A Virginia Vamp
To mix it up this week I wanted to go the cryptid route, and I wanted to try to stick close to home. I mentioned this to my partner, and he quickly asked if I'd ever heard the legend of the Richmond Vampire. I hadn't, but naturally I wanted to know EVERYTHING, so I'm bringing you along on this lore-learning journey.
The first thing to know is that Richmond has a long and storied history, dating back to colonial times (and obviously, for much, much longer than that as home to the Powhatan Nation. It has been an incorporated city since 1742, and since the mid 1800s, it became an important railroad hub due to it's centralized location, access to sea ports, and thriving industry.
As most of us know, railroads bring a lot of paranormal baggage with them- both in tall tales and in theoretical science. Beyond the idea that they represent a liminal place, a crossroads, the truth is many people died during construction of the railroads, and many have died on and around the tracks in the many decades since.
Local stories of the spirits of those poor souls being doomed to ride the rails for eternity abound, and Richmond has no shortage of those legends. Take for example, the true story of the collapse of the Church Hill Tunnel.
Photo from: richmondfamilymagazine.com
The Church Hill Tunnel was built in the late 1800s for the C&O Railway, as part of an effort to connect Richmond to the Virginia Peninsula, more specifically Newport News. It was approximately 4,000 feet long, beginning east of 18th Street in the Shockoe Bottom area of Richmond, and ending near 31st street by Libby Hill Park.
Due to the nature of the landscape in the area, building the tunnel was more trouble than expected, and because of the way the clay soil changed with fluctuations in rainfall and groundwater, there have been complications- i.e. cave-ins and sinkholes- ever since construction began.
In the 1890s, about a decade after the tunnel was constructed, the C&O built an elevated viaduct (a fancy word for a bridge, basically) to connect the R&A Railroad tracks coming from the west, and the C&O tracks headed east, and this not only allowed train traffic to divert around the downtown/state capitol area, but also helped them to avoid using the Church Hill Tunnel. (This also created the famous Richmond Triple Crossing, which we'll talk about another time!)
With railroad traffic taking an alternate route, and the tunnel having known safety concerns, it ended up falling into near abandonment for two decades, until C&O wanted to restore it for use.
On October 2, 1925, a work train with over two hundred workers were performing repairs when a boiler ruptured and the tunnel collapsed near the western end. Most of those workers were able to crawl out and escape through the eastern end of the tunnel, but engineer Thomas Joseph Mason and two laborers, both black men, named Richard Lewis and H. Smith, didn't make it out. The body of Thomas Mason was removed from the rubble on October 10, but Lewis and Smith were never found.
One more man died in that incident, a Benjamin F. Mosby, who was the fireman on the crew. He experienced severe burns due to the boiler, and while he made it out of the tunnel, he passed away several hours later at Grace Hospital.
In the spring, the VSCC (Virginia State Corporation Commission) ordered that the tunnel be sealed due to safety reasons. The train, and the unrecovered bodies of Lewis and Smith, were entombed inside.
Photo from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Hill_Tunnel
Unfortunately, while the railroad workers' story ends with the tunnel being sealed, a darker story may have begun as construction first started on the tunnel all the way back in the 1870s.
As legend has it, when the digging began under Church Hill, an "ancient evil" stirred awake, causing havoc during the creation of the tunnel, and eventually, you guessed it, causing the Church Hill Tunnel to collapse in 1925.
As rescue teams dug in to find any survivors, the encountered "an unearthly, blood-covered creature with jagged teeth and skin hanging from its muscular body, crouching over one of the victims." They say that as it raced away, a group of men pursued it, and they saw it run toward the James River and into the Hollywood Cemetery, where it vanished into the hillside mausoleum of W. W. Pool.
W. W. Pool, whose tomb reads 1913, was said to have been exiled from England in the 1800s once it was discovered that he was a vampire. His tomb has elements from both Masonic and Egyptian architecture and of course the letter "W" does remind one of vampires' fangs.
Photo from: findagrave.com
There was, however, no other evidence to support the idea that Pool was a vampire. In fact, he was born in Mississippi, not Britain, and he worked in a tobacco factory here in Richmond before becoming a bookkeeper. In 1922, at age 80, he passed away and was buried in his family tomb, with his wife who passed away in 1913. Sadly, the vampire lore led to extensive vandalism of their mausoleum, and their bodies had to be relocated.
So if the story surrounding Pool was nothing more than a legend, what do we make of this mysterious evil creature who disappeared into his tomb? Well, there's an explanation for that too, I'm sorry to say. A local folklore researcher named Gregory Maitland believes that the "creature" was probably Benjamin Mosby, the scalded railroad fireman who escaped the tunnel but later passed away. He believes the account of broken/jagged teeth and skin hanging from the body are all explained by the state Mosby would have been in after he emerged. Not to mention, he'd likely have been in severe shock, and may have exhibited strange behavior.
That being said, it's not truly an open and shut case. In fact, there aren't any records supporting those specific details about Mosby's body, with his obituary only mentioning that he "was fatally scalded" in the tunnel incident.
So, paranormal pals and spooky siblings... what do YOU think? Tell me in the comments below or on social media- do you believe in the Richmond Vampire? Do you think it was just poor Benjamin Mosby? I want to hear your thoughts.
Until then, don't forget to K.I.S.S.!
Keep It Spooky, Sis!
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*Sources used:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Hill_Tunnel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Vampire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond,_Virginia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wortham_Pool
Personal conversations & ghost stories from pals in the Richmond area
