Countdown to Halloween #2: Chatham Manor — The Lady in White

Night four of the countdown, and we're back home in Fredericksburg, at the big house on the hill across the river: Chatham Manor. Built in 1771 by William Fitzhugh, Chatham hosted Washington, Jefferson, and later Lincoln. It also hosts the most famous ghost in our region — famous enough that her walking route has a name. They call it the Ghost Walk.

The story goes like this. A young Englishwoman was brought to Chatham by her father to break off her romance with a young man back home — a tradesman, a drysalter, not suitable in her father's eyes. She pined at Chatham despite its parties and grandeur. Then her young man did the boldest thing in this whole countdown: he followed her to Virginia, and the two of them planned an elopement. A boat waiting on the Rappahannock. A ladder against her window at midnight.

But a servant talked. And the houseguest who got word of the plan was George Washington.

Washington had the young man arrested that night, and the girl was put back under her father's roof. She was taken home to England, married a man of proper standing, and — this is the detail that has carried the story for 230 years — she never smiled again. On her deathbed, June 21, 1790, she vowed she would return to Chatham, the only place she had ever been happy.

People at Chatham that very day reported a glowing woman in a white gown on the path down to the river. And ever since, she is said to return every seven years, on June 21, walking that same path at midnight — still headed for the boat.

Do the math and mark it down: her next walk is due June 21, 2028.

Chatham has a second, heavier layer, too. In December 1862 it served as a Union headquarters and hospital during the Battle of Fredericksburg. Around 130 soldiers died in that house, and their bodies were buried on the grounds before being moved to the national cemetery after the war. Walt Whitman came to Chatham looking for his wounded brother. Abraham Lincoln stood there. Staff and visitors have reported cries, moans, and soldiers in the halls ever since — a whole ward of unfinished business underneath one young woman's broken heart.

Two kinds of sorrow in one house: a love that never got to happen, and young men who never got to go home. That's Chatham. If any place in Fredericksburg has earned its ghost stories, it's the manor on the hill.

Tomorrow night — Halloween — at 8: #1. The most haunted place where I live and work, out in Essex County, where a hundred years ago the crowds walked into the woods by moonlight just to stand outside an empty house and watch.