A Ghost Hunting Story

I worked the better part of a year as a ghost hunter in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. This is the story of my favorite "event" during that time.

Let me back up just a little bit here to set the scene. In 2018, I was living in Newport News where I worked part time at a museum, however I spent the bulk of my time as a stay-at-home dad to my one-year-old son. We were pretty happy overall, but as I am sure many of you know, kids can be expensive, and a museum job is not terribly lucrative (and by that, I mean it is absolutely abysmal pay for even a single person to live on, never mind a family of three). In order to bolster our finances a bit, I started looking for a little extra part time work when I stumbled upon a listing for a ghost tour guide role in Colonial Williamsburg (not affiliated with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation). Tell me that does not sound like the opening plot of a horror movie!

I will eagerly admit it was a pretty cool gig! Walking around a colonial city at night sharing ghost stories is not a bad way to earn some good money. From April to December, I lead tours almost every single night, starting at 8pm and sometimes going as late as 1 am. Whether you are a believer in the paranormal or just a fan of a good creepy story, I highly recommend the experience.

Now, every tour guide I ever met in that city had stories of their personal encounters and hauntings. There were some great tales to be sure, but unfortunately most sounded almost outlandish to me. In a job where better stories often equated to better tips, there was absolutely a lot of embellishment for the sake of guests. Perfectly normal occurrences were often spun to be creepy encounters so guests could go home with a great story...and hopefully leave a great tip and review for their guide! There were probably some genuine gems in there, but they were buried amongst all the bullshit.

That did not dissuade me though. Night after night, I hoped for a ghostly encounter of my own, but nothing particularly notable happened for some time. Still, I was not at all disappointed; walking through the cobblestone streets in the dead of night was plenty creepy (and on many nights, the city fills with a really dense fog that gives you the chills no matter how many times you see it). While the ghosts of Williamsburg never made a great show, the guests always seemed to enjoy the experience and I was content with that. It was not until I got a "promotion" that I started wondering if there might be more happening in that town at night than I realized.

I was chosen to start leading small groups on ghost hunts. They were mostly a tourist cash grab, nothing particularly spectacular, but we would "investigate" various locations around town with common ghost hunting tools: EMF detectors, voice recorders, laser grids, spirit boxes, etc. These hunts were a bit of a game changer for me, not so much because of the fancy equipment, but because we were staying out much later and exploring in much smaller groups (hunts were 8 people max, while tours had between 30 and 150!). I felt that if ghosts were going to reveal themselves, these were the optimal conditions!

During my stint as a guide, one building quickly garnered my attention: The Peyton Randolph House. While I had a number of houses and facilities I regularly rotated between, I took guests to the Peyton Randolph House on every single hunt as there was almost always something just "off" about that location. I will spare you the history, which you can investigate for yourself, but the house is considered to be one of the most haunted structures on the East Coast, with hauntings reported as early as 1784. Painted a dark red color, the house often gives off a foreboding atmosphere even during the day...perhaps because it is rumored to hold a lot of dark energy.

For a while, I would have described that house as "frustrating and uncooperative". Electronics regularly failed around the house, and guests would complain that fully charged phones and cameras were malfunctioning. EMF detectors and other hunt tools would only ever run out of battery at that house. I even had a television news crew follow me for an interview and their cameras stopped working at the Peyton Randolph House on two separate occasions (the operator was furious with me as though I was messing with him)! However, it was photography that proved the biggest hurdle for most tourists. The house was notoriously difficult to photograph at night; pictures would often come out completely black or red, extremely blurry, or having a sort of static quality like an old television. On a tour with fifty people, perhaps five might get a reasonable photo of the house on a given night. This was by far the most consistent oddity I encountered.

The house also had a noticeable physical effect on a small number of guests. No, no one was ever attacked or touched by something unseen, but there was something about this house that people inherently did not like, and that was great for business! Even before beginning my ghost story, people seemed quieter around the house and more apprehensive; often the rowdiest tourists seemed uneasy and subdued when they got close. Some guests would refuse to even stand on the same side of the street as the house, and they would listen to my story from a safe distance. More than once, as we crossed the open field to approach the site, a guest would ask, "we're not going to that house, are we?" Nausea, dizziness, anxiety, and depression were occasionally reported, and every few months, someone would get violently sick standing in the front yard. It was very rare to be sure, but a trend was noticeable over several months, and it was clear that the Peyton Randolph House was my best chance of a meaningful encounter.

It started with a photo late one night. It was after the hunt, and I returned to the house alone to see what I could find. I started snapping some photos of the windows and in one of the photos that turned up, something caught my eye.

Looking through the photos, I saw what almost looked like the top part of a face in the left windowpane. It was, I thought at the time, a creepy coincidence or weird reflection, but I figured it would be cool to share with my next hunt group. They love stories but if you can show them any kind of evidence, they really get excited. I left moments later because it was almost 2 am, there wasn't another human around and I thought I had just photographed a face; understandably, I was just a bit anxious. (It wasn't until later that I realized the "face" was NOT in the previous photos, however my dumb ass deleted those because there wasn't anything to see...)

I coasted on that photo for a few weeks. Guests loved the grainy, creepy quality and the misshapen ghost in the window. I had pretty much come to the conclusion it was a fun coincidence, what Bob Ross would call a Happy Accident, but I didn't feel as convinced in it as I did at 2 am the night it was taken. I was sure: sadly, it wasn't a ghost.

Except, I got it again.

With more detail.

This one was caught roughly a month later, about the same time of night, following another hunt, but this time with a new trainee in tow. I kind of froze when I saw what looked like those sunken eyes in the same pane; suddenly it did not feel like the coincidence it did before. We went into a frenzy, snapping photos to catch what we dubbed "the tall man" but to no avail. Whether it was a ghost or a trick of the light, we couldn't make the magic happen twice. As we admitted defeat, we sat down to study the photo. In that moment, we saw something that actually made the hair on my neck stand up.

Beneath those sunken, lifeless eyes, you can almost make out a face. A very faint nose, slightly lit on the left side giving it soft dimension. But it was what was beneath the nose that really gave me pause: TEETH. Three teeth in the upper jaw, fairly uniform in size and shape.

Between the apparent eyes, nose and teeth, all of which were positioned appropriately, this didn't feel like the coincidence I once believed it to be. My trainee and I just stared at this photo for a while (after moving to a bench a little way down the road just to be safe). It was not the encounter I had imagined, but there was something surreal about having hard evidence of something weird (I still won't ever definitively say "this is a ghost", but I have not been able to dismiss it as another event). We had experienced odd things before, but they often had reasonable explanations behind them. This time, we could not explain it. We could not replicate it. And we could not really accept that a camera artifact would create something of that detail.

Perhaps it is just a case of face pareidolia, the psychological phenomena in which we see faces in inanimate objects. Maybe it is just a really wild freaking coincidence. Or maybe, my brain finally saw the paranormal evidence I had hoped to see for so long. Whatever the case, this photo has been a favorite to share with friends and family over the years.

I continued giving tours for a few more months, and never stopped taking guests to the Peyton Randolph House on every tour. It was different from then on though; while I never distinctly held a feeling of being watched, I always had to wonder if there was not some unseen face in the left pane of that window staring back at us.