Countdown to Halloween #4: The Old Mansion — Three Ghosts and a Jack-O-Lantern

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Night two of the countdown through the most haunted places where I live and work. Tonight we're in Caroline County, in the town of Bowling Green, at a house so old the county was young when it was already somebody's home place.

The Old Mansion, on Main Street in Bowling Green, goes back to the Hoomes family in the 1600s — Colonel John Waller Hoomes is credited with building it around 1670, which makes it one of the oldest houses in Virginia. Houses that old collect stories the way they collect dust, and this one, they say, has three residents who never left.

The first is the Colonel himself, still at home in the house he built. The second is his daughter Sophia, who has been seen arriving at the property in a coach — still coming to visit her father, a few centuries after the fact. There's something almost sweet about that one.

The third is the story that earns this house its place on the list, and it's a Halloween story whether the house wants it to be or not.

Mrs. Woodford lived at the Old Mansion in a later generation. One night, her husband decided it would be funny to dress up in a jack-o-lantern costume and scare her. It worked better than he intended: the fright stopped her heart, and she died of it. Local lore says her screams can still be heard coming from the downstairs bedroom.

Every countdown needs a moral somewhere, and here it is, free of charge: there is a version of “it was just a joke” that follows you for two hundred years.

Add in one more detail — the sound of phantom hoofbeats at the Old Mansion is said to show up before something catastrophic happens — and you've got a small house on a quiet street in Bowling Green carrying more story per square foot than just about any place in Caroline County.

I've driven past it more times than I can count, working in that county. It looks like what it is: an old, handsome, well-kept Virginia house. That's the thing about these places. The most haunted addresses in our part of the world don't look like movie sets. They look like somebody's home — because they were, and maybe, in a sense, they still are.

Tomorrow night at 8: #3 — up in Westmoreland County, a great Lee family mansion where a woman's voice still insists, “I didn't do it.”

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