visit it.

The curtains had rotted and fallen from their supports so long before that the sun had bleached their lace pattern into the hardwood floors, and dust was thick throughout the home.

Behind the closed door to the second floor master bedroom, the first people to enter the house in years—the first people, other than the old couple, to step beyond the front door in decades—found lying under a sheet and blanket what they first thought to be a couple of dried “old hams,” said a neighbor as he described the discovery of Old July’s mummified corpse.

It seems that one morning June descended the stairs to the kitchen to make breakfast, but her husband did not come down when she called. She found him, dead in the bed they had shared. She simply knew that she could not afford a funeral, so she had covered him as best she could, and had closed the bedroom door forever behind her.

The house is now a commercial establishment, whose proprietors prefer to shun such specificity as might scare potential patrons. But when the place is nearly unoccupied and otherwise silent, one of them—the child of a physician and grandchild of a Baptist minister, a former teacher, a churchgoer, a successful business person and a respected member of the community—is among those who have heard what are, quite unmistakably, footsteps going to and fro in the empty attic.

Actually, Norfolk ghosts are rare compared to those of Portsmouth, where it seems you cannot throw a rock without its hitting, or, rather, passing through, some Old Town specter. Virginia Beach harbors three ghosts in one hotel, the old Cavalier, where brewery founder Adolph Coors fell, or jumped, or perhaps was pushed to his death from a sixth floor window that somehow closed behind him. His spirit is supposed to haunt the place, along with that of a servant in livery who cautions people away from the top floor with the warning that there are “ghosts here.” The final spirit is that of a cat, seen wandering the halls.

For the rest of this story, you can order the September/October 2004 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine.