THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 29, 1995 TAG: 9510270191
SECTION: SUFFOLK SUN PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAWSON MILLS, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
A TIPOFF to a good ghost tale, it seems to me, is having the teller's voice drop to a near whisper before saying, ``Now I don't really believe this, but .
Believe what you will, but there are plenty of stories about ghosts right in Suffolk.
A crisp autumn night - a chill wind whistling through the trees and the moon casting eerie shadows across a darkened landscape - is ideal listening time. First, though, you may want to make sure the doors are locked and perhaps turn on another light. It is, after all, almost Halloween.
Retired Judge William Wellington Jones, who lives just north of Driver, recounted this one:
A young man from Suffolk was dating a neighbor girl, who got sick and died.
The young man had gone to visit her parents. Walking home, late on a foggy evening, he had to pass by her grave.
As he did, he felt her presence. He stopped, looked around and saw her image standing above the ground. After several minutes, the image went away and the young man went home.
Jones, who places the account in the 1880s, wouldn't reveal the young lovers' names because the families are still living. He did add that the young man wasn't the sort to have ghost stories, although he had other stories.''
A more contemporary, but equally inexplicable, tale came from Sue Woodward, who lives in a historic home on North Main Street.
The protagonist is a painter, who worked for the family for a number of years. The events he recounted to her occurred, as she remembers it, three or four years ago.
``The painter was working alone in the house. I'd come back to the house while he was working upstairs, and he'd ask if I had been downstairs because he'd heard a woman humming or singing.
``Then, while working in the upstairs wing, up on a ladder, he heard someone walk into the house. He heard him walking about downstairs and smelled tobacco smoke, from a cigar.
``Then he saw this little man, whom he said was clearly `from another time.' He had on knee britches and a little vest, with his hair combed back and no facial hair. Their gazes met. The little man looked enormously disgusted at the painter and said `humph!' and walked to the back hall.''
Woodward said the painter, shaken, got off the ladder, picked up a fireplace poker and went looking for the visitor. He searched the whole house but never found him.
``I'd like to think it was John Granbery,'' said Woodward. Granbery, around 1790, developed the part of town where her home is located. He was married to a woman from Bermuda, and both were lost in a shipwreck around 1805.
A picture of him in a history of Suffolk shows a clean-shaven man, his hair combed back.
When the painter was working on the porch, he reported seeing a woman in the back hall, her hair up.
It wasn't her, Woodward said, but ``someone from an earlier time.''
This story is included in a book, ``Ghosts of Tidewater,'' by L.B. Taylor Jr.
By the way, the Woodward home will be on the upcoming Suffolk-Nansemond Historical Society's annual Candlelight Tour. Perhaps ghostbusters can solve the home's mysteries.
Judge Jones also shared another tale that proves not everything is as it first appears.
``It happened when I was a small boy,'' he recounted. ``We had horses and mules.
``One time we had a sick mule. My father had to shut him out of the barn; he feared the mule would get sick in the stable, and he wouldn't be able to get him out. About 2 in the morning, he heard a noise in the barn. He looked out and saw a large, white object right in an area reported to contain graves.
``He went out to investigate and saw the object move toward him. He kept going and discovered it was a gray mule that had been in the stable. The sick mule had pushed the handle on the door and let it out.''
Some seemingly mysterious things, Jones said, have explanations. Others don't. You be the judge.
Happy Halloween! ILLUSTRATION: Photos by DAWSON MILLS
Sue Woodward, who lives in a historic home on North Main Street,
once had a painter working in her house who was visited by a ghostly
figure.
Retired Judge William Wellington Jones, left, lives just north of
Driver, and enjoys sharing spooky local folklore.
A house painter working in Sue Woodward's historic home on North
Main Street, above, claims he was visited by a ghostly figure.
Retired Judge William Wellington Jones, left, lives just north of
Driver, and enjoys sharing spooky local folklore.
by CNB