From: jfurr@vtssi.vt.EDU (Joel Furr)
Subject: Staunton
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 18:11:09 GMT

At the storytelling session in Staunton, I was sufficiently nervous at the
start of the whole affair (I always am, when I'm running an event and there
are things that could still go wrong) that I decided to forego telling a ghost
story and just concentrate on having everything ready for the speech contests
after dinner.

There were four very decent stories told that day, in the pre-dinner story-
telling session.  I can't recall everything that was said but I'll try to
recap them as best I can.  Two of them were pretty generic "strange noises in
the house" type stories, but the first was kind of interesting and the last
was also.

The first one was told by a woman named Annette.  She told of two men who'd
been out walking in the woods in western Virginia, e.g. Appalachia, and had
come past the ruin of a cabin, and heard fiddle music playing inside, even
though it was dark and there were no lights on in the cabin.  Neither of the
men wanted to acknowledge the music at first, afraid that it might just be
imagination, but when they each realized that the other was hearing it also,
they decided to get out of there.  They asked around and found someone in town
who knew the story of the cabin.  It seems that a family had lived there in
which the husband forbade music on religious grounds but the wife and son both
loved music.  The wife's father even went so far as to give a fiddle to his
grandson, who was excited and all but got told to hide it by his mother lest
his father find out.  Apparently the father did find out and punished the
child, who ran away and broke his neck falling.  The mother and father went on
living there but a few years later, on the anniversary of the son's death, the
father fell and broke his neck in the same place.  After her husband's death,
the wife went back to enjoying music and eventually died in the cabin.  Since
that time, music is often heard from the cabin at night.  Apparently a "true
story" but I didn't get the exact location.

The last story, told by a resident of Staunton named Rusty, was told about a
mansion house named Selma which still stands in the outskirts of Staunton,
Virginia, which for those of you who don't know, lies in the Shenandoah
Valley, scene of much bloody fighting during the War of Northern Aggression. 
The house, Selma, dates back before the War.  During the War, a Confederate
soldier was killed in front of the hearth in the main living room by a
Northern soldier who'd pursued him inside.  The Confederate's blood still
stains the hearth to this day.  Since the War, the Confederate soldier was
often sighted by servants and guests in the house, with servants going so far
as to ask the owners "Should we lay a place at the table for the soldier man?"
The ghost was never malicious and always very quiet and polite. *I* personally
came across the story in a book of ghost stories (published in 1932) which I
checked out from the Virginia Tech library when I was researching possible
stories I could tell at the session.  I was glad that I hadn't chosen to do
this one since Rusty had more recent information.  It seems that a "parapsy-
chology" class from nearby Blue Ridge Community College in Charlottesville had
visited the house a couple years ago and had been welcomed to the house by the
current owners but told that under no circumstances were they to go into the
_attic_.  Needless to say, the minute the owners departed the house to let the
class do their ghost-contacting thing, one of the students made a beeline for
the attic.  The attic was dark and the student came in and shut the door and
almost immediately heard an angry shout from the dark... the soldier telling
her to get OUT of the attic.  As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw a
floating apparition in the attic, vaguely resembling a man but with bits and
pieces out of place and some floating freely... as if the ghost was disinte-
grating after all that time.  Apparently the student stayed in the attic
arguing with the ghost for the better part of an hour before the ghost finally
gave up and left the house for good...

I don't know how much of this is true or if the sightings of the ghost stopped
after this point but it made for interesting listening.

Thanks, by the way, to all the people who mailed suggestions to me about the
speech idea I had.  I'm going to use them when I put the final version
together.

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Joel Furr                                                   jfurr@vtssi.vt.edu
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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories