Black Horse Tavern, Old Mountain Road

The building is real and old — a one-story, three-bay log tavern raised about 1782 on the Carolina Road, the colonial wagon route that, in local history buff Ernie Rakes's phrasing, 'was the interstate back in the 1700s.' Taverns stood roughly a day's ride apart, and Black Horse welcomed travelers bound down the Roanoke Valley; local tradition puts Andrew Jackson under its roof several times on the road between Nashville and Washington, during and around his presidency.

The property accumulated around the log core: a temple-fronted brick office about 1840, and the two-story Greek Revival Bellvue Hotel — also called Kyle's Hotel — about 1854. In the mid-twentieth century the complex housed the Bellevue School for handicapped children, which closed in 1976; the property went back to a single-family residence, and the 4.2-acre whole was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002 as the Black Horse Tavern–Bellvue Hotel and Office. Roanoke County records in recent years note the 1782 structure came down after more than 230 years, with owner Frank Longaker undertaking what the county called a history-saving rebuild. 'There will never be another Black Horse Tavern,' Longaker said — which is why he was rebuilding it.

The rider is the file's only ghost, and he is unusually specific: white horse, plumed cavalry hat in the J.E.B. Stuart manner, a man searching the road toward Hollins for the love he lost. No version documents a death on the property or attaches him to a name or a war; he belongs to the road, and the tavern is simply the address the road keeps. Hollins University, down the way, keeps a haunted reputation of its own; the rider, per the local write-ups, is headed in its direction.

Sightings are thin even by legend standards. The 1994 account remains the sourced one — barn workers claiming the sight, an owner declining it, neighbors silent. 'There have been all kinds of stories and rumors and ghosts,' she told the paper. 'Maybe. Maybe not. They don't bother me.'

The same Times piece collects another address on Old Mountain Road — the Bellvue Plantation house, where owner Linda Selfe reported strange happenings and said she would not stay alone at night. The road, in other words, has a file of its own; the rider is just its most-quoted entry. Roanoke's ghost-tour circuit has since folded him into the program as 'the hazy horseman,' which is how folklore pays rent.

The site sits at the foot of Read Mountain where the Carolina Road ran, rebuilt or rebuilding, and it is private property — the dossier documents it and does not invite you in. The plumed hat has already outlasted the road it rode; the rider, if he keeps his route, keeps it to himself.