Haunted Countryside

To start off, I've always been intrigued by haunted house stories so here is the best one me and some friends investigated here in our home town of Wytheville. First I'll tell you about Major Ghram's Mansion. The house itself is a beautifully built mansion that was built some time in the late 1770's the oldest part looks somewhat like a colonial farmhouse, the newer part built in the early 1880's looks like a Gothic mansion. The house sits about four miles off of a main highway down a dirt road that leads to pretty much the middle of nowhere. The house itself seems to come out of nowhere as you round a sharp corner you see it looming on the hill almost obscured by overgrown trees. Then you see the source of the haunting, the slave quarters, a dark rundown two story shack just a little ways down the hill from the mansion. As the story goes Major Ghram severely mistreated the slaves so they made up a plan to rid themselves of a brutal and sadistic master. They waited until Major Ghram was ready to make homemade whiskey for that year, after he started making it they then waited until he was very drunk. One of the slaves (who's wife Major Ghram had raped and impregnated) decided it was time to take revenge on his sick master, he cut the masters head off with an axe and then provided to chop his master into small pieces. Well that's the story as I heard.

Now here's what happened when my fiance and a few of his friends visited the house a few years before he and I met. They went to the mansion (which has been vacant for years) one night to investigate some of the strange happenings they had heard about. They took an Ouija board with them and sat out on the front porch playing with the Ouija by the light of flashlights. They started to hear a baby crying so they went and searched the entire premises to see if they could locate the crying baby, all thinking that maybe there was a real baby that had been abandoned and needed their help. The crying seemed to come from the area just below the slave quarters near a small stream that stopped at a tree stump. The stump looked as if it had been used to chop firewood. After all of this and the sounds being traced to the supposed site of where the angry slave hacked old Major Ghram to bits, they decided they had worn out their welcome and it was time for them to be leaving. So to make a long story short they hauled ass out of there. A few nights later though that they might go investigate, and what did they find siting on the porch where they had been playing with the Ouija board but an old fashioned pram type baby carriage which had not been there the night before!

A few years later my fiance took me out to see the old mansion after showing me some pictures of it. I read a story in the local newspaper about another older lady who had been visiting relatives who lived a few miles down the road from the old mansion. They took her up to the mansion to take some pictures of it because she thought it was such a beautiful and magnificent old house to be left abandoned in the middle of nowhere. Nothing weird at all happened while they were there but when she got her pictures back there were three shadowy figures in one of the windows.

So I asked my fiance (who wouldn't even turn up the road to take me up to the house) if he could take me closer so I could touch it or even better go inside. He flat out refused, I on the other hand who can get psychic pictures in my head when I so much as even look at the house was not afraid. The ghost is of the slave who bore Major Ghram's child for she was promised by her master if she keep secret about what happened and didn't tell Major Ghrams extremely jealous wife about the rape that she, her husband, and child would be freed. So she and her husband kept quite about it, but when the child was born it was too white to be passed of as just a lighter skinned black child so Major Ghram in a fearful rage killed the child to cover up his terrible deed so his jealous wife would never know he had been unfaithful. That's why the slave took revenge and killed his master out of love for his wife and their child. Major Ghram's killer was soon tried for murder and hung, and Major Ghram's jealous wife in the end did find out the truth, and had the innocent slave woman beaten so severely that she died from it.

So now the old slave woman's restless ghost haunts the property looking for justice so everyone will know what really happened to her and her family.

Submitted from: Tonya, Virginia, USA