Ferry Plantation House

The current house is a ten-room, central-passage Federal farmhouse facing the western branch of the Lynnhaven — three-course American bond brick under what was originally oyster-shell stucco, with heart-of-pine floors and an 1850 northwest wing. It stayed in the McIntosh family for more than sixty years, went to the City of Virginia Beach in 1996, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 20, 2005. An on-site excavation exposes the old brick floor of the earlier buildings.

The ferry, the courthouse, the manor, the farm — the file's history is layered literally, which matters because the haunting claims are layered the same way.

Volunteers at the house put the resident count at eleven and can name them: Charles, Isabel, Bessie, Eric, Julie, Nanny, George, Cora, Stella, Belinda and Henry. Henry is the best documented presence the file holds — an enslaved man who lived in the third-floor quarters of the old kitchen wing, stayed on the plantation after Emancipation, and answered paranormal investigators' EVP sessions, the record says, with the opinion that his favorite pastime was "goin' fishin'." He is also credited, in local memory, with running into the burning manor house in 1828 to pull people out.

The most-quoted report is residual rather than interactive: in the 1980s, caretakers hired by the last private owner watched an elderly Black man come up from the basement on Saturday evenings, cross the room, and kneel before the west wall on some long-ago task. When that room was later restored, a fireplace was found behind the wall. Other filed spirits include Sally Rebecca Walke, who mourns a dead fiancé; a Lady in White said to have broken her neck on the stairs; the artist Thomas Williamson, seen at the top of the stairs mid-brushstroke; two children pressed against the second-story landing; victims of an 1810 wreck at the ferry landing; and dragging chains attributed, reasonably enough, to the courthouse days.

The Friends of the Ferry Plantation House run the building as a museum and education center, with a summer history camp, an annual Grace Sherwood Festival that reenacts the ducking, and an October spirit tour marketed as the Stroll of Lost Souls. Volunteers are matter-of-fact about the roster; the National Register nomination is matter-of-fact about everything else.

Between the two documents a visitor gets the file's full shape: four centuries of Lynnhaven crossings, one convicted witch, and eleven spirits whose names, at least, are on record.