The story
On the Chesapeake Bay, in Mathews County, Virginia, there's a little stand of pines called Old House Woods. People there say that sometimes a ship comes in. Not on the water. Over the trees.
One tugboat captain, Davey Callis, tells it the way his grandfather heard it, from an old man who said he had been down in Old House Woods the night before. In that telling a sailing ship appears with a rope ladder over the side, and down the ladder come skeleton sailors carrying shovels. They are digging, the story goes, for Lord Dunmore's treasure.
Here's the remarkable part. Lord Dunmore was real. And one summer he really did bring nearly a hundred ships to the place that is now Mathews County. So here is the ghost story first, told the way people tell it, and then what really happened that summer.
The tellings
Mathews is a small county on the Bay, a place of creeks and watermen. Old House Woods sits near the water, close to Haven Beach, and covers about fifty acres of pine. The story never gets told the same way twice.
A waterman named Roscoe Rowe always heard it was pirates, who came ashore in a storm, buried their treasure, and never got back to it. In what he heard, a doctor going out at night to visit a child saw a ghost there with no head. They were out there, Rowe said, looking for that treasure. Another waterman, Kevin Godsey, says the treasure-hunting ghosts steal people's horses and ride them down the road at night. Of those three tellings, only the tugboat captain's has a ship in it.
1926
How old is the haunting? The oldest account with a date on it is a newspaper story from 1926. That year a Baltimore newspaper ran a story about the woods, and by the local paper's account it caused a lot of excitement. In it, a merchant from Mathews Court House named Jesse Hudgins, who lived near the woods, said he had seen the ghosts about a dozen times. Once, when he was young, he was driving a horse and buggy at night to fetch a doctor for a neighbour. His horse, he said, usually afraid of nothing, cowered and trembled.
That article has come down to us through the local paper, the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal. The 1926 page itself hasn't been found and read yet, so everything about it here is the Gazette-Journal's report.
The governor
In at least one telling, the treasure has an owner: Lord Dunmore. John Murray, Lord Dunmore, was the last royal governor of Virginia. By 1775 the colony was turning against the king, and against him. That June, in the early hours of the morning, Dunmore and his family left the governor's palace in Williamsburg and went aboard a British warship. From then on he fought for the king's side in Virginia from the water.
That November he made a promise. Enslaved people and servants held by rebels, who would take up arms for the king, would be free. Hundreds came. By December Dunmore had a unit of Black soldiers he called the Ethiopian Regiment.
Gwynn's Island
In late May 1776, Dunmore's fleet, close to a hundred ships, came up the Bay and anchored off Gwynn's Island, in what is now Mathews County (in 1776 it was part of Gloucester County). His people came ashore and built houses, ovens and fortifications. But sickness had been moving through the fleet for months, smallpox among it. On the island, some days, six or more people died. Many of the sick were the people who had come to Dunmore for their freedom.
On the morning of July 9, 1776, Virginia troops opened fire from the mainland. General Andrew Lewis put the match to the first cannon himself. The shot went straight through the hull of the governor's own ship, the Dunmore, and she was hit again and again before she cut her anchor cables and pulled away. According to a man from the fleet who was captured afterward, one ball tore into her stern; the splinters wounded Dunmore in the legs, and his china was smashed around him. All along the shore, ships slipped their cables in confusion.
What they found
The next day Virginia's soldiers crossed to the island and found the camp abandoned. As the fleet left, it burned some of its own ships that had run aground.
One of the men who crossed over wrote an account that ran in the Virginia Gazette. He described bodies all the way from the fleet's battery to Cherry Point, about two miles, without a shovelful of earth on them. Some people were still alive. Some had crawled to the water's edge. He counted a hundred and thirty graves himself, "or rather holes," he wrote, "loosely covered over with earth." By his reckoning the fleet had lost close to five hundred people since it arrived. Historians say many of them were people who had escaped slavery to reach Dunmore.
What the record shows, and what it doesn't
So what's buried in Old House Woods? No record of any treasure turned up, and nothing ties the summer of 1776 to those woods. The two places are both in today's Mathews County, and that is as far as the record goes.
Maybe the story remembers that summer. Maybe it just borrowed a famous name. The oldest account of the haunting that can be dated is from 1926, and it isn't known whether it mentioned Dunmore at all. The earliest telling found that uses his name is a tugboat captain's memory, written down in 2014.
The skeleton sailors with their shovels are folklore, a story passed from teller to teller. The people who died on Gwynn's Island were real, and many of them never got even a shovelful of earth.
Seeing it today
Old House Woods is a story place, and it isn't a site to go looking for. The film doesn't show a way into it, and you shouldn't go hunting for it on private land.
Here's one way the story has travelled: an old man told it, a grandfather retold it, and a tugboat captain in Mathews remembered it and passed it on. Somebody tells you, on a night like this. Now you've heard it, and you can watch the film above.
Sources
- Fairfield Foundation, "Mathews County Oral History and Folklore: Old House Woods and More!" (Oct. 22, 2014)
- Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, "Old House Woods has fascinated ghost watchers for decades" (Elsa Verbyla, Oct. 26, 2022)
- Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, "Ghost tales from Old House Woods continue to generate interest" (Jan. 7, 2015)
- Patrick H. Hannum, "The Battle of Gwynn's Island," Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities)
- Encyclopedia Virginia, "Lord Dunmore's Proclamation"
- Colonial Williamsburg, "Dunmore's Flight and the Seizure of the Governor's Palace"
- Purdie's Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, July 12 and July 19, 1776 (Library of Congress, Chronicling America)
- Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 5 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), pp. 1022–23, 1147–51
- Mathews Memorial Library, "Battle of Cricket Hill"
Credits
Images in the film: Library of Congress (Thomas Jefferson, Map of Action at Gwyn's Island, 1776, Thomas Jefferson Papers; Map of the Maritime Parts of Virginia, 1776, Geography and Map Division; Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, 1775, Rare Book and Special Collections Division; Purdie's Virginia Gazette, July 19, 1776, Chronicling America; Howard R. Hollem, the Governor's Palace, Williamsburg, 1943, FSA/OWI). U.S. Geological Survey: Mathews quadrangle, 1917 (Historical Topographic Map Collection); USDA / USGS The National Map: Orthoimagery (public domain). Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 5 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970; public domain). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons: Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, 1765 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery); Dominic Serres, English Ships Coming to Anchor in a Fresh Breeze; Dominic Serres, Barrington's squadron at anchor, St. Lucia, 1778 (Royal Museums Greenwich); Thomas Mitchell after Dominic Serres, Forcing a Passage of the Hudson, 1776 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich); The Bodleian Plate, about 1740 (College of William & Mary / Cornell University Library); Fort Cricket Hill and Main Street, Mathews Court House (photos: Nyttend, 2017). CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons: Bavon Beach, Mathews County, two photos (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region, 2011); Bethel Beach Natural Area Preserve (John Gresham / Virginia State Parks, 2015). The ink illustrations, the chain of tellers, the TOLD / RECORDED card and the map markers were made for the film and are labelled as illustrations on screen. Poster: an ink illustration of the ship as the story tells it, made for the film. Original score.