THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9411010512
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
It's ghostly, mostly. Haunted America by Michael Norman and Beth Scott (Tor Books, 200 pp., $23.95) takes readers on a spirited tour of all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Talk about Lake Eerie.
Would you believe Boolder Dam?
Not to mention Ghoulonial Williamsburg. Yes, the old Virginia capital takes its own spooky turn in these pages. Powdered wigs and ectoplasm!
Does the specter of headstrong Lady Ann Skipwith, for example, haunt the Wythe House?
Married to wealthy planter Sir Peyton Skipwith, she attended a gala ball in the 1770s at the Governor's Palace. She wore a stunning cream satin dress and diminutive high-heeled red slippers ``upon which shone buckles of brilliants.'' But something happened at the ball.
An offended Lady Ann bolted from the palace unescorted, heading for the Wythe House across the damp green as measured minuets continued in the background. She snapped the strap of one of her slippers and arrived hobbling on one foot, the other unshod except for a silk stocking. Lady Ann ascended the stairway to a single-heeled staccato, very much like the sound of a pirate's peg leg.
Lady Ann would die in childbirth in 1779. Her husband would marry her sister, Jean. And for 200 years residents, visitors and employees of Colonial Williamsburg would recount hearing the sharp ring of a heel on the broad stairs alternating with the tread of a bare foot.
Reports would be made of a beautiful woman, fully gowned in a colonial ball costume, emerging from a closet to look at herself and finally passing out the door.
``On several occasions,'' recount the authors, ``all at night, witnesses have reported seeing a colonial woman seated at a dressing table, combing her hair. The figure always fades away. It's the same bedroom once occupied by George Washington.''
Is this Lady Ann? What drove her from the ball in high dudgeon? And why does she return?
Perhaps to commune with her counterparts at the Peyton Randolph House. Norman and Scott tell of ``a vaporous female figure'' at the foot of an oak bed in an upstairs bedroom there who ``wrings her hands in worry and despair.'' A little 2-year-old girl had been sleeping in another bedroom when she woke to the horripilate presence of a ``man . . . man . . . all white.''
The authors say historical interpreters on the premises have encountered a young dude in a blue colonial outfit. Sometimes he has been mistaken for a fellow employee - until he vanishes before their eyes. And what about the translucent figure of an elderly woman in a lace-trimmed nightcap, who has been known to appear at the foot of the bed and address guests by name?
She is certainly more efficient at getting them out of the sack than a wake-up call.
Which brings us to the experience of Russell T. Simons, now an air traffic controller in Oklahoma. He says he was staying in a boarding house on Lafayette Street in 1977 when he wakened to the figure of a woman ``of slight proportion'' floating a few inches above the floor. Simons went back to sleep - stout fellow - but in the morning found his alarm clock wouldn't work.
The owner of the boarding house said that figured.
``He told me,'' testified Simons, ``that he was at his wife's side when she passed away at the hospital. When he returned home he found every clock in the house stopped at the exact time of her death. . . . He purchased new clocks, but after a week or so they, too, would stop at the same time as all the others.
``He led me to a room and opened a drawer in his desk. It contained at least ten clocks. All of them that I could see had stopped at the same moment as his wife's passing!''
After Simons departed, he took the opportunity to plug in his alarm clock at new quarters elsewhere.
It ran perfectly.
Because, of course, home is where the haunt is. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB