Ghosts–They’re Still Around

You don’t have to “believe” in ghosts to run into them. In Virginia, Indian ghosts regularly appear on the newly-opened Pocahontas Parkway. One truck driver recently saw three of them. “The truck driver came through and said he saw [three] Indians in the middle of the highway lined up by the woods, each of them holding a torch,” says a parkway toll taker. The warriors were illuminated clearly by the light from their fiery torches, and looked so real that the driver blasted his horn to tell them to get off the road. But the woman in the toll booth knew they were ghosts, since she’d heard the same story from so many other drivers.

Troopers who work along the Pocahontas Parkway say they have responded to dozens of such calls. A recent one was on July 1st at 3:11 a.m. Two days later, at 1:44 a.m., roadway workers reported “see[ing] a subject running back and forth around the loading dock.” Troopers responded both times and found nothing. In both cases, the Indians were described as having cloudy but fully formed legs, arms and torsos, with only a vague outline of a head. Troopers and workers also have reported hearing Indian drums.

Long after midnight, drivers and roadway workers report hearing whoops, shouts and cries from what seem like dozens of voices. Some people claim the noises are from a nearby kennel, but one trooper says, “I know what a bunch of hunting dogs sound like, and it doesn’t sound anything like that.”

State police spokeswoman Corinne Geller visited the toll plaza late at night and says,”Three separate times during our watch, I heard high-pitched howls and screams, not the kind of screams of a person in trouble, but whooping. There were at least a dozen to 15 [voices]. I would say every hair on my body was standing up when we heard those noises.”

An engineer for Blau-Velt, who is working nights to complete the parkway bridge’s construction, says, “It was me and two or three other guys and we could see a horse and there was an Indian sitting on it. It was right at the bottom of the bridge.” The engineers started toward the rider, “because you’re not allowed to have a horse on an interstate,” but both the Indian and his horse disappeared.

Deanna Beacham of the Nansemond tribe has a theory about the ghosts. “We are anxiously awaiting our federal recognition,” she says. “We’re still here as place names. We became rivers and streets and roads and communities. Why shouldn’t people see physical manifestations of that?”

There is evidence of Indian inhabitation in the area of the parkway from the 1600s to as far back as 3500 BC. Dennis Blanton, an archeologist at the College of William and Mary, organized a dig before construction started. “There were artifacts scattered all over, dating back five or six thousand years,” he says. “They had a main village that was closer to Richmond.”

Ron Hadad owns Hadad’s Lake picnic grounds, which is less than a mile from the toll plaza. He says, “I’ve been here for 37 years. My mom–we all thought it was funny–she lived in this house before me. She said she used to hear a lot of hooting and hollering. I’ve never seen any Indians myself, but I’ve seen my mother’s face. They probably built [the roadway] on an Indian burial ground.?

England is the traditional land of ghosts and clerks think they?ve finally caught the ghost that has haunted their grocery store for 17 years on a security camera. The store?s staff say they can see the figure of a man walking up and down a store aisle all through the night on the video of the store?s camera.

Manager Jacqui Hawes says, “A lot of things have happened. We have been having [the ghost] for years and it is quite frightening. It is just active early in the mornings and when staff are on their own. Things used to fly off the shelves and when we had a refit I felt my hair being pulled. I just pulled my hair back.

“But also the room goes really cold. The heavy doors opened on their own as well. You usually have to push them hard to open them fully. We heard shouting down the bottom warehouse and we were on our own. We were so scared we shut ourselves in here [the office] and locked the door. When we went to get out, the door was unlocked. It is scary but the ghost is quite friendly. I have been here 17 years and it has been an on-going thing.”

Caroline Groom, an employee at the store, says, “We don’t often hear or see it, just every now and again. A woman who works here saw it on camera six months ago but that is the only proof we have really got. It just looks like he was walking slowly in the aisle. It is just a shape, it is not really clear.”

Read about the woman who made the mistake of purchasing a haunted house in Brooklyn and about the world-famous ghostbuster she hired to chase the spirits away in ?Graves End? by Elaine Mercadeo,click here.

To read about Virginia ghosts, click here.

To read about U.K. ghosts,click here.

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.