Virginia Ghosts

by Marguerite Dupont Lee

Vintage softcover

255 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[Alleyne Dickens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite collection of Virginia Ghost stories.

[Jennifer pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up at a vintage shop for a few dollars. It looks to be from a small publisher, mine is not a hardcover, it has a card stock cover with what looks like a postcard glued on it with a photo of what I am assuming is a supposedly haunted Virginia house. The print/font is a little old fashioned looking. The content is more like historical accounts of ghosts and hauntings, not really stories, but I enjoyed reading it, and it was a tiny bit spooky in a few places. The best one is about a haunted church on a country road, told from the point of view someone who often had to pass it at night in a horse and carriage. It’s an interesting little book to add to my ghost story collection.

[w gall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each little story described the house, the gardens and trees, and the first and following owners and some of their families. The profusion of names made the persons hard to keep track of. Then the author launched into a brief description of the ghostly incidents. Fictional ghost stories draw out the incidents to enhance the melodrama. These stories relate the encounters as they really are, brief and relatively uneventful. I read up to page 63, and felt I had enough.

[Meg Koch · Rating 2 out of 5]

If your family has roots in 17th-19th century Virginia, this book might be of great interest. It is basically a catalogue of stories of Virginia house hauntings. Each chapter follow the same formula - introducing the house, the family and telling of the haunting. Has to be a vanity printing.

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Old-fashioned ghost stories collected in the 1930s by an interesting and independent-minded woman named Marguerite DuPont Lee. (My book is a reprint done in 1966). These tales do not have plots and invented dialog such as I have seen in modern ghost stories. These stories describe the history of the buildings and locations and the families associated with them (back to the 1700s in some cases) and then report the mysterious experiences folks have had in those places. They are more like accounts that you might hear if you were visiting the family in an old home that was reportedly haunted. Most are gentle stories, not harrowing, and the language and narrative style evoke days gone by and simpler times.