Ferry Plantation House

The land at Ferry Plantation, on a peninsula of the Lynnhaven River in what is now Virginia Beach, has a long history. Native people, probably the Chesepian, hunted and lived in the area for centuries before English colonists arrived. In 1642 Savill Gaskin began a ferry service here, the second in Hampton Roads, carrying passengers along the river to the county courthouse and nearby plantations. A brick courthouse for Princess Anne County stood on the property from 1735 to 1751, until the stocks and pillory were moved to a new county seat.

The Walke family later built a manor house on the site, using the old courthouse as its kitchen, and enslaved people lived and worked on the plantation. The manor burned in 1828; two years later George and Elizabeth (Walke) McIntosh built the present three-storey brick house from its salvaged bricks. Over the following two centuries the building served as a plantation house, school and post office. Since 1996 the Friends of the Ferry Plantation House, working with the City of Virginia Beach, have run it as a volunteer-led museum and education centre.

The house also calls itself one of the most haunted places in Virginia. The volunteers say lights switch themselves on in the empty third floor, and that in the 1980s caretakers repeatedly saw the figure of an elderly Black man come up from the basement and kneel before a wall where, years later, restorers uncovered a hidden fireplace; paranormal investigators believe he was a man named Henry who had lived in the enslaved people’s quarters. A small girl in ringlets, whom staff link to Bessie McIntosh, who died in 1860 aged five, a bearded man painting on the stair landing – identified by docents as General Thomas H. Williamson, a member of the family who painted the old manor from memory – and a grieving pregnant woman in blue are among some 11 spirits in the house’s lore.

The museum funds its work partly through night tours and paranormal investigations, and the same volunteers helped lead the campaign that won a 2006 pardon for Grace Sherwood, the “Witch of Pungo,” ducked in 1706 at nearby Witch Duck Point. Whatever visitors make of the ghosts, the stories have kept attention on a site whose real history spans Native, colonial, enslaved and post-war lives.

Lights turning on in empty rooms; a residual figure of an elderly man crossing a room and kneeling at a wall; children seen on the stair landing and children’s voices recorded; toys moving; a bearded man painting on the stairs; a woman in white said to have fallen on the stairs; the sound of dragging chains; and figures appearing in photographs of windows.

The third floor, the second-floor stair landing, the Conference Room (where a boy is said to have fallen from a window), the Green Room and Best Parlor, and the basement. Activity is reported most often on night tours and investigations.

The house appears in Virginia Beach ghost books and paranormal YouTube investigations, hosts Halloween events and “Friday Night Frights,” and is closely tied to the story of Grace Sherwood, whose pardon its director helped win.