The story
In the summer of 2002, a long-haul trucker was driving a brand-new highway just outside Richmond, Virginia, when, by his account, he saw three figures near the road, carrying torches. He later described them as Native Americans in breechcloths, and his first thought was that he'd driven into some kind of protest. Then, he said, two more torch-bearers appeared in his headlights, and he sounded a warning blast on his horn.
At the toll plaza he reported what he'd seen, and according to later accounts an official report was filed. That report hasn't been found.
It might have stayed one strange night and one driver. But other people working that road had stories of their own, and according to the Henrico Citizen, state troopers responded to dozens of calls, though only one trooper reported seeing anything.
A brand-new road
The road is the Pocahontas Parkway, Virginia Route 895: a toll road of about 8.8 miles from Chippenham Parkway and I-95 in Chesterfield County, across the James River, to I-295 in Henrico. Its bridge is nearly a mile long and clears the shipping channel by about 145 feet, high enough for oceangoing ships. It opened in stages in 2002, starting that May, with all lanes open in September. Within months, people were talking about something else.
The stories from the night shift
A night engineer and several construction workers reportedly saw a rider on horseback watching from below the bridge. When they went to run him off, the story goes, the man and the horse were gone. At the toll plaza, attendants described something banging on the backs of the metal maintenance buildings, and some reported figures around the loading dock. One toll-taker, the story goes, lost her appetite for her midnight meal after seeing her soda can move from one spot on the table to another.
Chris Dovi covered the reports for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Ten years later he told the Henrico Citizen that descriptions varied, but most described a legless torso with an indistinct head. He recalled going through numerous incident reports about figures around the plaza. Toll workers told him they could sense a car passing through the booth, even feel the air move, with no car there. One trooper, Dovi recalled, jumped out of the road, afraid of being hit by a car he sensed coming but never saw.
Two nights, two versions
Dovi told the Henrico Citizen that he talked Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller into spending a night out there with him, from around midnight until three or four in the morning. He said they kept hearing drumming and whooping in the distance. His best guess was geese, though he noted there was no water near the sound. According to the Citizen, Geller told Dovi she was unnerved by the howls and wails she heard, which could not easily be explained away.
In 2022, Richmond Magazine heard another version from Jeff Caldwell, who handled public information for VDOT at the time. He said he went out with Dovi that August, to the toll plaza and the bridge. His verdict: "We spent all night on the bridge and didn't see a single ghost." Neither account mentions the other, so nobody can say whether this was one night remembered two ways or two different nights.
What lies under the road
As the stories spread, one explanation kept coming back: that the road had been built over a Native American burial ground.
The history under the road is real. VDOT commissioned archaeologists from William & Mary to study the road's path through Henrico's Varina district. Their June 2000 report, as Richmond Magazine summarized it, found artifacts thousands of years old and remnants of a small seventeenth-century Native American community, likely in the territory of the Powhatan and Arrohateck towns that Captain John Smith marked on his 1612 map.
But a community isn't a graveyard. The Henrico Citizen's 2012 retelling says the toll plaza sits on burial grounds; we haven't found archaeology that shows it, and Richmond Magazine's summary of the 2000 report doesn't mention burials at all.
Native people aren't characters in a ghost story, and their communities are still here. Spokespeople for the area's tribes said no campaign or protest against the parkway was ever organized. Deanna Beacham, who has worked on Virginia Indian affairs for the state and the National Park Service, told Dovi that a protest could have hurt the push for federal recognition, which six Virginia tribes, including the Nansemond, won in 2018. "We're still here as place names," she told him.
The legend takes over
By then the road had a nickname, the "Pocahaunted Parkway," and the story went international; Caldwell later remembered staying up in the middle of the night to be interviewed by the BBC. At home, people started showing up. Ghost hunters parked on the shoulders and overpasses. Ron Hadad, who by 2012 had lived less than a mile from the toll plaza for almost fifty years, remembered paranormal investigators lined up along Route 895 for a mile. State and county police had to work overtime to control the crowds. No ghost had to be real for that to be a real problem.
What the record shows
Documented: a new road opened, people who worked it said they saw and heard things, some reports reached the police, and the archaeology of a Native community in the road's path is real.
Reported, not proven: every sighting above is an account retold years later by local journalists, and the original 2002 Times-Dispatch stories couldn't be found to check them against. A separate rumor said VDOT had videotape of a rider at the plaza and that the tape had gone missing; no such footage has surfaced in anything we found. Skeptics called the whole thing a publicity stunt for a new toll road, which is unproven too. And there is no evidence of a burial ground under the toll plaza.
Maybe it was geese. Maybe it was traffic, carried across the river on a quiet night. Maybe it was a good story that got better each time it was told. Watch the film above for the whole thing.
Seeing it today
The operator said in 2022 that more than six million vehicles a year use the parkway. The way to see it is the way they do: drive it. Please don't stop on the parkway, its shoulders or its overpasses.
Sources
- Henrico Citizen, "Ghosts roamed Varina parkway," Patty Kruszewski, Nov. 16, 2012 (archived copy)
- Richmond Magazine, "Highway to the Sky," Harry Kollatz Jr., Nov. 18, 2022
- FHWA project profile, Pocahontas Parkway
- Roads & Bridges, "Driving on blades," May 16, 2003
- Roads to the Future, Route 895 opening, September 2002
- Public Law 115-121, federal recognition of six Virginia tribes, approved Jan. 29, 2018
- Capt. John Smith, Virginia (1612; 1624 printing), Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
Credits
Poster and night scenes of the bridge and toll plaza: drawn for the film and labelled as dramatized recreations. Virginia Route 895 shield: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Route 895 under construction over I-95 (2001) and three Varina views (2007): Taber Andrew Bain, CC BY 2.0. The 895 ramps at I-95 (2015): Payton Chung, CC BY 2.0. A ship on the James near Dutch Gap (2010): John Meckley, CC BY 2.0. The James from Drewry's Bluff (2020): National Park Service, public domain. The James downstream from Drewry's Bluff (2013): Ron Cogswell, CC BY 2.0. Wilton, 1933: Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress. Waterfowl at sunset: Tom Fisk, Pexels. Sounds: kyles and Kinoton (Freesound), CC0. Maps and diagrams: drawn for the film. Original score.