#virginiahistory

Strolling through the city of Richmond, Virginia means taking a walk through one of the oldest cities in America and being able to visit sights and structures that saw countless chapters of the earliest parts of American history. Visiting Jefferson Park, located on Union Hill, offers visitors walking paths, a playground, and a picturesque view of the modern city skyline. It’s a pleasant scene, and one that does not at all hint at what lay hidden underneath the earth of Jefferson Park.

Skyline of Richmond, Virginia. Image via Bruce Emmerling, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Church Hill Tunnel of Richmond, Virginia was built with a purpose of advancement, looking to leave behind the aftermath of the Civil War and bring in new progress. Completed in 1872 by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O), the railway was built as an extension in order to reach a new coal pier located in the city of Newport News, bringing a new logistical connection to the exportation of coal from the area. The plan sounded good, and upon completion the tunnel was one of the longest in the country at nearly 4,000 feet in length, but the initial victory of completing the tunnel came after multiple problems that should have been seen as a warning.

The first issue with the Church Hill Tunnel was the very earth it was being constructed from. Unlike other tunnels carved through bedrock, Church Hill was created through layers of limestone and soft clay, deeply unstable soil that would shift and swell up when exposed to any moisture and shrink back again when dried. With the volatile soil structure there was no way to ensure the safety of the tunnel and during construction there were multiple instances of portions of it collapsing, taking the lives of the men working inside. Land around the work area began to react to the construction and in one instance the ground gave way, toppling the house of a minister and breaking a gas line. The marvel was also a menace and upon the completion of a new viaduct in 1901 the Church Hill Tunnel was closed and fell into disuse. It should have stayed that way.

While the city of Richmond grew and flourished in the early part of the twentieth century the Church Hill Tunnel lay dormant, looming like a great void out of the earth. That is, until 1925 when after over twenty years of non-use the city decided it was a monster worth bringing back to life.

Given that the tunnel had been left dormant for decades there were extensive repairs that needed to be completed before it could be used once again. These repairs were underway on October 2nd 1925, a cold and rainy day in Richmond that seemed ordinary before the Church Hill Tunnel experienced something that was both unthinkable, but also tragically familiar. The tunnel was bustling with activity and engineer Tom Mason was guiding a train with ten additional flat cars into the west entrance of the tunnel on his first day as an engineer. Then, the bricks began to fall. The collapse of the tunnel was as fast as it was terrible with bricks, debris, and clay falling all around the workers and the train, burying it under the weight of the earth. Electric wires were cut plunging everyone into darkness and some of the trapped men took out their knives and started slashing wildly into the dark, trying to cut through anyone who stood in their way of getting out. Workers scrambled to escape, most miraculously making it to the eastern entrance a mile away and walking from the site with their lives. But others were not as lucky, 190 feet of the tunnel had fallen in on itself and the entire train was buried along with the bodies of Tom Mason and at least two other workers. Fireman Benjamin F. Mosby was hard at work shoveling coal when the locomotive was crushed. He was able to escape but when he staggered out of the east entrance he was horrifically scalded from the steam from the engine and his teeth were broken. He died later that night at Grace Hospital.

The Richmond Times Dispatch reporting on the tunnel collapse.

In the aftermath of the tunnel collapse there were questions, but unfortunately the reason why it happened was known, the tunnel’s history was marred by multiple collapses, and this was not even the first time it claimed human lives. The bigger question now was how to proceed. The body of engineer Mason was able to be recovered but finding the other workers, later identified as Richard Lewis and H. Smith, was impossible. After nine days of efforts to recover their bodies (and after more sections collapsed) it was determined that any further activity in the Church Hill Tunnel was simply too dangerous. The next year the entrances of the tunnel were sealed off, with a giant “1926” inscribed on the mossy, wet stone covering the western entrance. The train and bodies remained entombed inside.

Over the decades since the collapse the tunnel has continued to cause problems, in 1962 another collapse swallowed a house and another worker lost their life to the tunnel. There have been multiple plans to recover the train and the bodies, but the continuing collapses and state of utter disrepair halted further efforts. In 2006 the Virginia Historical Society proposed trying to get into the tunnel once again, but upon drilling a hole in the seal and peering at the inside with a camera it became clear that it would not be possible. The tunnel is filled with water and sand and manipulating it in any way could result in further collapses and severe damage to homes currently standing on Church Hill. Any recovery plans are indefinitely on hold.

Plans for recovery of the train and the bodies of those still entombed inside the Church Hill Tunnel is not the only thing that brings the collapse into present-day conversation. Then there is the vampire.

When twenty-eight-year old Benjamin F. Mosby staggered out of the east end of the tunnel he was the picture of pain and suffering. His teeth were broken, he was bloody, and according to people at the scene his flesh was hanging in ribbons, torn from his body after being blasted by the scalding steam from the locomotive. As the stories of the collapse spread one stated that a “creature” covered in blood and with a mouth of sharp teeth ran from the tunnel, eventually making it to the nearby Hollywood Cemetery where it disappeared into the mausoleum of W.W. Pool, a striking structure with a metal gate and an inscription only reading “W.W. Pool 1913.”

Article in the Richmond Times Dispatch about a tribute to Mosby after his death.

This “creature” which has become known as the Richmond Vampire, is a popular story, but the background is a messy jigsaw of events, rumors, and innocent people denied their eternal resting place. It is almost certain that the figure described as bloody and ghastly with a mouth of sharp teeth emerging from the tunnel was Mosby, moving away from the horror in a state of shock before other people at the scene lay him down on an embankment and began to pour water on him to try and soothe some of his pain. He was reportedly calm, asking that someone let his wife know he was alive and ok. As for the connection to the final resting place of W.W. Pool, there is a rumor that Pool found himself in the United States after being run out of England for practicing vampirism. This rumor is purely that. Pool was born in Mississippi in the 1840s, moved to the Richmond region in the 1860s, died in 1922 (on the same day as one of his closest friends) and had an elaborate funeral including Masonic rites given his membership to the Freemasons. So is the origin of the Richmond Vampire a case of tragic proximity? There are the accounts of seeing a creature emerging from the tunnel and the rumor of Pool and vampirism but the two became intertwined over time, carried into the future by word of mouth and sensationalist storytelling. It is a story of wildly convoluted origins, but it is a persistent one. Visitors to the Hollywood Cemetery regularly ask if there is a vampire buried there and more disturbingly, the remains of W.W. Pool and his wife were removed from the mausoleum due to vandals breaking in, drawing symbols on the walls, and allegedly trying to steal parts of their bodies.

Hundreds of people visit the Hollywood Cemetery of Richmond looking for the tomb of a monster, the physical remains of a real-life horror story. The true tale of terror though, can be found three miles away where a large stone wall inscribed with only “1926” stands between the visitor and a tragic scene where a train and at least two bodies lay frozen in the moment when the earth caved in and took their last breath from them.

The sealed western entrance of the Church Hill Tunnel. Image via Eli Christman from Richmond, VA, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Sources:

Branch, Ashley. “Starting with the Church Hill Tunnel Collapse, a Filmmaker Is Uncovering Virginia’s Buried History.” VPM, Virginia’s home for Public Media, 30 Sept. 2021, www.vpm.org/2021-09-30/starting-with-the-church-hill-tunnel-collapse-a-filmmaker-is-uncovering-virginias.

Castleton, David. “The Richmond Vampire - Virginia’s Tunnel-Haunting Nosferatu - David Castleton Blog - the Serpent’s Pen.” David Castleton Blog - the Serpent’s Pen, 21 Apr. 2021, www.davidcastleton.net/richmond-vampire-hollywood-cemetery-w-w-pool-church-hill-tunnel-virginia/.

Feather, Lauren. “This Richmond Park Is Home to a Sealed Tunnel (with an Unusual History).” TheTravel, 10 Dec. 2022, www.thetravel.com/church-hill-tunnel-in-richmond-virginia-history/.

By: Lisa Timmerman, Executive Director

“Captaine Argall intelligence, but he delt with an old friend, and adopted brother of his Iapazeus, how and by what meanes he might procure hir captive, assuring him, that now or never, was the time to pleasure him, if he entended indeede that love which he had made profession of, that in ransome of hir he might redeeme some of our English men and armes…” Raphe Hamor recorded the kidnapping of Pocahontas in his “A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia” printed in 1615. He served as Secretary of the Virginia colony until 1614 and returned to Virginia in 1617 where his life was strife with conflict and controversy. While he claimed Captain Samuel Argall lured the Patawomeck subchief Iopassus (Iapazeus) into helping capture Pocahontas for the reward of a “small Copper kettle, and some other les valuable toies so highly by him esteemed”, he greatly misunderstood the situation and the indigenous people.

(The Abduction of Pocahontas by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, early 20th century painting, Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society. Note how the artist romanticized this exchange and the more English appearance of Pocahontas)

While the Patawomeck peoples paid tribute to Powhatan, they lived on the fringe of the alliance’s territory, closer to other hostile Algonquian-speaking groups. The people deftly maneuvered between many tumultuous relationships as the English certainly added new elements to their political and social worlds. While Captain John Smith claimed he encountered the Patawomeck people in 1608, even falsely reported they secreted a “glistering metal”, Captain Samuel Argall’s expeditions led him to actively engage in diplomacy, hoping to create a fissure in the tenuous indigenous alliances. From 1609-1614, the First Anglo-Powhatan War raged between the English and Powhatan’s alliances, persisting in small-scale but frequent and persistent warfare. Sidenote: Some scholars argue the label “Anglo-Powhatan War” misidentifies the complexities of the situation, only addressing it from an English perspective. However, the ongoing conflict led to serious problems such as food supply and Captain Argall headed north to find willing trade partners. In 04/1613, Argall learned Pocahontas was in the town of Passapatanzy, recognizing that she would be a valuable hostage. Regarding Iopassus role in the deception of detaining and kidnapping Pocahontas on a boat, Hamor recorded, “he [Iopassus] would reserve Pocahuntas, whereat she began to be exceeding pensive, and discontented, yet ignorant of the dealing of Iapazeus, who in outward appearance was no less discontented that he should be the meanes of her captivity, much a doe there was to perswade her to be patient, which with extraordinary curteous usage, by little and little was wrought in her, and so to James towne she was brought, a messenger to her father forthwith dispached to advertise him, that his only daughter was in the hands & possession of the English…” Pocahontas was a hostage in Jamestown for about a year as the English and Powhatans negotiated and her marriage to John Rolfe in 04/1614 brought an uneasy truce for a short period.

(Map of Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom created by Historian Helen Rountree, 2002. Read more here with Encyclopedia Virginia)

Unfortunately, we do not have a first-person account from Iopassus or the Patawomeck peoples. English sources are fraught with indigenous stereotypes, presumed cultural superiority, misunderstanding (and lack of wanting to), and agenda as letters and narratives measured and generated the financial backbone of the Virginia Company. In 1617, the same year Pocahontas died, John Rolfe printed “A True Relation of the state of Virginia Lefte by Sir Thomas Dale Knight in May Last 1616, referring back to Hamor’s writings, “How happily and plenteously the good blessings of God have fallen upon the people and colony since the last impression, faithfully written by a gent. of good merit, Mr. Ralph Hamor, (some tyme an actuall member in the Plantation, even then departing when the foundacoun and ground worke was new laid of their now thrift and happines,) of the earthie and worldly man is scarcely believed, but of heavenlier minds they are most easilie discerned, for they daily attend and marke how those blessings, (though sometimes restrayned for a tyme,) in the end, are poured upon the servants of the Lord.” As with Hamor, Rolfe also had an agenda to promote in keeping the Virginia Company alive and thriving with interest and influential backers overseas. Many complicated factors went into the decision to assist in the kidnapping of Pocahontas – from potential benefits and veiled and no so subtle threats. A “small Copper kettle” could not determine the decisions of a people that thrived in a setting with shifting enemies and neighbors. The Patawomecks would again ally with the English but earnest English encroachment in 1654, combined with disease and declaration of war on the peoples in 1666 led to the disappearance of the people in the English records.

The Patawomeck tribe applied for and eventually received official state recognition in 2010. Click here for their official website.

Note: What’s on the agenda for Friday, 05/20, 7pm? Grab your walking shoes, bottle of water, and join us and Prince William County Historic Preservationists as we give a free outside walking tour of the area! Click here to view our seasonal programs!

Mount Wharton, near Accomack, Virginia. HABS photo, Library of Congress ( HABS VA,1-____,3--1)

Survey notes: “Main house approx. 25 x 50 feet and has cellar. South end gable…of brick. This end in ruins July 1940. Scalloped shingles on main hose and [south] wing.” 

Later additions on early houses are quite common, and Eastern Shore houses often have “telescoping” series of added rooms, making the houses much longer than they are deep. Mount Wharton shows a good example of that trend. The addition likely represents one or more  18th or 19th century add-ons to the core 18th century building.  Note the exposed frame and rafters in the ruined section of the building and also the small outbuilding behind.

On today’s date in 1952 Gladys Davis married fellow A.R.E. member Al Turner. Gladys Davis Turner (1905-1986) served as Edgar Cayce’s stenographer and secretary beginning in 1923 and dedicated her life to protecting the archives of the Cayce work. She built her cottage, "Glad Niche," in the early 1950s. Mary Ellen Carter in “My Years with Edgar Cayce: The Personal Story of Gladys Davis Turner” writes that the cottage, “situated adjacent to the headquarters property, ...was already a lovely setting which Al enhanced by his labors as nurseryman and gardener. He taught the many children who came to visit how to respect and care for the natural environment - reminding Gladys of Edgar Cayce's own love of nature" (138-139).  These photographs reside in the archives of the Edgar Cayce Foundation and are open for research.

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