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Chesterfield County, Virginia

Chesterfield County Posted a List of Its Haunted Buildings. So We Checked It.

In 2023 Chesterfield County posted a list of its haunted historic buildings. The houses are real. The deaths behind two ghost stories are harder to find.

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The story

An old house across from the courthouse in Chesterfield, Virginia, used to host weddings. After the ceremonies, more than one guest remarked how much they had enjoyed the staff member in period clothes. It made the day feel authentic. There was only one problem, as the county tells it: there weren't any staff in costume at those weddings.

That story isn't from a ghost tour. It's from Chesterfield County itself. In October 2023 the county government posted it on its own website under the headline "Haunted Chesterfield." Chesterfield, the article says, "is something of a hotbed for paranormal activity." It names the houses and describes the ghosts. Two of the stories also lean on something that can be checked: a real family, a real house, and a death. So we went looking for the history under the ghosts.

Magnolia Grange

The wedding house is Magnolia Grange. It went up around 1822 or 1823, built by a man named William Winfree, and his family kept it until 1845. Today the county owns it as a house museum.

According to the county's article, visitors have reported a lady in Victorian dress on the second-floor landing. Many years ago, it says, a medium reported a man in a black suit in the downstairs parlor, brooding, "as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders." The article says this was believed to be the spirit of the builder, who was "found murdered while doing business in Richmond in the 1840s." It even spells his name with a Y on the end. The house's historic records, and the county's own article the year before, spell it Winfree.

Looking for a murder

A murder is the kind of thing that leaves paper behind, so we looked. The file that put Magnolia Grange on the National Register of Historic Places says who built it, when, and how long his family kept it. It says nothing about how William Winfree died. Neither does the state's historic register, the National Park Service, or the county's own history of the house.

We searched the Virginia newspapers from the 1840s that the Library of Congress has put online and found no murder of a William Winfree. What did turn up was a William P. Winfree representing Chesterfield in the state legislature in 1845, and still active in county politics in 1848. Was he the builder? A son? A relative? We don't know.

Old newspaper searches miss things, so this doesn't prove it never happened. It means we couldn't find it, and the house's own history doesn't mention it. That's a shaky thing to hang a ghost story on.

Castlewood and the Christmas tree

A short way down the same road is Castlewood. It was built in stages, from about 1817 to 1820, most likely for Parke Poindexter, the county's clerk of court from 1812 until his death in 1847.

The county's article calls the next story one of its "documented accounts." Poindexter's son, it says, "died of severe burns after his clothing caught fire from live candles on the family Christmas tree." Separately, the article describes reports of children's laughter and footsteps on the second floor in the evening, and a visit by a newspaper reporter and photographer whose developed film, it says, appeared to show a child's face in the glass of a display case.

The Christmas tree is what stopped us. In Virginia in the early 1800s a decorated tree in the house would have been a rarity. A German-born professor's tree in Williamsburg, at Christmas 1842, is often called the first in Virginia, and the custom spread in the years after. Parke Poindexter died in 1847. If a candle-lit tree stood in his house, it was most likely in those last few years, from about 1842 to 1847. That isn't impossible, but it's a narrow window.

We couldn't find the boy's name, a year, or any record of the fire. They aren't in the house's register file, which traces it from owner to owner, or in the newspapers we searched. Maybe a boy really did die that way in that house. If he did, his name didn't turn up.

The rest of the list

A group called RTL Paranormal, which works with the county's historical society, has investigated four of the listed buildings. One is the 1892 jail on the courthouse square, which held prisoners until 1962 and is now a small free museum. Nearby, old Trinity Church holds the historical society's library. The article doesn't say what anyone saw at either one.

Bellwood

Then there's Bellwood. Employees at the Defense Supply Center Richmond, on Route 1, have reported "various ghostly presences," the article says, and in 2017 a paranormal group spent a couple of days and nights in the old manor house there and made a documentary.

The house is real and old, built between about 1797 and 1804 by a planter named Richard Gregory. Its history is bigger than any ghost story on the list. During the Civil War the farm was home to Augustus Drewry. At the edge of his land, above the James, his artillery company began the fort that took his name, Drewry's Bluff. In May 1864 General Beauregard made the house his headquarters, and Jefferson Davis came there to meet him. The 1860 census lists Augustus Drewry as holding fifty people in slavery. That census didn't record their names. In 1941 the Army bought the property.

What the record shows, and what it doesn't

The houses are real: Magnolia Grange, Castlewood, the old jail, Bellwood. Their builders and dates mostly hold up, give or take a few years, a spelling, and a "probably." The ghosts are the county's stories, told by visitors, staff and paranormal groups, and a ghost can't be checked. The two deaths those stories lean on, a murder in Richmond and a fire at Christmas, didn't appear in any record we checked, in the houses' histories or in the newspapers we searched. That doesn't prove they never happened. It means the record, as far as we could follow it, doesn't say so.

Seeing it today

Magnolia Grange is a house museum, open most days, with tours; it is closed Sunday and Monday and charges admission. The old jail on the courthouse square is a free museum. Castlewood is open by appointment. Check current hours before you go. Bellwood sits inside a secure military base and is not open to visitors.

Go and see the houses, and know which parts are history and which parts are Halloween. Watch the film above.

Sources

Credits

Images in the film: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (Frances Benjamin Johnston, Castlewood, Chesterfield County, Virginia, 1935, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South; Drewry's Bluff, Virginia, 1865, Civil War Photographs; Historic American Landscapes Survey VA-27, Battle of Drewry's Bluff, National Park Service, 2007). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons: Bellwood Manor (DLA Aviation Public Affairs, 2019); "The Christmas Tree at Windsor Castle," Illustrated London News (December 1848); "The Christmas Tree," Godey's Lady's Book (December 1850). Magnolia Grange and the Historic Chesterfield County Jail at Courthouse Square: photos by James Shelton32 (2012), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, shown whole and unaltered except for resizing. The checklist, timeline and courthouse-area map were made for the film. Poster: Frances Benjamin Johnston's 1935 photograph of Castlewood (Library of Congress). Original score.