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    Haunts of Virginia's Blue Ridge Highlands
    Haunts of Virginia's Blue Ridge Highlands
    Haunts of Virginia's Blue Ridge Highlands
    Ebook162 pages1 hour

    Haunts of Virginia's Blue Ridge Highlands

    By Joe Tennis

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    About this ebook

    This “interesting collection of Southwest Virginia ghost stories” is packed with pictures and Appalachian lore (Roanoke Star-Sentinel).
     
    A Confederate soldier forever lost at Cumberland Gap. The wispy woman of Roanoke College. The spectral horse that runs the streets of Abingdon. These are just a few of the restless spirits of southwestern Virginia.
     
    Join local author Joe Tennis as he takes readers on both sides of the Blue Ridge to explore the ghostly tales of Appalachia and the Crooked Road. Peer over the rim of the New Castle Murder Hole, dive into the mysteries of Mountain Lake, and wander among the lost graves of Wise County to discover the haunted lore of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Highlands.
     
    This book bridges the Blue Ridge Parkway and follows the entire length of the Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail. It explores a couple dozen counties, with tales of towns called Fincastle and Saltville tucked away in Virginia’s scenic southwestern corner. Each chapter is based on a blend of folk legends, longtime traditions, historical research, and firsthand accounts—and the book also includes a bibliography, a map, and forty-five photographs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateAug 18, 2010
    ISBN9781614235323
    Haunts of Virginia's Blue Ridge Highlands
    Author

    Joe Tennis

    Joe Tennis is the author of books on history and legends of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina. His other books include Haunts of Virginia's Blue Ridge Highlands, Virginia Rail Trails: Crossing the Commonwealth and Along Virginia's Route 58: True Tales from Beach to Bluegrass.

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      Book preview

      Haunts of Virginia's Blue Ridge Highlands - Joe Tennis

      INTRODUCTION

      Virginia’s Blue Ridge Highlands holds a wonder of waterfalls, rocky canyons and mile-high mountains. Scenic villages called Woolwine and Meadows of Dan share the skyline of the Blue Ridge. Yet also lacing this landscape is a labyrinth of legends—in caves, colleges and historic homes.

      Neighbors tell of haunted houses from Hiltons to Hillsville, and stories have circulated for years at the Major Graham Mansion near Wytheville and Avenel in Bedford. In Grayson County’s Grant community, homeowner Kim Hill has reported unexplained sounds at the allegedly haunted Willis House—including what appears to be a bowling ball rolling across the wooden floor of the second story and slamming a set of pins, always scoring a strike. An explanation remains unclear, but the sound could be related to a former resident who lost her life in a traffic accident.

      Schools across this region have collected ghost tales at the college campuses of Radford, Salem, Emory and Wise. The old Christiansburg Middle School bears the century-old legend of the Black Sisters while, in Abingdon, multiple stories told of the Civil War relate to the old Martha Washington College for Women, now known as the Martha Washington Inn.

      Some ghostly sightings of this mountainous region, however, have no tale attached—such as the wispy Lady in White on the sixth floor of the Hotel Roanoke or the mysterious phantom jogger breezing past the Virginia Tech Duck Pond. Some ghosts, too, are phonies, like the Coon Ridge Ghost of Carroll County—a haint owed to Larry Cochran, who paraded down a road around 1960 wearing a sheet and carrying Joe David Horton on his shoulders. A more celebrated spirit—Tazewell’s Woman In Black—once haunted Pine Street in the early 1900s, making businesses close early and residents stay put. Many decades later, the truth was finally revealed: John W. Laird played this part, dressed in a long black skirt with help from businessman H.W. Probst.

      At least one ghost in Washington County even made headlines: the Bristol Herald Courier reported on April 15, 1926, that a Ghost Appears Every Sunday in House at Green Spring near Abingdon. This ghost made itself known by a prolonged and unearthly whistle and the blowing of a horn. Then he proceeds to give a knocking performance. About thirty people heard this one Sunday evening and offered various opinions. Some surmised that this was the shade of a nearby farmer, who departed this life more than a year ago, who is trying to tell the location of his buried treasure.

      Herein lay the Haunts of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Highlands. This book bridges the Blue Ridge Parkway and follows the entire length of the Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail—from Rocky Mount to Breaks Interstate Park. It explores a couple dozen counties, with tales of towns called Fincastle and Saltville tucked away in Virginia’s scenic southwestern corner. Each chapter is based on a blend of folk legends, longtime traditions, historical research and firsthand accounts.

      HEART OF APPALACHIA

      Cumberland Gap—Sugar Run—Powell River—Josephine—Wise—Breaks—Cedar Bluff—St. Paul

      THE LAST REBEL

      Cudjo’s Cave—Cumberland Gap, Lee County

      Deep below the earth, Confederate warriors scratched their names in a dark cavern at the Cumberland Gap, captured by what one artilleryman called the most gorgeous and weird scenery imaginable. As many as sixty men left signatures—in candle smoke—on the cavern’s walls and ceiling. But one, it’s believed, might have also left behind his spirit.

      Virginia makes its last reach to the west at the Cumberland Gap—a natural notch on Cumberland Mountain where it was once thought that America’s greatest Civil War battle would be fought. Confederate general Felix Zollicoffer was sent to fortify the gap as early as 1861. Later, as the war lingered, some surmised that any invasion—by the North or South—would come through this cut in Lee County at the border of both Tennessee and Kentucky.

      For forty-four months, the Union and the Confederacy played a game of wait and see. Soldiers—wearing both blue and gray—stripped beautiful Cumberland Mountain of its coat of many colors. They knocked down forests so that limbs and logs would not block gunfire. But, what these soldiers may have really fought was boredom. Four times the Cumberland Gap changed hands. All the while, soldiers probably panicked because poor roads made it hard to re-supply the barren site with food.

      For storage, troops turned to the crevices of the cavern—the Soldiers Cave—on the Virginia side of Cumberland Gap. Hundreds wandered into this world of wonder, fascinated by the formations of stalagmites and stalactites. Colonel James E. Rains of the 11th Tennessee Infantry bragged of the cave in an 1862 letter to his wife, saying, There are towers & statues, pools of clear water, beautiful arches, & splendid chambers…It is perhaps the most beautiful cave in the world.

      Long after the war was over, a section of this subterranean system became King Solomon’s Cave when it was developed for tours in the 1890s. Then, sometime after 1934, a tunnel was dug to link the Soldiers Cave to King Solomon’s Cave. After that, the entire cave system won a new moniker—Cudjo’s Cave, for a novel of the same name by J.T. Trowbridge, released during the war in 1864. In that book, Cudjo and the other characters explore a large cave in the Cumberland Mountains and are amazed, as Trowbridge writes, by the vastness of the cave, the darkness, the mystery, the inky and solemn stream pursuing its noiseless course.

      The shallow pool of Cleopatra’s Bathtub is one of the many unique formations in Cudjo’s Cave—now called Gap Cave—at the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park of Lee County. Courtesy of the author.

      Darkness and mystery remain part of the modern tours of the real-life Cudjo’s Cave—unlike earlier years, when the roadside attraction was illuminated with dozens of electrical lights. For decades, commercial tour brochures in the mid-1900s advertised the unparalleled beauty of this place, where calcite crystals scintillate like millions of glittering diamonds.

      Rangers of the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park now call this Gap Cave and lead tours with just flashlights and helmet bulbs to light the way.

      It is in this darkness, some rangers say, that a leftover looms: the bearded face of a Confederate officer, hovering back and forth between the two main channels of the cavern. This ghostly man appeared to join a cave tour during September 2009. Inside the cavern’s Music Room, the spirit briefly showed his countenance to John Gillenwater, a seventeen-year-old ranger, who recalled, I never thought there was a ghost—until I saw that.

      About a week later, John Gillenwater and another young ranger, Lucas Wilder, showed off Cleopatra’s Bathtub, a shallow pool, while leading a middle-aged couple on a typical tour. Lucas took the lead but was soon taken aback when he noticed what appeared to be disembodied legs, running in the distance.

      Slightly shaken, Lucas marched on to the Music Room. He sang his usual mournful version of Long Black Veil, demonstrating the dynamic echo of the cavern. Then he climbed the forty-four steps of the Ultimate Thighmaster, a steep set of often-slick stairs. Lucas held his head down to maintain his balance.

      Looking up, he froze in fear.

      There was a man sitting at the top of the steps. He was looking straight at me, Lucas said. I was scared to death when I saw it. I was just ready just to fall off.

      This man was stout. He wore a Confederate officer’s jacket with two button rows on the front, a colored strip down the side of his pants and boots that stretched about halfway up his calves. He had no hat, Lucas said, but he did wear a beard—unkempt, gray and stretching to the center of his chest.

      A stairwell connects King Solomon’s Cave to the Soldiers

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