The Richmond Vampire and the Church Hill Tunnel

The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway’s Church Hill Tunnel ran some 4,000 feet beneath one of Richmond’s oldest neighbourhoods. Dug through soft, shifting blue marl clay, it was dangerous from the start: workers died in cave-ins during its construction, and after it opened in 1873 it was eventually bypassed by a riverside viaduct and fell out of use. In 1925 the railway began repairing and widening it for freight.

On the afternoon of October 2, 1925, as a work train stood inside, bricks began falling from the arched roof and a section of about 150 feet collapsed. Around 200 workers fled in darkness toward the eastern portal. Engineer Thomas J. Mason was trapped at the throttle of locomotive No. 231; his body was recovered on October 10 after rescuers dug down from above. Fireman Benjamin F. Mosby, 28, terribly scalded, escaped beneath the flatcars and died hours later at Grace Hospital. Two Black day laborers, recorded as Richard Lewis and H. Smith, were never found. Further cave-ins defeated every rescue attempt, and the following year the state ordered the tunnel sealed with the locomotive and ten flatcars still inside.

Out of that disaster grew one of Richmond’s strangest legends. As retold by local paranormal researchers and in the book Haunted Richmond, witnesses saw a blood-soaked figure with jagged teeth and hanging flesh burst from the tunnel and run toward the James River, pursued by men who watched it vanish into a hillside mausoleum at Hollywood Cemetery – the tomb of W. W. Pool. Stories that a broken glass was once found inside the sealed tomb, and gatherings of occult enthusiasts at its door, kept the “Richmond Vampire” alive. Even the researchers who popularised it say the fleeing figure was most likely Mosby himself, maimed and in shock.

Hollywood Cemetery, founded in 1847 and resting place of presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, is a historic landscape and active cemetery. In 2006 the Virginia Historical Society explored recovering the buried train, but a camera lowered into the tunnel found it filled with silt and water, and the project was shelved for fear of further collapse. The train, and very probably the two missing men, remain under Church Hill.

The core legend is of a ghoulish, blood-covered figure who fled the collapsed tunnel and disappeared into the W. W. Pool mausoleum. Visitors to the tomb tell of unease, and stories circulate of objects found inside the locked vault.

The W. W. Pool mausoleum on a hillside in Hollywood Cemetery, and the sealed Church Hill Tunnel beneath Jefferson Park, where rescuers dug down to reach the engineer in 1925. The cemetery is open only in daylight hours.

The Richmond Vampire is a fixture of Richmond ghost tours, Halloween journalism and the book Haunted Richmond. The real Church Hill Tunnel story, with its entombed locomotive, has been covered by NPR, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Virginia Historical Society.