Hollywood Cemetery

The cemetery underneath the legend is one of America's most document-rich burial grounds. Joshua Fry and William Haxall bought 42 acres from Lewis E. Harvie on June 3, 1847, for $4,075, and hired John Notman — the landscape architect of Philadelphia's Laurel Hill — to lay it out in the rural garden style. Notman proposed the name for its hollies. The grounds have grown to 135 acres on a James River bluff.

The interment ledger reads like a government directory: presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, twenty-five Confederate generals including J.E.B. Stuart and George Pickett, and some 18,000 Confederate dead beneath a 90-foot dry-laid stone pyramid raised in 1869. The cemetery has hosted Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies since 1866 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1969.

William Wortham Pool was not a vampire; he was a bookkeeper for the Bryan newspaper estate, a Mason, a lifelong member of Central Methodist Church, and a resident of Woodland Heights. He built the mausoleum after his wife Alice died on February 6, 1913 — hence the date over the portal — and joined her there in February 1922, dead of pneumonia at 75.

The legend's mechanics are legible. Frugality dictated initials rather than a full name, and the double Ws over the door can be read, by a suspicious eye, as fangs; the tomb's Egyptian and Masonic ornament did the rest. Richmond students were circulating the vampire story by the 1960s, and its first known printing is a 1976 article in the Commonwealth Times. Folklorist Gregory Maitland, of the Virginia Ghosts and Haunting Research Society, traces the bloodied figure itself to Benjamin Mosby — a 28-year-old fireman who escaped the tunnel burned and broken-toothed, and who is buried, with a straight face on the record's part, in Hollywood Cemetery.

The vampire's documented footprint is thin but persistent. Medical students once broke into the cemetery intending to steal Pool's remains; a groundskeeper reportedly found broken glass inside the sealed tomb, a detail preserved in the book Haunted Richmond. The tunnel-merge version of the story — creature fleeing the 1925 collapse into the mausoleum — does not appear in print until 2007 and online around 2001, though it is now the version everyone tells.

The file's verdict is that of every researcher who has worked the case: the tunnel disaster is documented, the vampire is not. Hollywood Cemetery remains open to visitors, who still leave notes and offerings at the Pool tomb — the only monument in a cemetery of presidents that has to explain itself.