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Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia

The Richmond Vampire Is Younger Than You Think

Richmond's vampire legend begins with the 1925 Church Hill Tunnel collapse. The earliest written version of that story we could find is from 2001.

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The story

Richmond has a vampire legend. In 1925, the story goes, a railroad tunnel caved in under Church Hill, and something came stumbling out of it. It ran across the city to Hollywood Cemetery and disappeared into a tomb. The man whose name is over that tomb door had been dead for more than three years, which, for a vampire, isn't much of a problem.

That is the legend, and it is folklore. The real question is when it was written down. We went looking for it in 1925, and we couldn't find it.

The tunnel part is real

On October 2, 1925, a little after three in the afternoon, part of the Church Hill Tunnel came down on a work train, with about two hundred men inside. Most of them got out. The engineer, Thomas Mason, died in the cab. His fireman, Benjamin Mosby, made it out, badly burned by the steam, and died that night at Grace Hospital. Two laborers, Richard Lewis and H. Smith, were never found. The locomotive is still down there.

The newspapers followed the disaster for days, and none of the 1925 coverage we've been able to read says anything about a creature. So where did the vampire come from? Start with the tomb.

The man on the door

The name over the door is W. W. Pool. The newspapers of his day spelled it both ways, "Pool" and "Poole."

Pool died of pneumonia on Sunday evening, February 26, 1922, more than three years before the tunnel came down. He lived in Woodland Heights, south of the James. He had been a church steward, and a Mason for decades. That same night, a few hours later, his lifelong friend Samuel Owens died too. Two days later the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported both funerals in a single story, under the headline "Two Veteran Masons Will Be Buried Today."

Pool was buried at Hollywood Cemetery, in the family vault where his wife, Alice, had been laid to rest in 1913. That vault is where the stories start.

It sits near the cemetery's entrance, with his name over the door and a single date: 1913. No birth year, no death year. A carved lamb on top, and, once, a verse from Isaiah about the wolf living with the lamb. Richmond Magazine's Harry Kollatz has suggested that the stark lettering, on a vault with a faintly Egyptian look, helped invite the stories.

The paper trail

Nobody knows for sure when the vampire talk began. Richmond Magazine has suggested it caught on with college students in the late 1950s and '60s.

The earliest version in print we could find is from April 1976, in VCU's student newspaper, the Commonwealth Times. A writer touring Hollywood's graves noted that Pool was "alleged to be a vampire," that a cult seemed to have grown up around him, and that he'd heard the cemetery had tightened security on Halloween. There's no tunnel in it. No 1925. No creature.

When Richmond Magazine told the story in 1993, there was still no tunnel. Even in the spring of 2001, people writing in to a Virginia ghost-hunting website told it the same way: a vampire in the vault, candles around the grave, rumors of chanting on Halloween.

By late September 2001, the same website had posted something new. A Richmond ghost group laid out the full legend: the creature from the collapsed tunnel, the chase across town, and the vault marked "W. W. Poole." To picture that chase, Church Hill is on the east side of downtown. Hollywood Cemetery is on the other side, to the west, up on the hills over the James.

That page, three-quarters of a century after the collapse, is the earliest written version of the tunnel story we could find. Its writers said the descriptions came from people who had been alive in 1925, though not at the scene. They also noted that no news report of the creature had ever been found.

The people who doubted their own story

Then they did something you might not expect. They argued against the monster. In the chaos of a collapse, they asked, would anyone really have chased something across the city? And if anything that strange had happened, why didn't a single newspaper report it?

They offered a theory instead: that the story had grown, in the telling and retelling, out of a real man, the fireman who escaped the tunnel badly hurt. What's documented about Benjamin Mosby is what the 1925 papers reported: he got out burned by the steam and died that night at Grace Hospital. The rest is their theory, and there is no way to prove it. They closed by declining to accuse Pool of anything, calling him, as far as they could tell, an innocent man.

It didn't matter. Ghost tours picked up the tunnel version. Then it was on local TV, and all over the internet. With every telling it changed: a well-dressed man bending over a body, a figure running for the river, and an older rumor that Pool had been run out of England. One of the people behind a Richmond ghost tour has called it a game of telephone.

What the record shows

  • W. W. Pool died in February 1922, more than three and a half years before the collapse.
  • None of the 1925 coverage we've read mentions a creature, though we haven't read every Richmond paper from that October.
  • The tomb legend was in print by 1976. The tunnel chapter is far newer. These are the earliest dates we found, not proven firsts.
  • Two deaths in the collapse are confirmed. Lewis and Smith are presumed dead, and the exact toll is uncertain.

Visiting the vault

Underneath it all are two real men: a church steward who died just hours before his lifelong friend, and a railroad fireman who was at work one October afternoon and didn't come home. Both were buried at Hollywood Cemetery.

Pool's vault has paid for the legend. Richmond Magazine reported that in the 1980s someone forced its iron door. It's still a grave, in a working cemetery. Hollywood is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., or 8 to 6 in Daylight Saving Time. If you go, go by day, stay on the path, and treat the vault as what it is, a family's grave.

And look at the date over the door: 1913. It isn't his. It's hers.

Watch the film above for the whole paper trail, page by page.

Sources

Credits

Newspapers from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America, public domain: the Richmond Times-Dispatch (February and March 1922), The Times Dispatch (February 1913), the Richmond Planet (Oct. 10, 1925, with photographs from the Richmond News-Leader), the Evening Star (Washington), The Washington Times and The Bismarck Tribune (October 1925). Maps and photographs from the Library of Congress, public domain: F. W. Beers, 1876; Detroit Publishing Co., c. 1900–1908; Andrew J. Russell, April 1865. D. H. Anderson stereograph, 1870s, The New York Public Library, public domain. Hollywood Cemetery photographs via Flickr under CC BY 2.0 by smalerie (the Pool vault, 2009), PunkToad, Lori L. Stalteri and Adam Jones. Richmond skyline by Bdl2001, CC BY 4.0, and a photograph by Sean Dudley, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. The opening scenes are an illustration of the legend, labelled as folklore. Poster: the Pool vault door, photo by smalerie, 2009, CC BY 2.0. Original score.