Countdown to Halloween #1: Elmwood — The Most Haunted Place Where I Live and Work

All week I've been counting down the most haunted places in the country I call home — Fredericksburg, where I live, and Caroline, Essex, and Westmoreland, where I work. We end tonight, Halloween night, in Essex County, at the one that stands alone.

Elmwood.

It's a great brick mansion from the late 1700s, down a lane near Tappahannock, built when Essex County was tobacco money and river trade. By the late 1800s the house stood empty — and an empty mansion in the woods is an invitation the human imagination cannot refuse. A century ago, the newspapers took up the stories coming out of Elmwood: strange happenings in the vacant house, things seen and heard that nobody could explain. And people came. Not a handful of thrill-seekers — hundreds of them, tramping through the woods on nights when the moon was full, just to stand outside that dark house and see for themselves.

Virginia's dean of ghost stories, L.B. Taylor, kept Elmwood near the top of his lists for a reason. Of all the haunted houses in the state, this is the one that turned into a public event.

And it has the single best ghost in this whole countdown. At gatherings at Elmwood, people have reported a couple in fine, old-fashioned dress appearing in the middle of the party — uninvited, unintroduced, and unbothered. They take to the floor, waltz down the main staircase, drift out into the garden — and disappear. Every other ghost this week has been sad, or stuck, or still working. The Elmwood couple is dancing. Whatever they're doing in the afterlife, they seem to be enjoying it.

Elmwood is a private home today, so let me be plain about the etiquette, because it matters to me: you don't go up the drive. You don't tramp through anybody's woods by moonlight in 2026. You read the story, you drive the county road like everybody else, and you let the people who live there live there. The folks of a hundred years ago got their look. We get the legend, and the legend is enough.

That's the countdown: a colonel still doing his paperwork, a lady still insisting she's innocent, a mother still arriving by coach, a girl still walking to the river — and at the top of the list, in a county I drive through for work every week, a couple still dancing at a party that ended a century ago.

You don't have to believe a bit of it. I hold it the way I hold most old stories: some of it's embroidery, and some of it might be something else, and either way it tells you the truth about a place — which is that people loved and lost enough there that the stories refused to die. The places we live and work are full of that. We just have to slow down long enough to hear them.

Happy Halloween, from all of us at Reason with a View. Mind the little ghosts on the road tonight — they're out there collecting the good candy.

Prefer to watch or listen? This post is also a video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3IMV9Rux7kw