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CHAPTER 7

Weems-Botts Museum

DUMFRIES

She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair …. Caring for her mother, lifting a cross old lady from her chair to her bed, setting out endless little trays of soup and oatmeal, steeling herself to the filthy laundry.

—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

MUCH OF WHAT MANY OF US LEARNED about George Washington while we were growing up—including bizarre legends of him chopping down cherry trees apropos of nothing but truthfully confessing to his actions—were concocted by a man named Mason Locke Weems, a parson who dwelled in Dumfries, Virginia, in the early years of the American republic. His bookstore is one of three Colonial-era buildings extant in the little town, and is today the only one open to the public and known as the Weems-Botts Museum, being named for him and a subsequent owner, lawyer Benjamin Botts.

Today, the Weems-Botts property is believed by many of the people who have visited or worked at it over the years to be haunted, and a great number of inexplicable and paranormal phenomena has been associated with it.

“There have been things that have happened here that I can’t explain, for which there is no logical explanation,” Beth Cardinale, administrator of the Weems-Botts Museum, told me when I visited it with my friend Jason Froehlich the last Tuesday in June 2008.

Dumfries is a very old town, of course—the oldest continuously chartered town in Virginia, as a matter of fact—and places like it tend to have the greatest incidence of ghostly phenomena. It is located on land that was first explored by John Smith in 1608, and was inhabited at that time by the Doeg Indians, a tribe of hunters, fishers, farmers, miners, and traders. The first European settlement of the site appears to have been in 1690, when someone built a grist mill on the banks of nearby Quantico Creek.

The fledgling community did not grow much for a number of years, until a customs house and warehouse were built in 1731, the year the county was formed, followed by a number of additional warehouses the next year. At the prompting of the Scottish merchants who operated out of it, Dumfries was chartered in 1749 as the first town in Prince William County, and named for the hometown in Scotland of the man who owned the land on which it was established. Three years later, the Quantico Episcopal Church was built, the first in the county, with bricks brought over from England.

Dumfries grew up at the juncture of two major roads, the north-south King’s Highway (known before that as the Potomac Path locally and today as Route 1) and the east-west Duke Street, which linked the town with Winchester to the west (and is now also known as Route 234).

While it is a sleepy, little-known town today, Dumfries was a vital commercial center during the Colonial era—indeed, the second most important port in Colonial America at one point—and the volume of goods shipped from it was comparable to that moved through Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. Ships bound to or from England, Scotland, Holland, France, and the West Indies sailed into Dumfries with manufactured goods and out of it with tobacco, wheat, and lumber. One of the largest shipments of tobacco to leave from the colonies was shipped from Dumfries, which was the center of all trade in northern Virginia.

Amenities in the prosperous town—many housed in buildings of significant architectural value—included a variety of stores, numerous private and public warehouses, several hotels, a dance hall, an opera house, a jockey club, a race track, a newspaper, a bank, a silversmith, a brick factory, multiple academies, a cabinetmaker, a clockmaker, and a blacksmith. At its peak, during the period 1760 to 1822, when it also served as the third seat of the county, Dumfries had a population of two thousand and was an important center of commercial and social interaction. During its heyday, luminaries like George Washington were frequent visitors to the town, and it was home to many of the first families of the region, among them the Lees, Grahams, Graysons, Hendersons, and Tebbs.

Eventually, Dumfries’ harbor silted up, and that, coupled with primitive farming methods that ruined much of the rich surrounding farmlands, wrecked the economy of the town and brought its prosperity to an end. Today, it is little more than a village and suburb of Washington, D.C.

It was during its golden age, in 1798, that Parson Mason Locke Weems purchased the oldest portion of the property that is now the Weems-Botts Museum—which had originally been constructed around 1750 at the corner of Duke and Cameron Streets as the vestry house for the Quantico Episcopal Church—and used it as a bookstore and warehouse. Two years later, he wrote his famous work of mythology on Washington, becoming his first biographer and greatest apologist, and followed it with works on Francis Marion, Benjamin Franklin, and William Penn. A true Renaissance man, Weems was educated as a minister and doctor and was also a merchant and talented musician.

Weems sold the house just four years after he acquired it, in 1802, to lawyer Benjamin Botts, a young go-getter who used it as his law office until his untimely death in 1811, in a theater fire in Richmond. Botts achieved some measure of fame when Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, requested that he serve as the youngest member of his defense team during his trial for treason.

While the Weems-Botts house is apparently haunted by the ghosts of two former inhabitants, it seems that neither of those two are believed to be the men for which the property is named, both of whom appear to have passed on to the afterlife uneventfully (or, at the least, gone on to haunt other places). It may seem surprising that neither of them should be among those suspected of haunting the house, but a little investigation and reflection explains why.

First, neither of them actually died within the house or even owned it very long, which would have limited their emotional or spiritual attachments to it.

Second, neither appears to have left behind unfinished business or to have been tormented by an unfulfilled life. Weems in particular seems to have been very satisfied with himself, and to have successfully and zealously devoted the greater part of his intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life to his deity (who, by all accounts, was Washington, “the HERO and the Demigod,” who he characterizes as “Jupiter Conservator” or “Jupiter the Savior”).

No, two far more tragic and unfulfilled lives are associated with the house and seem to be the source of the unhappy spirits who continue to dwell within it. And, as Beth Cardinale was to explain to us, their names are Mamie and Violet, a pair of sisters who lived in the house during the last century. Their stories are as strange and gothic as any I have found associated with a purportedly haunted site.

In 1869, four years after the Civil War ended, Richard Merchant purchased the Weems-Botts house and for the next century his family lived in it. Whether he was married to his wife Annie at that time, who then would have been about thirteen, is unclear.

Richard and Annie Merchant’s first daughter, Mamie, was born around 1883. She suffered from some sort of epilepsy and, with the hardened propriety of that era, the family kept her confined within an upstairs bedroom to hide her condition from the public. She was never allowed to leave the room, taking her meals at a small table and even performing hygiene functions within the room’s confines. It is not surprising that her intellectual development was supposed to have been stunted, and that she was to remain childlike her entire life—which was not long, as she succumbed to a seizure in 1906, at the age of twenty-three.

Violet’s life was to be more prolonged but, in its way, equally grim. She was apparently blessed with good health, both physically and mentally. She lived away from home somewhere outside of Dumfries, had a job, and a fiancé. When her father, Richard, died a few months before Mamie, her mother demanded that she return home and take care of her. Dutifully, she left behind her husband-to-be, her job, her life, and returned to the family home in Dumfries (presumably in time to be present for Mamie’s convulsive demise).

There is some suggestion that Violet thought her mother might not live long and that she might be able to return to the existence she had enjoyed elsewhere, but that hope waned, slowly but surely, one long, lonely year after another, until nearly half a century had passed. Annie hung on until 1954, when she died at age ninety-eight. Violet herself lived on just another thirteen years, many of them in a nursing home, and died in 1967. (Violet’s life could almost have been the inspiration for Eleanor in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House—adapted for the screen in 1963 and 1999 as The Haunting—the main difference being that the literary character cared for her mother just eleven years.)

A few years after Violet died, the city of Dumfries acquired the house and, in cooperation with the Historic Dumfries nonprofit association, has operated it as a museum since 1976. It was around the time they were renovating it for this public use that ghostly phenomena were first recorded at the house.

Beth showed me and Jason around the Weems-Botts house during our visit and told us about some of the strange experiences she has had at the house. She had her first, in fact, during one of her initial visits to it several years ago, at one of the sleepovers the institution allows each year in October.

“Throughout the night I would wake up occasionally, because I heard creaking, groaning, old house noises, pipe-rattling noises,” she said. “I’ve been in old houses; I’ve heard the plumbing rattle, so it was not an unfamiliar sound.” She was sleeping in what is called the “Weems Room,” she said, and most of the noise was coming from the nearby parlor.

“The next day, the curator asked me how I’d slept,” she said. When Beth described to the woman what had disturbed her sleep throughout the night, “she smiled and said to me, ‘There’s no plumbing in this house!’”

Beth went on to describe another incident, which occurred during a visit by a group of high-school students after Beth had begun working at the house. They were in the upstairs bedroom used by Violet, which is in the oldest part of the house, and has a window that used to look out onto an open area prior to the building being expanded but now faces only a brick wall. She and one of the students were talking in the room and the window, just a few feet away from them, was closed.

“I turned to point to the window to explain something and it was open,” she said. “We both kind of looked at it, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s just our ghost saying “hello,”’ and he chuckled. I talked some more to him, and when we looked back at the window it was closed again.” None of the other windows were open and there was no breeze and no one else had been present.