The Fluvanna Historical Society was excited to receive a letter from Paul Mitchell, who self-published a 1992 booklet entitled Astonishing Stories of Ghost Stories UFO-Related Stories, and One Skunk Ape Story. In it is a story told to him by a former resident of Fluvanna’s historic home Chatham, Joan Perkins, who recorded this incident that occurred in 1976, shortly after becoming the new owners.
I would like to share one brief happening at Chatham on a hot night in July. My children and I were working on restoring Chatham before moving in. We worked late, and being too tired to drive back to Richmond, decided to stay over. The next morning we drove to Fork Union Restaurant for breakfast. After placing our order, my teenage daughter Lynne told her brothers about her dream the night before. As she talked, my ears picked up her story. I said nothing at the time. In her dream, she had seen two ladies with candles dressed in long, gray skirts standing at the bottom of the stairwell. Her dream sounded funny to me because during the night, I had dreamt that I had seen candle light coming slowly upstairs. I had seen the same two ladies dressed as Lynne had described come into the room where David, my three year old, and I were sleeping. As they came closer, I had a cold, freezing feeling. A little later, looking over at David still sleeping, I noticed that he was trembling so I closed the windows.
After Lynne had completed the description of her dream and [we were] eating breakfast, she turned to me and asked what were the noises she had heard upstairs last night. I answered that it was probably me closing the windows. A few days later, I told her of my dream and we’ve shared a laugh together many times since over the two ladies who were checking us out as we were the new owners of Chatham. Lynne’s two older teenage brothers, Craig and Reid, were sleeping in the add-on bedrooms and missed it all.
Who were these apparitions roaming the halls of Chatham? The plantation of Chatham was owned originally by the Wills family, starting with Elias Wills, who had a home somewhere on the property as early as 1785. In 1793, Dr. John Wills attained 376 acres of the land from his brother, and he had a wooden dwelling on the property. By 1823 it had passed to the son, John M. Wills, and tax records note that the wooden structure had burned, and somewhere between 1823 and 1826, the brick structure that now stands is thought to have been built. The house is situated across the Rivanna River from Carysbrook, and remained in the Wills family for over six decades. An iron balcony once graced the front entrance, but was melted down during the Civil War to make cannonballs. (No. 50, McGehee, Miyagawa).
Fluvanna Bulletin No. 50 notes that there is a tragic story about a daughter of the Wills family that Fluvanna folk have passed down that has led to the belief that a ghost of a young woman haunts Chatham (No. 50, McGehee, Miyagawa). The daughter’s pet name was “Pinkie.” One of her best girlfriends was visiting and came down with a headache. To help her friend, Pinkie went to her father’s medicine cabinet and chose medicine that she thought she would help, but instead accidentally administered a poisonous substance that ended in her friend’s death. Could the two ghosts in the story be those of the visitor, and the remorseful friend, Pinkie?
