{"id":1496,"slug":"peyton-randolph-house-williamsburg-virginia","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The gambrel-roofed frame house at Nicholson and North England Streets is among the oldest buildings in Colonial Williamsburg — its west portion raised about 1715 for William Robertson. Sir John Randolph owned it from 1724 until his death in 1737, and his son Peyton Randolph took title in 1745 and lived there until 1775: Speaker of the House of Burgesses, president of the First Continental Congress, dead of a stroke while dining with Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia months before the Declaration. The widow kept it until 1783; General Rochambeau quartered there during the Yorktown campaign; the Peachy family held it through the first half of the nineteenth century; it served as a military hospital after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862; and the Restoration bought it in 1938. It is a National Historic Landmark.","It is also routinely called the most haunted house in Williamsburg — occasionally in America — though nobody agrees on the reason. The candidate ledger is long: an alleged curse laid by an enslaved woman named Eve, the spirits of enslaved people owned by the household, two Peachy children said to have died there, Civil War soldiers who succumbed in the wards, and a 19th-century anecdote of a spectral hand that barred General Lafayette at the door."]},{"heading":"The soldier upstairs","paragraphs":["Virginia tourism's telling is the modest end of the tradition: a young soldier seen inside the house and footsteps overhead, consistent with the building's war-hospital chapter. A newer entry in the file is physical: in December 2014 a firefighter answering an alarm found a fully discharged extinguisher sitting in the middle of a sealed east-wing room — pin gone, no powder anywhere — and said on camera he could only call it paranormal.","Colonial Williamsburg documents the deaths and leaves the ghosts to the tour trade; the file does the same — a founding father's house with a real casualty ledger, and a folklore layer that accreted one telling at a time."]}],"name":"Peyton Randolph House","aliases":[],"type":"HISTORIC_HOUSE","type_label":"Historic House","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["hauntings","historic-sites"],"desc":"Historic house associated with published local folklore.","full_desc":"Peyton Randolph House is a historic house in Williamsburg, Virginia. Historic house associated with published local folklore. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting.","address":null,"city":"Williamsburg","county":null,"state":"Virginia","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":37.269481,"lon":-76.708193,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery record. Coordinates, earliest legend source, independent history and current visitor rules require further verification.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":43.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":724,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Virginia Tourism recounts a young soldier apparition and upstairs footsteps. A house with Williamsburg's history behind it gives the reports a setting that needs no exaggeration. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. The apparition is the file's anchor — every other report orbits it.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.75,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"12 Haunted Sites in Virginia with True Ghost Stories","url":"https://www.virginia.org/blog/post/virginias-haunted-sites/","publisher":"Virginia Tourism Corporation","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Virginia Tourism recounts a young soldier apparition and upstairs footsteps. Peyton Randolph House in Williamsburg, Virginia is the kind of old house where every sound eventually gets a name. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The tale is the site's other archive — oral, embroidered, and outlasting the documents.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"12 Haunted Sites in Virginia with True Ghost Stories","url":"https://www.virginia.org/blog/post/virginias-haunted-sites/","publisher":"Virginia Tourism Corporation","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"12 Haunted Sites in Virginia with True Ghost Stories","url":"https://www.virginia.org/blog/post/virginias-haunted-sites/","publisher":"Virginia Tourism Corporation","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}