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Hawes House, 506 East Leigh Street, Richmond, Virginia

The Ghost Whose House Was Demolished

Author Marion Harland wrote that a little gray lady haunted her family's Leigh Street house in Richmond, and that a skeleton was later found under its window.

Film No. 0057:05Out

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The story

One winter night in the early 1850s, a young woman in Richmond, Virginia, said goodnight to her parents and stepped into the hall with a lamp in her hand. In its light, she wrote, she saw a small woman in gray come out of the bedroom door across the hall, glide along the wall, and vanish at a door that was shut. She had heard that door's latch click behind her a few minutes earlier. It never opened.

Her name was Mary Virginia Hawes. As Marion Harland she became a best-selling author, and she called this her family's true ghost story. Its strangest part came years later. After the family sold the house, she wrote, workmen altering it found the skeleton of a small woman in the front yard, right under the drawing-room window.

The house is gone now. The story isn't, and some of it can still be checked.

The house on Leigh Street

The house stood on Leigh Street, a short walk from the Virginia Capitol: a big, square brick house with wide halls and doors made of wooden slats. Mary Virginia's grandmother bought it in the summer of 1851 for her only child, Samuel Hawes, Mary Virginia's father. It was a full house, with parents, a grandmother, sisters and brothers. Mary Virginia told its story in her autobiography in 1910, more than fifty years later.

The little gray lady

In her telling, an old friend had come by that evening, and they'd spent two hours playing piano and flute and talking by the fire. Her father, winding his watch, asked about the new piece she'd been playing, and she went back into the hall humming it. That's when she saw the figure.

She went straight back in to her parents, set down the lamp she could barely hold, and said, as she recorded it: "I have seen a ghost!" Her father took the lamp and searched the whole house and found nobody. The next morning he told her to keep it to herself.

She wasn't the only one. About a month later, on a wet night, her mother came in glancing behind her: she'd seen the same small figure, all in gray, with something white wrapped around its head. A sister heard high-heeled footsteps following her down the stairs, with nobody there. One moonlit night a younger sister and a young cousin watched a white figure come slowly down the staircase, and when the front door opened and the brothers walked in, the figure was gone. As that sister put it: "It just was not!"

Her father's secret

The next morning her father called her, her mother and her sister together and told them something he'd kept to himself for more than a year. As she remembered it, he said that one windy November night, not long after they moved in, he felt small hands touch his feet, then his knees, then his chest, and felt someone looking into his face. He opened his eyes and nobody was there. It had happened, he said, fifty times or more.

He didn't try to explain it. In her telling, he's the one who called the visitor the little gray lady: her hands were light, he said, and they petted rather than struck. But if word got out, he warned, no one would buy the house for fifty years. They all promised to keep quiet, and they did.

Under the window

Her father died soon after the Civil War, and years later her mother sold the house. It became St. Paul's Church Home, an Episcopal orphanage for girls; a Richmond newspaper in 1878 called it "the cheerful house on Leigh street," home to thirty orphans.

That's when, she wrote, the workmen came. Altering the house for its new use, they dug about four feet down in the front yard, less than six feet from the wall, directly under the drawing-room window, and found the skeleton of a small woman. There was no sign of a coffin. Under the head was a high, richly carved tortoiseshell comb. Years later, she said, a neighbor's grandson told her he'd run to the hole as a boy and watched the workmen uncover the whole skeleton, and he remembered the comb. She said the newspapers covered the discovery and then let it drop as an unexplained mystery.

What can be checked, and what can't

If workmen dug up a skeleton in a Richmond front yard, someone might have written it down. So we went through the digitized Richmond newspapers in the Library of Congress's archive from 1874 through 1878, searched them for the word "skeleton," and read every passage where it turned up. We found a regiment "reduced to a skeleton" and bones turning up in other towns and counties, but no skeleton on Leigh Street, at the Church Home, or with a comb.

That doesn't mean it didn't happen. Old scans are full of misread words, a report might have said "bones," it might have happened in another year, and we haven't been through every Richmond paper from back then. For now, though, the skeleton rests on one person's word: Harland's, published more than thirty years later. The sightings, the father's account and the dig are all her account. And even if it happened exactly as she said, a grave isn't a ghost. There would still be no name, and no way of knowing how that woman came to be there.

What the records do confirm is the house and its later life. By the 1930s the story was in a book of Virginia ghost stories, and when the Historic American Buildings Survey measured and photographed the house in the 1930s, its notes included one line: that book called the house famous for its ghost, the Little Gray Lady. By then the house belonged to the Salvation Army, which by its own account ran a home there from 1919 until 1966. In the late 1960s it was torn down for Richmond's downtown redevelopment, after Interstate 95 had already cut through the neighborhood.

Seeing it today

There is nothing left to see. The spot is now part of the block where the Altria research center meets Leigh Street: no house, no front yard, no window.

Long before anyone dug in that yard, her father had said all he could. As she remembered his words: "I don't account for it at all." Watch the film above for the whole story.

Sources

Credits

Poster: the Hawes House, photographed c. 1936 for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS VA-115), Library of Congress; the survey's measured drawings, data pages and index card also appear in the film. Marion Harland's Autobiography (1910), cover, title page and pages: University of California Libraries via Internet Archive, public domain. Portraits of Marion Harland (c. 1903 and 1893): public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. F. W. Beers, Illustrated Atlas of the City of Richmond (1876/77) and Sanborn insurance maps (1905, 1925): Library of Congress. Richmond, 1969: Library of Virginia, Virginia Governor's Negative Collection, no known copyright restrictions. 408 East Clay Street, c. 1978: John G. Zehmer, VCU Libraries, CC BY 2.0. Aerial imagery, 2024: USGS The National Map / USDA, public domain. Downtown Richmond at night, 2007: ChrisDag, CC BY 2.0. Recreations: drawn for the film. Original score.