Is Poplar Lawn's Caretaker's Cottage haunted by the ghosts of Civil War soldiers and nurses?
Sean Jones
PETERSBURG – The old Caretaker’s Cottage at Poplar Lawn is tucked just atop a hill in the southeastern section of the city park. Hardly more than 100-square feet, its tan wooden siding and red metal roof don’t bring too much attention outside of its moment of charm in the middle of a grassy field.
But, is it haunted?
A centuries-old city often comes with its fair share of historic brick buildings, warehouses and homes that have countless stories to dig up. Throw in a significant Civil War battle and you have a recipe for ghost stories.
Poplar Lawn Park was once the site of a Confederate Field Hospital. Union troops were brought there for care after the Battle of the Crater, which saw particularly gruesome combat.
Ghost Hunting couple Keith and Christy Wade took their equipment – cameras, motion sensors and cell phones equipped with apps used to speak with the spirit realm – to the Caretaker’s Cottage one night in late September hoping to find any contact with the beyond.
An hour-long video recording of the evening shows the two in awe at some of the readings they got from their equipment. They try to engage the spirits into conversations by hauling questions into the air.
“What is your name? Why are you guys still here?”
The apps they use ring out words from time to time. Sometimes they are a string of names, others, the ghost hunters just get one word. They hear the word “question,” and ask, “what is your question?”
The video hits its apex about 38 minutes in. Keith holds a radio in the air with his left arm, trying to hear the voices of any ghosts that might be in the area. His tricep suddenly jerks as the sleeve of his shirt appears to jostle like it was hit with a small puff of wind.
“I felt something tug right here,” Keith says to the camera. “.. Can you do it again?"
They report strange orbs of light floating upwards in the air, strange tapping noises and unsettling emotions all throughout the night. At one point, Keith got a bug bite and instinctively reached down to scratch it. Almost instantaneously, the phone spat out the word “scratch.”
“We’ve gone to quite a few places but that is the one place that as soon as you go in there, there’s orbs everywhere,” Christy said. “You get this really creepy feeling that you can’t breathe.”
Keith meanwhile carries the image of calm the entire time he is on camera asking questions of the spirits.
“That was the first time I've ever been touched by a ghost,” he said. “We’ve been to more well-known haunted places but I was surprised we found as much there as we did.”
A wartime site of gruesome scenes
Poplar Lawn Park was long used as an area of recreation for the community before it ever became a public park. It has always been a picturesque yet open haven just beside Petersburg. It once housed a racecourse for horses and had a trolly that chauffeured leisure-seekers to it, up until the early 20th century.
It also had its fair share of military uses, dating back to at least the American Revolution when the French Legion rested its troops there in the winter of 1781 just after the British surrender at Yorktown.
The Confederacy later turned its open clearings into a military center. Wooden barracks were built as a resting place for troops traveling between the deep South and Northern Virginia. The site also included a military hospital.
Temporary wooden buildings were erected across the park. A chunk of that was used as a field hospital to care for troops during the Battle of the Crater, which ended in a victory for the South.
That battle saw some of the war’s more gruesome combat. Nearly 2,000 union troops were injured.
“There were northern troops that were hospitalized who had been captured, including African American troops,” said long-time Petersburg Resident and local historian Dulaney Ward.
Union soldiers were ultimately decimated at the Battle of the Crater.
The two armies started the conflict in trenches at opposite ends of the Crater. In a stint of last-minute confusion when the engagement began, an advancing Union division went straight into the Crater, rather than around it, as they were expected.
“When they did finally send them into the Crater itself, it was not the place to be,” Ward said. “The two firing lines against you, bullets coming from every side.”
The battle ended with over 800 dead on both sides, and almost 2,000 Union wounded Union troops. Many of them would have been taken to Poplar Lawn.
A Civil War field hospital was not a pretty scene. The large projectile from a musket could decimate limbs and the bones underneath. Amputations were common because legs and arms often couldn’t be saved. Medicine also wasn’t particularly advanced. The understanding of germs and sanitization of bone saws and scalpels hadn’t yet become as widespread as we know it today.
“A lot of these people were dying of sickness because they were living in unsanitary conditions,” Ward said.
Are the spectral remnants of these Union soldiers still entombed in the air at the Caretaker’s Cottage at Poplar Lawn Park? If you ask Ward, he’ll tell you that he’s not one for ghost stories. He points out that the Cottage itself is actually a post-Civil War structure.
“I’ve lived in several houses that are supposedly haunted,” Ward said. “They’re full of various strange things that are going on. But the only kinds of things I’ve ever heard were strange noises at night that turned out to be a bird that had gotten into a chimney — and I had difficulty getting the bird out.”
The Wades mount their paranormal evidence
Keith and Christy say they aren’t sure the cottage itself is what’s haunted, but the ground beneath where the soldiers were being treated by war nurses. They say the spirits picked up on their equipment may just be passing through that spot. In a second video trip to the Cottage, they got a lot of feedback with words like “down,” and “underneath,” causing them to want to investigate a small tunnel that goes under the structure.
In a third and so-far-final investigation of the Caretaker’s Cottage, the Wades left stationary cameras and motion sensors to observe the building while they went to a different ghost hunt.
The hour-long video picks up several disturbances in the otherwise frozen environment. Small bumps and knocks pop up from time to time. Suddenly a loud thud hits the audio. Soon after you can hear the distinct sound of two small metal objects crashing into each other.
Suddenly, the motion sensors erupt, having been tripped by something inside the cottage. The alarm set to Keith’s voice saying “ghosting alert” rings out in the empty building.
At one point a distinct ball of light appears for a moment and slowly fades back into darkness near the ceiling of the room.
Keith says these types of investigations are the best way to get spectral evidence. He’s been hunting ghosts since he was a high schooler living at his mother’s house which he believed was haunted. He and his friends used to search for spectral voices on an old handheld radio.
“I can’t tell you that I’ve seen a ghost right in front of me but I’ve seen them on camera, or I’ve seen orbs,” Keith said. “But a shadow person? I’ve only seen them in video.”
The two have been putting themselves in the middle of haunted places all across the area. They've been to places like Pamplin Park, some of the Civil War battle sites in Dinwiddie, the MLK Bridge and Peter Jones Trading Post. All along the way the find similar unexplained readings, but the Cottage is still their most active.
Although Keith looks unflappable, Christy says she thinks he is scared to return. She instead feels a distinct attraction from what she says is the feeling of a female spirit.
“I’m drawn to that place, I’m not sure if it’s because I am a female or not,’’ she said. “I can go there anytime, but there’s something that’s pushing him away.”
You can reach Sean Jones at sjones@progress-index.com. Follow him at @SeanJones_PI. Follow The Progress-Index on Twitter at @ProgressIndex.