Unfinished Business

Join Dr. Steffey for a special edition of Stratford Mail. In this final episode of Season 1, Hallowtide is upon us, and as the veil between the worlds grows thin, our minds turn to the 'hereafter,' and perhaps to the departed who haunt our here and now. What's the connection between historic sites like Stratford and ghosts? Which member of the Lee family compiled two books of ghost lore? What does ghost lore have to do with women's suffrage? Listen now to find out, and to hear of a haunting from old Virginia.  

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Transcript

Stratford Mail Special Edition 

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As the veil between the worlds grows thin, which is what the ancient festival of Samhain commemorates and newer festivals of Hallowtide and Halloween dimly remember, our minds attune to what Victorian author Catherine Crowe called the night-side of nature, a category of phenomena that included ghosts and hauntings. Around this time every year many historic sites offer ghosts tours, spirit walks, or some other form of haunted attraction. In his 1915 book Historic Virginia Homes and Churches, Robert Lancaster observed that No old Virginia mansion is quite complete without a ghost. Now I don’t think Lancaster wanted us to study that claim too closely. Maybe it’s good old-fashioned embroidery, like saying No old Virginia mansion is quite complete without cicadas screaming in the shimmering heat, or a hound dog or three dozing beneath a hazy sky. Still I want to take Lancaster more seriously than maybe he meant it and ask: why are historic Virginia homes incomplete without ghosts and ghostlore? 

Let’s take a roundabout way to an answer. I’ll start by telling you the first true story of a haunted house. What do I mean ‘true’? I just mean that it wasn’t circulated as fiction, but rather as a report of something that happened. And it happened more than 2000 years ago, and was later reported in the correspondence of a 1st century Roman intellectual named Pliny. The story goes that a Stoic philosopher named Athenodorus is in the market for lodging in Athens. A large, infamous house sits derelict and available as a cheap rental, but it’s suspiciously cheap, and Athenodorus shakes the lowdown on the house out of the rental agent, who confesses that the house is haunted. But Athenodorus is a philosopher, and undeterred by superstition, so he rents the house, makes himself comfortable, and settles in that first night for an evening of reading and writing. Now let’s listen to Pliny: The first part of the night passed in entire silence, as usual; at length a clanking of iron and rattling of chains was heard: however, he neither lifted up his eyes nor laid down his pen, but, in order to keep calm and collected, tried to pass the sounds off to himself as something else. The noise increased and advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up, saw, and recognized the ghost exactly as it had been described to him: it stood before him, beckoning with the finger, like a person who calls another. Athenodorus in reply made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers; the ghost then rattled its chains over the head of the philosopher, who looked up upon this, and seeing it beckoning as before, immediately arose, and, light in hand, followed it. Athenodorus follows the ghost until it vanishes, marking the spot at which it vanishes. And the next day he contacts the authorities, asking them to excavate that spot, which they do.The story continues: and the skeleton of a man in chains was found there; for the body, having lain a considerable time in the ground, was putrefied and mouldered away from the fetters. The bones, being collected together, were publicly buried, and thus after the ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was haunted no more. 

If you’ve ever heard a ghost story, that should have felt familiar, and precisely because it expresses themes and motifs common to ghost stories, including chain rattling which carries with it the connotation of compulsion to linger. The central theme of our ancient ghost story is that this man was dead too soon, likely murdered, and his remains were denied proper burial. His spirit was therefore restless. Culturally we desire the dead to rest in peace; we say it, we write it, we intend it: rest in peace. Many of the ghost stories we tell are about when this doesn’t happen, about when the living and the dead have unfinished business with one another, whether that unfinished business is an improper burial or a denial of justice or a difficult, underappreciated, and unacknowledged history. To that extent ghost stories are folk portals to knowledge of the past. They assert, This place has a significant past, and they demand that we ask: What happened here?  And so we ask, and thus set foot on the road to discovering, perhaps telling, true stories behind the hauntings. This is precisely what happened to Athenodorus; the ghost rattled his chains until Athenodorus consented to pay attention. Their restlessness makes us restless, facing us toward history in spaces and times abutting our own. The endgame isn’t exorcism or ghost-busting, it’s attention. 

The great granddaughter of French-American industrialist and founder of the du Pont dynasty of Delaware, Marguerite Lamott duPont married into the Lee family of Virginia. In addition to her 1936 literary biography of Arthur Lee of Stratford, Marguerite duPont Lee compiled and published two books of ghostlore: Virginia Ghosts in 1930 and Virginia Ghosts and Others in 1932. Her preoccupation with ghosts wasn’t all that unusual. Marguerite was born in the heyday of Spiritualism, a popular religion movement of 19th century America marked by the view that the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living, often through an intermediary called a ‘medium,’ who communed with the dead in a trance state at an organized event called a séance. Only 4 years before Marguerite was born the first transatlantic telegraph cable connected the continents, and this ability to create fast, invisible communication across vast distances reinforced hopes for communicating across the ultimate threshold of death. By 1890 the census (which survives in fragmentary form) reported 45k spiritualists across 40 states and territories. Marguerite was an avowed Spiritualist with a special interest in ghost photography, the attempt to capture the invisible around us on film or photographic plates, a practice defended against debunkers by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of savant detective Sherlock Holmes. On September 29th, 1915, The Pittsburgh Press paraphrased research printed in the journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, the nation’s first society dedicated to the study of parapsychology and paranormal phenomena. The newspaper reported that a woman apparently possessed of an unexplainable mediumistic power obtained curious results while operating an ordinary kodak camera. That woman was Marguerite duPont Lee, who in attempting to take a photograph of a portrait of herself, discovered her photos included instead a portrait of a man she’d known, or a pencil sketch of Mark Twain, or an empty chair. Where some saw defects of a technology still in its infancy, or tricks played by charlatans on the credulous, others like Sir Arthur and Marguerite saw in ghost photography apparitions and residues of the departed past, proof of the dead among the living. 

The old stereotype of women as ‘passive’ meant they were seen as naturally suited to mediumship, a kind of receptivity, and many women discovered empowerment and employment as mediums. This may be why Spiritualism and progressive politics of the 19th and early 20th  centuries flocked together. In the 1850s a Spiritualist named Mary Davis proclaimed: “Spiritualism has inaugurated the era of women.” And rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself observed that “the only religious sect in the world … that has recognized the equality of women is the Spiritualists.” It should come as little surprise then that Marguerite was not only passionate about ghosts, but also about the women’s suffrage movement, to which she was a significant donor.  And she marched in the great Women’s Suffrage Procession on March 3rd, 1913 in Washington, DC, the first civil rights march in our capital. Other activist marches would follow in the footsteps of suffragists like Marguerite. Her march put significant pressure on Congress to reconsider a federal women’s suffrage amendment, culminating in 1919 and 1920 with the passage and ratification of the 19th amendment. Her passion for women’s rights was on view in an opinion she wrote to the editor of the Baltimore Sun in the face of stark opposition to making the University of Virginia coed: The real and forceful antagonism to the University of Virginia as a coeducational institution is due to the degeneracy of the male Virginia intellect and soul (Baltimore Sun, 27 February 1930). 

In her 1928 DC tell-all, painter Marietta Andrews writes that a chorus of agreement would meet the suggestion that Marguerite duPont Lee was the most willful woman in Washington (My Studio Window). Andrews observes that Marguerite assimilated gunpowder [a duPont commodity] with her mother’s milk, and consequently From early childhood she registered superlative willfulness. Not always a reprehensible quality. Not always indeed given Marguerite’s long and aggressive record of private and public philanthropy among the poor in DC and elsewhere. As confirmation of her early tendency in later life, Andrews writes that She claims to have as much right to criticise a Bishop as an ashman, the worker who clears the hearth of last night’s fires. Her indifference to social position also translated in later life to indifference to the vagaries of high society and fashion, though she confessed to wearing long white gloves in her unregenerate years.       

The 1966 edition of Marguerite’s Virginia Ghosts contains descriptions and stories from more than one hundred historic sites in Virginia, including vintage photographs of those sites and, in a few cases, of the deceased believed to haunt them. Marguerite’s collection is a product of its time, an archive of ghostlore more nostalgic for 18th century gentility than reflective about the system of inequality that made it possible. Later generations will nuance and supplement this ghostlore and mainstream history to tell fuller, more complex narratives about the American past. The stories Marguerite collects highlight the availability right now of significant history at sites that make a claim to our care and protection. The stories are not scary, but wistful and inviting. Marguerite tells no tale of Stratford Hall, perhaps because Stratford changed hands in 1929 (the year before Marguerite published Virginia Ghosts) and was still in the process of being restored when Virginia Ghosts and Others appeared in 1932. This isn’t to say that Stratford has no ghostlore; only that circumstances prevented its inclusion, but that wasn’t the case at nearby Mt. Airy plantation, traditional home of the Tayloe family. Francis Lightfoot Lee of Stratford (and later Menokin) married his 2nd cousin Rebecca Tayloe, daughter of Colonel John Tayloe who established Mt. Airy a mere 19 miles from Stratford. Frank and Becky are buried in the Tayloe Family Cemetery on the grounds of Mt. Airy. Marguerite relates this tale of haunted Mt. Airy: 

Close to the water’s edge in Richmond County … may still be found traces of the foundations of “Old Place Field,” the early home of Col. John Tayloe.

Colonel Tayloe in 1758 built upon the same extensive plantation the splendid mansion called then, as now, Mt. Airy. Above the Rappahannock, and far beyond its reach, framed in a setting of sunny fields and shady forests of oak and cedar, it is the custodian of a superb collection of portraits and priceless heirlooms. Furniture, silver and china, have been treasured at Mt. Airy from generation to generation. 

Built of native brown stone and of the white sandstone quarried on Aquia Creek, this imposing edifice is adorned by curved corridors extending to two-storied wings placed far from the dwelling. One of these additions was, before the Revolution, the Master’s office, schoolroom, and guesthouse, and in it today is the haunted room where the ghost of a woman is still seen from time to time …

In 1850 … a young lady–Miss Mary Leiper–arrived one Friday morning, having been engaged to teach the children of the household. The family were leaving in a few hours to be absent over the week-end, and Mrs. Tayloe remarked to the newcomer, as she was shown her room on the ground floor, that if she felt at all timid, there was an upstairs room. 

That night Miss Leiper awoke during the night and was surprised to see an old woman, with white hair, in the room. She was dressed in an old-fashioned costume and coming towards the bed, with her hands extended as though to push the curtains apart, although they were already open.

Gazing at the figure for a moment, believing it must be a dream, she closed her eyes, then opened them again. There stood the woman! “This is very strange,” Miss Leiper thought, “no one could get into this house.” 

Continuing to watch the apparition a few minutes, it gradually drifted into a corner of the room and disappeared, but the sound of sobbing and moaning could be heard for some time. 

Here is an invitation to look again, to ask what happened here? The mystery orients us toward the history of that place and encourages us to discover its untold stories. Who might she have been? What might her grief have been about? Apparently Miss Leiper experienced the same haunting the next two nights, and when the family returned to Mt. Airy, Mrs. Tayloe, according to Marguerite, exclaimed: “Mercy! You don’t mean to tell me you slept in that room? Why, it’s haunted!”  Marguerite duPont Lee died on Halloween, October 31st, 1936–she was 73 years old, and, if fate is kind, she rests in peace in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC. She was survived by two sons, one of whom, Cazenove Gardner Lee, Jr., was a founder of the Society of the Lees of Virginia and was active in efforts to buy and restore Stratford Hall, chiefly through his wife Dorothy Vandergrift Lee, one of the original directors of the Foundation (now Association) that purchased and restored Stratford Hall.   

All this takes us back to our question: why are historic Virginia homes incomplete without ghosts? Very simply, to be haunted by the dead would seem to belong to the human condition. If we believe, if we do not believe, images of the departed nevertheless inhabit our dreams, our landscapes, and places we call home. In Virginia, where so many homes reach so far into the distant past, the dead crowd us, demanding to be remembered properly, to be remembered for their struggles, simply to be remembered. Ghosts are our reminders, whether you take them to be symbolic or actual, that our histories are incomplete. There is more work to do. As for the night-side of Stratford, well, that’s a tale for another season. 

From Stratford Hall Historic Preserve in Westmoreland County, Virginia, I’m Director of Research, Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey. Thank you for listening, and join me again in late December when Stratford Mail returns for its second season. Meantime, please share Stratford Mail with everyone you know, and help us to elevate this incredibly significant historic site to the prominence it deserves.  

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Marguerite duPont Lee image courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library

Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay and DeadSounds.com
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2023