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CHAPTER 6

Rippon Lodge

WOODBRIDGE

Many tragic stories are told of Rippon Lodge. More than one murder is said to have been committed there. A victim of a fatal duel bled to death on the parlor floor. This house is said to be haunted in such a ghostly and sinister fashion that no one will occupy it, and the public road has changed its course to avoid the neighborhood.

—Manassas Journal, May 19, 1911

WHILE IT HAD A PRESENCE ominous enough to be commented on in newspapers a century ago, Rippon Lodge has since become somewhat more obscure, if not actually less menacing. Although I had read about it in Marguerite DuPont Lee’s excellent and florid Virginia Ghosts (and lived only fourteen miles from it for seventeen years), I was not even sure it still existed until the day I visited it for the first time in June 2008.

Rippon Lodge is today, in fact, believed to be the oldest house extant in Prince William County. Built in the 1720s by planter Richard Blackburn, it sits on a hillside overlooking Neabsco Creek, the waters of which flow into the nearby Potomac River. Its prosperous owner built his home along the King’s Highway—roughly corresponding to modern-day Route 1—a critical roadway that stretched from Newport, Rhode Island, to Yorktown, Virginia, and connected the original thirteen colonies (and played a critical role in the Revolutionary War, being used as the route taken by the American troops who defeated the British at Yorktown). Blackburn named it for Ripon, in North Yorkshire, England, the city where he was born (variant spellings being much more prevalent in the 18th century than they are today). According to some sources, it is referred to as a lodge because it was also used as a Masonic meeting place.

Established as the seat of a cotton and tobacco plantation, the somewhat modest home overlooked about 21,000 acres of land and, despite its proximity to the colonial seaport town of Dumfries, had its own port on Neabsco Creek. Clustered about the wooded ridgeline above the house are the ancient graves of some of its earliest inhabitants, many of them now marked only with worn and illegible stones or grassy mounds, including those of Blackburn and some of his family’s slaves.

Blackburn bequeathed the property to his son, Colonel Thomas Blackburn, who had less allegiance to the home country than his father and during the Revolutionary War served as an aide to George Washington, who was himself a frequent guest at the estate. Another visitor to the lodge during this era was militia Captain Bernard J. Hooe, who in April 1810 fought a duel with James Kemp just across the Potomac in Maryland. Hooe was critically injured in the fight and brought back across the river to Rippon Lodge, where he died soon after.

Rippon Lodge was a modest home overlooking 21,000 acres.

By the time Blackburn and his wife followed Hooe into the great beyond, Rippon Lodge had acquired the beginnings of its dark reputation and remained vacant for some years, apparently never passing on to anyone else in their family.

It was eventually purchased around 1820 by new owners, the Atkinsons, who owned it for about a century. The first suggestions that it was haunted were made during the era they lived in the house, and over the years members of the Atkinson family described various ghostly phenomena, including “strange and disturbing noises.”

Rippon Lodge was not sold to new owners until 1924, when Wade Ellis, a Federal judge from Washington, D.C., purchased it, and subsequently made significant efforts to preserve and renovate it. Interestingly, some time after taking possession of it, Ellis discovered that he was a descendant of Richard Blackburn, the man who had built the home (although it is not clear at what point he discovered this and to what extent it influenced his preservation efforts).

Ellis eventually sold Rippon Lodge to another Blackburn descendant, Rear Admiral Richard Blackburn Black, who accompanied Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd on his Antarctic explorations. Black’s daughter inherited the house from him in 1989, and eleven years later sold it to Prince William County, which now maintains it and the surrounding forty acres of property.

One of the most often-told ghost stories associated with Rippon Lodge has its roots in the era of Thomas Blackburn, who married a daughter of an ill-tempered family known locally as the “Rattlesnake” Grahams. She was apparently as irascible as the rest of her clan, and is said to have one day impatiently knocked out of her way the young child of a house slave, whose head struck the stone jamb of a fireplace. The child died from her injury, casting a pall over the house and leaving her mother inconsolable. Mistress Blackburn was indifferent to what in no way would have at that time been considered a crime (there is some suggestion that she might have eventually been somewhat remorseful but, no reason being given for this change of heart, this is likely merely the opinion of latter-day apologists).

Some people have claimed to see a bloody stain at the spot where the child’s head was ruptured on the stone of the fireplace, and others believe that her spirit hovers over the spot where she was buried on the hill above. This callous and unjust killing bestowed a curse on the house and made it prone to possession by subsequent spirits. Many of the phenomena that have been reported over the years do not have the hallmarks typical of a child ghost.

One of the most dramatic early episodes involved a pair of friends from Alexandria on a hiking trip who decided to take shelter in the abandoned house in the years before it was purchased by the Atkinsons. Soon after they turned in for the night, they began to hear loud and continuous noises, which eventually gave way to shrieks and peals of ghoulish laughter. Alarmed by this eerie clamor, the young men produced a light and proceeded to search the place from top to bottom to determine the source. They were unnerved to discover that it was deserted and, darkness notwithstanding, abandoned it immediately. Relating their experience to people in the surrounding neighborhood the next morning, they learned the name of the house and that it was widely known throughout the local area to be haunted.

My friend Jason Froehlich and I did not, fortunately, experience anything quite so dramatic during our brief visit to Rippon Lodge (but, of course, we did not try to spend the night there). We learned of its continued existence while chatting with Beth Cardinale, administrator of the haunted Weems-Botts Museum, located about four-and-a-half miles away, and decided to take advantage of its proximity and visit it that same day.

Unfortunately, the first thing we learned is that it is open only on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and not Tuesday (which was the day we visited), our first clue being that the gate blocking the main road leading up to the house was closed. We turned around, headed back down Blackburn Road toward Route 1, and almost immediately came to a turnoff that was marked as a staff entrance to the site (someone was close on our tail as we made a hasty turn onto this road; thus we did not notice until we left the admonitions against anyone else using this alternate approach).

We crawled up the narrow, wooded, and badly rutted dirt road for a few hundred yards, after which we passed a private home and then right afterward emerged onto the open area in front of Rippon Lodge. We stopped the car and got out to get a better look at the ancient house, which appeared to be beautifully restored and very well maintained. A number of other structures were clustered around the site, including a small cabin to our right, a covered well at one side of the front lawn, and another building behind the lodge itself.

It was very quiet around Rippon Lodge, and no one else seemed to be there but us, giving the place a somewhat desolate air. Despite the brightness of the day and the evidence of use, if not actual occupation, a gloomy aura seemed to hang over the otherwise pleasant-looking old building. Whether it was this oppressive atmosphere—or merely the growing sense that we were not meant to be there at that time—we started to feel disquieted and nervous and decided not to linger any longer than necessary.

The road appeared to go completely around the lodge and loop back on itself, so we decided that following it back to where we started would be easier than trying to turn around, and that we might as well see the other side of it before we left. Driving toward the house and then circling around it, we stopped several times on our circumnavigation of the lodge to take pictures and get a closer look at various details. I kept an eye on the windows and doors of the structure as we went, looking for any signs that the building might be occupied by either living people or spirits, but did not detect signs of either.

Coming back around toward the front of the lodge and facing back in the direction from which we had come, we could look down the hillside and see through a break in the trees the waters of the Potomac River, and it was obvious to us why someone would have wanted to build here. Maybe a spot that is breathtaking and beautiful enough, I thought, could induce someone to linger at it long after their spirit should have moved on to another world.

Whatever might have allowed any of the former inhabitants of Rippon Lodge to remain there after the normal termination of their lives, the mysteries and legends of the place have carried over through the course of three centuries. And, after even a brief sojourn at the antiquated house, we could readily sense why this would have been the case.