Ghosts, soul-mates and demons on the Tipton-Thornton Farm in the Shenandoah Valley

Chapter Sixteen

© Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

It was only during the period 2012-2018, when I was living in a house again and had plenty of time on my hands, due to lack of architecture work and a love life, that I became aware that my former farm was part of Toms Brook Plantation (1729), the first British settlement west of the Blue Ridge and Massanutten Mountains.  This was thirty years before Thomas Lord Fairfax began surveying out his inherited estate in order to attract settlers.  Therefore, it was along Toms Brook that occult refugees from Germany first settled.  (See https://apalacheresearch.com/2021/07/15/the-ancient-roots-of-the-shenandoah-valley/)  The presence of the occult in that stream valley certainly would have an affect on paranormal activities.

Like many people, I was not certain there was a such a thing as ghosts, before moving to the old house on Toms Brook.  They were scientifically illogical and the Bible mostly talked of Heaven and Hell, when discussing the afterlife.  However, both Jesus and the apostles did mention the word, ghost, so perhaps there was some sort of truth to the folklore.  It finally came down to “seeing is believing.”

The Creek Indians traditionally believed that people, who lived unrighteous lives were doomed to walk the Earth for eternity, lost in time and space. On the other hand, Creek elders, who were especially righteous were offered the honor by the Master of Life of being Grandmother and Grandfather spirits (guardian angels) or Spiritual Owls, who kept watch over Creek towns and warned the people when enemies were approaching the palisades.

Ghosts

What I did not know, when I moved to Virginia was that ghosts can take many forms.  The way they are portrayed in Shakespearian plays and movies are not necessarily their most common manifestations.  Now, if any house LOOKED LIKE it should be haunted, it was this one.  However, during the year that I worked on the restoration of the house,  I never saw anything that looked like how Hollywood movies portray ghosts.  But that is not the whole story.  I didn’t know much about ghosts until I was back to a more conventional lifestyle in Georgia . . . thus was bored and started watching movies on cable TV to ease the boredom.

Ghosts

What I did not know, when I moved to Virginia was that ghosts can take many forms.  The way they are portrayed in Shakespearian plays and movies are not necessarily their most common manifestations.  Now, if any house LOOKED LIKE it should be haunted, it was this one.  However, during the year that I worked on the restoration of the house,  I never saw anything that looked like how Hollywood movies portray ghosts.  But that is not the whole story.  I didn’t know much about ghosts until I was back to a more conventional lifestyle in Georgia . . . thus was bored and started watching movies on cable TV to ease the boredom.

That is not the whole story.  I didn’t know much about ghosts until I was back to a more conventional lifestyle in Georgia . . . thus was bored and started watching movies on cable TV to ease the boredom. I now know that prior to the more dramatic manifestations of paranormal activity in 1990, there were several incidents that either can be associated with the presence of ghosts or are pre-existing conditions that seem to attract ghosts.

Balls of light

During August of 1987, I comprehensively photographed the exterior and interior of the house in preparation for creating construction drawings.  When I picked up the developed photographs at a pharmacy in Asheville,  I was surprised to see balls of light in the Dining Room and Master Bedroom only.   There was no explanation for these round lights.  The flash attachment for my camera was rectangular and there was nothing in either of these rooms, which could have reflected light.  Later, both rooms would be associated with paranormal activity.

Skeletal remains

Virginia Power Company had already installed new electrical service to a new pole about 200 feet west of the house.  During the last week in October 1987, a well was dug in the field across the driveway from the house.  I noticed some bits of bone in the soil first removed by the drill.  I assumed that these were animal bones from the 250 years that the land had been farmed.

In early November 1987, the utility contractor began excavating ditches for the underground electrical service, plus electrical and water service to heated water fonts in the pastures.  I noticed bits of bone in all of the soil coming out of utility ditches in the pasture.   Again, I assumed that they were the remnants of old animal bones.

The contractor then had to cut three transverse ditches across the driveway to the basement of the house to run the main electrical supply conduit, the main water supply pipe and branch water/electrical supply for the heated water pumps.  His ditch digging machine encountered a definite human foot bone when excavating the 36” deep trench for the water line. 

As required by law, I stopped work, but had no phone to call the coroner.  Cellular service would not come to our section of the Valley until 1991.   In 1990, Shenandoah Telephone became the first company in Virginia to offer cellular service to rural customers.   I began playing telephone tag between the coroner’s office and my phone in a rental house near Woodstock.

I instructed the contractor to cut a diagonal trench that veered around the grave then began carefully exposing the skeleton.  The man had suffered terrible damage to one hip from a bullet that almost penetrated it.  The cracks and chipped bone areas of the ilium bone had started healing when he died.  The skull was in pretty good shape.  The teeth looked like that of a young man.  I found some Confederate brass buttons and a Virginia CSA belt buckle, but left them in place.  I didn’t know that the buckle could be worth several thousand dollars! 

I covered the skeleton with a plastic tarp and some rocks to hold down the tarp then waited for the coroner and an archaeologist to arrive.  They never came.  Almost the entire contents of the grave were removed on the night of November 14, 1987.   Bone fragments were also in the soil of the other two trenches as they crossed the yard into the house, but there were no recognizable bones.   It was not until contacted in person by a National Park Service historian about a year later, did I know that our farm was the site of the third largest cavalry battle of the American Civil War!

It was only in 1989 as the National Park Service archaeologists were studying our farm did, we realize that wounded Confederate soldiers, who had died in the house, when it was used as a hospital, were buried in the yard.  A fairly large cemetery was located across the driveway for the dead of those who died in French and Indian War skirmishes and the Confederate dead at the Battle of Toms Brook.  Those graves were extremely shallow.  The bone fragments had been thoroughly shredded and mixed with the soil by many generations of plowing.  National Park Service archaeologists determined that it would almost be impossible to associate any bone fragment with any individual burial.

Bloodstains on the floors

During the winter of 1987-1988,  we sanded the ancient virgin pine floors and were surprised to find deep blood stains in many locations.   Next to one of the major bloodstains on the north side of the Dining Room floor, some wounded Confederate prisoner-of-war had carved the date . . . Oct 10, 1864. That’s the day after the Battle of Toms Brook, but we did not know that at the time.

In the autumn, we learned from the National Park Service that our house had served as both a Confederate and Union hospital during the American Civil War.  The east side of the farm had been the site of a small cavalry battle on October 7, 1864 in which a troop of the Laurel Brigade ( 7^th Virginia Cavalry & 12^th Virginia Cavalry) ambushed a troop of Michigan Calvary that had been burning barns and stealing livestock.

 The Michigan men were driven from the field, but their top commander, Major General Phillip Sheridan, was not amused. He ordered all available cavalry units to attack the Confederate cavalry army, camped along Toms Brook and Spiker’s Hill.  On October 9^th, 1864 snow flurries were blowing, but that did not deter a broad attack by the Union Cavalry.   Some of the Union Cavalry sneaked westward to the hidden ravine, where Toms Brook passed Spikers Hill.  They attacked the rear of the Confederate’s west flank . . . causing the entire line of Confederate units to panic and flee southward. In total number of combatants, it was the third largest cavalry battle of the American Civil War. That’s certainly a history, which would be inclined to produce ghosts.

Ribbons of light

When we moved into the almost finished house in the autumn of 1988, I occasionally began to see a phenomenon that I would not understand until watching a TV documentary on the paranormal, while living again in Georgia. On nights with the wind was not blowing and the sky was clear, I would sometimes see ribbons of light streak across the pasture, immediately to the south of the house.   That is the area where bodies from the French and Indian War and Battle of Toms Brook were buried.  The latter were only the unmarked graves of Confederate dead, because graves of Union soldiers were carefully marked and recorded in the journals of officers, so that they could be exhumed after hostilities ceased.

At the time, I assumed that these ribbons of energy had something to do with the many top secret military activities in Northern Virginia and eastern West Virginia.  The most likely candidate was a secret US Navy facility on the eastern edge that was used to communicate with submarines via radio waves that traveled through the earth’s crust.  Yes, really!   There are a lot of things that the public is not told.  The way we found out was that Navy ground radio facility experimented with another frequency, which caused all the Leading Edge computers, mine included to crash permanently.  The company had to issue us new hard drives that had some sort of protection from these radio waves emanating from the soil beneath our feet.  Well,  it was quite possible that these electromagnetic pulses WERE disturbing the ghosts.

Long time ghost resident

The first mention that we heard of ghosts was when I bought a used manure spreader in April 1989.  A couple pulled it over to my farm with a diesel pickup.  The woman said that she had grown up near our farm.  On many occasions during the summer at dusk, when the air was still, they would see the ghost of “Old Man Wisman” sitting on the front porch, puffing on a pipe.  I never saw the ghost of Old Man Wisman.  From time to time, as the sun sunk behind Little North Mountain, the dogs would bark in a friendly manner to a spirit that they could see, but we couldn’t.  Perhaps that was the Old Man Wisman ghost.

The little girl, who died in 1832

In late 1989,  Jacky Lawson, a recently divorced mother and her three daughters from Fairfax County bought the farm, which adjoined the rear of our property. The oldest daughter of the single parent family was in college.  They planned to raise steeplechase race thoroughbreds and open a jewelry store in Woodstock.  The house mainly needed painting, new appliances and a modern electrical panel.  The pastures were overgrown and needed some work.

The man, hired to bushhog the pastures, clobbered his bushhog blade, when it slammed into a circle of stones on a natural terrace near Toms Brook.  This was on the edge of their property closest to my farm.  It was a burial!  Lying face down was an engraved tombstone.  It was for a girl named Mary Snarr, who was born in 1822 and murdered on May 1, 1832. 

Jacky Lawson did some research at the library and learned that the body of Mary had been found hanging in her bedroom.  The coroner ruled the death a murder, but no one was ever charged.  What was odd, though, was that the farm was adjacent to St. Matthew Lutheran Church.  All the other Snarr’s were buried there.  Why would an innocent little girl be buried alone, next to a creek?  The tombstone did say that

Once the mother and two daughters in high school moved into the house, they began hearing sweeping sounds coming from the third bedroom, which was designated for the sister in college.  During the night, they would race into the room with flashlights and see nothing.   The mother thought that her daughters were merely being wussy suburbanites, not used to being away from street lights.

The two teenage girls did not mention the sounds, when their sister came home for Christmas holidays. They also didn’t tell her that she had been assigned Mary Snarr’s bedroom.   Well, the college coed entered the twilight zone that night.  She was awakened by sweeping sounds then was petrified to see a pretty little girl with blond hair standing beside her bed.  The little girl spoke something in German, which the terrified college coed couldn’t understand.  She refused to sleep in the room another night and slept on the couch downstairs.  Soon the other two girls refused to sleep upstairs.  Eventually, they moved their library and den upstairs and built a two-bedroom addition downstairs.  The older daughter found a boyfriend to move in with between academic quarters.  She was terrified of that house.

The story doesn’t end there.  When Vivi the French Courtesan and Aimee showed up at my farm in mid-June 1992,  Vivi requested that Aimee sleep on a palette beside our bed for the first few nights. All Aimee knew was living in an apartment in Paris, where street lights and car lights illuminated the night. Also, I think Vivi was testing me to see if I had enough self-discipline to behave appropriately in front of young children.  I did.

It wasn’t a total sacrifice.  After saying her prayer the first night, Aimee asked me in French to snuggle with and kiss her mother, so she would be happy.  That’s all we did . . . sort of.  

Our guest bedroom faced the bright area light on the edge of the pasture, which was literally a street light.  That gave comfort to Aimee in her first night in her own bedroom.  Prior to moving Aimee from a palette to her own bed,  Vivi had bought a pickup truck load of stuffed animals from the Toys-R-Us in Winchester.  They made the guest bedroom look like a child’s bedroom.

Well, during the middle of the night, we heard Rob Roy the male herd dog bouncing up and down as if happy then Aimee’s voice calling for her Mommy.   Vivi got up and opened the door.  I couldn’t understand Aimee’s French, but Vivi said that Aimee said that there was a nice little girl in her room.  Aimee wanted to know if the little girl could stay in the house and become her friend.  Thinking that Aimee had merely seen one of the stuffed animals in the dark, Vivi said, “Oui bien sûr.” [Yes, of course.]

About 3:00 AM in the third night of us having quality time alone, Vivi woke me up, terrified.  “Richard, there is someone in the house! The badmen have broken in the door.”  I heard nothing and assured her that with our male dog at the entrance to the Master Bedroom and the two females downstairs, all hell would have broken loose, if anyone had tried to break in.  She wasn’t satisfied so I grabbed a rifle and accompanied by Rob Roy, our big male, I went downstairs.   There I saw the two female dogs grinning and wagging their tails.  They had just been playing.  She had heard dog footsteps.

Well, no . . . when we went downstairs for breakfast in the morning,  the pantry door was open and a broom was leaning against the wall, next to the mudroom door.  There was a pile of the type dust that you find under furniture or beds . . . in the middle of the kitchen floor.  There was another pile of the same type dust in the Keeping Room.  I will never, ever forget those sights.  At least twice a week, we would hear a broom sweeping the floor downstairs and sometimes a little girl giggling.   There would always be piles of dust on the floor in the morning.  We figured that as long as Aimee was not frightened, we wouldn’t be either.

The early evening of the day that Vivi and Aimee had to fly back to Paris, I heard the dogs barking with joy.  They were prancing along the driveway to the barn, wagging their tails and looking up at a face, which was invisible to me. I heard a little girl’s voice saying, “Es wird gut” Several times. [It will be alright.]

I wrote my friend, Dawn the psychologist, in Wilmington, Delaware about the experience.  She wrote back that May 1^st was the witch holiday of Beltane.  In northern Europe, during pre-Christian times, it was customer to sacrifice a preadolescent girl or boy or both on Beltane to assure good crops for the coming growing season.  Alternatively,  her parents could have murdered her because they thought she was possessed by demons.  That would explain the placement of a grave in a remote location.

Soul-Mixing and Jumping Demons

Eyewitness accounts of the Creek People in Georgia infrequently mentioned both ghosts and the human soul.   In general,  the Creeks considered most ghosts to be the souls of those persons, who were either ancestors stopping by to pay a visit or other person insufficiently righteous to be allowed in the Creek version of Heaven.  Nevertheless, they were submissive to the Master of Life and therefore not a mortal threat.  In fact, some ghosts were kin carrying messages from the spirit world.

Especially, righteous grandparents were offered the opportunity by the Master of Life to take a physical manifestation as owls so that they could guard Creek towns.  In contrast,  Cherokee and Iroquoian tribes were terrified of owls as being harbingers of death.

Soul-mixing: I don’t recall my grandparents ever mentioning ghosts.  I also don’t recall anyone in my mother’s family, talking about animals having souls . . . but I am convinced that dogs do have souls.    My grandmother did talk a lot about human souls and demonic souls, however.  That probably represents our Apalachete Creek heritage.  The Apalachete were different than the Muskogee-speaking Creeks.  Apalachete were the result of mixing Uchee indigenous tribes with Panoan immigrants from Peru and Itza Maya/Sokee immigrants from southern Mexico.  

My grandmother said that there were five types of souls . . . light souls, gray souls, dark souls, no souls and demonic souls. When I became a teenager, she began warning me about kissing “bad” girls with dark souls. She said that when two people mix their bodily fluids (such as saliva) part of their souls move into the other person, sometimes forever.  She defined a happy marriage for eternity as one in which two souls mix so much that they become one.

Just before I turned 18,  my grandmother began warning me about sleeping with “bad” girls.  This activity was much more dangerous than kissing because not only could her dark soul turn my soul to gray quickly, but also demons could jump from her to me and take control of me.

Several years ago, a team of biologists and geneticists were studying the human cells associated with the female cervix, human papillomavirus virus (HPV) infections and a new type of throat cancer that has become a deadly killer of adult males.  They were stunned to discover that the cervix and human mouth are lined with almost identical types of cells.   This type of cell has the previously unknown capability of absorbing the DNA from the cells of other humans.  This makes them very vulnerable to being taken over by HPV viruses.

That’s right, it is possible for you to carry in those linings the genes of every other person you have kissed or had intimacy with.   A scary thought!   You can’t just “wash that man right out of your hair.”  They found that when people are in love . . . whatever that is . . . the body is awash with hormones, which make both the male and female more fertile, but also vastly increase the inclination of cervical and mouth lining cells to absorb the DNA of their love partner.  Whether or not souls mix, it is a scientific fact that the mixing of bio-chemicals and genes does occur. 

Demons and demonic possession

Unlike most Native American tribes, the Creeks did not particularly fear spiritual demons, but recognized that individuals afflicted with demonic possession could do a great deal of damage.

Now the Bible does talk a great deal about demons.  They made appearances at the Toms Brook Farm also.  I could have done just fine without the demons.

Of course, the most memorable passage in the New Testament in regard to demons also included a herd of pigs. [Matthew 8:28-34]  A demonically possessed man in the town of Gadara was brought to Jesus.  Jesus drew the demons out of the man and cast them into a herd of pigs, who ran down a hill and drowned themselves in the Jordan River.

Demonic possession is quite real.  A dark or hostile soul can take control of an individual, a crowd or a nation.  Grandmama Ruby (Mahala) explained that dark or demonic souls have no power in themselves, but they could take possession of human bodies to do their evil.  When especially evil demons took control of individuals, they could become so powerful as to cause groups of people to become demonically controlled.  The end result would be murders, riots, lynch mobs or in the most horrific case, Nazi Germany.

Sleep-walking demonic possession

Beginning in early 1990,  my former wife began frequently to walk around the house in her sleep. Either with a man’s voice, she would be speaking an unintelligible language . . . or with a woman’s voice, speaking with a slight British accent, she would say things like “Where am I, where are you or when are you coming back?”  I thought that the latter personality was Mary Tipton, who died in childbirth in the Master Bedroom. Whatever the case, my former wife would remember nothing after I woke her up . . . but would push me away, if I tried to touch her.

Years later,  Susan the FBI agent proposed a possible explanation why my former wife would not let me sleep, kiss or touch her.   Susan suggested that the demons within my ex found my touch toxic.  She pointed out that in both her situation and Vivi’s, a warm embrace had driven their single demons away.  Who knows?   There is so much that we don’t know about the spiritual world.  Let’s talk about Vivi and Susan’s experiences with demonic possession.

Demonic possession in two modern ladies

The heroines of the Shenandoah Chronicles, Vivi and Susan, always insisted that they were demonically possessed until they hugged me the first time.  Both also said that although the demon or demons were in control of their behavior at least part of the time, they did not truly realize that they had been “possessed” until the demons were gone.

Vivi said that when the government starting pushing her into being essentially a courtesan is when her life began becoming unbearable.  She felt like a captive on multiple leashes.  The evilest demon took control of her, after she was defiled by the Saudi Arabian prince in Switzerland.  This demon repeatedly told her that God wanted her to kill herself as punishment for ignoring her daughter and simultaneously Satan was demanding her soul as payment for making her success in entertainment.

Thinking back to the time before she was born again . . . mid-December 1990 . . . Vivi could see that there was definitely an aspect of her behavior, which began as a teenager, which brought on this demonic possession.  Born in December 1963, Vivi grew up with the Women’s Liberation Movement. The Pill was legalized in 1967 and made free for all French women in 1973. She went through puberty about the same time that a law permitting teenage girls, 16 and older, to be prescribed the Pill by doctors without a parent’s permission. In the same law, all boys 13 and over could get free condoms.  Thus, she was telling me the truth that she could not even remember her first experience.

Vivi eventually realized that every time that she had any sort of physical contact with an evil male, she seemed to add yet another demon (more misery) to her life, even though she acted in public as if she was a happy, carefree coquette.   Now this observation confirms exactly what my Creek grandmother said.

I might add that I have also learned in recent months that Vivi and I carry the same Southern Mesoamerican DNA markers.  Of course, I did not even know in 1991 that the Creeks came from Mexico.   At some point this past seven months, Vivi went to a psychic in hope of understanding our current relationship.  Without knowing anything about me, the psychic said that in an earlier life, long, long ago, she had been married to a man in southern Mexico, who in this life lives somewhere in the southern United States.  The psychic added that we would be soulmates forever.

Even during her two years in the United States, while she was looking for me, Vivi had already been a participant in the Big Sister program, whereby she was a friend and counselor to teenage girls, who had gotten in trouble with the law or addicted to drugs.  In France, she became more pro-active with her counseling work . . . in conjunction with Église protestante unie de France. She has been a foster mother/sister for many girls, plus adopted five children, in addition to the two she bore.   

Just like Vivi once did,  most of the girls, Vivi worked with,  have tried to substitute psychotrophic drugs or meaningless sex as a substitute for lack of love in their family or in their relationships with young men. Always, Vivi’s first message to them is “Le sexe sans amour n’est qu’une autre drogue”  – Sex without love is just another drug.

Susan carried a demon with a simpler obsession and the opposite result.  From the time of puberty onward, the demon would cause her to say stupid things or act crazy when she was around boys then men, she was especially attracted to.  Her bizarre behavior would always drive men away, before even kissing her. Yet in the classroom or at work she seemed unusually mature and self-disciplined. 

In our first practice session at her home, Susan’s sudden bizarre behavior also had me walking toward the door, but then she starting crying.  I am always a sucker for crying women. The rest is history.

My brief demonic possession:  I had one brief experience with demonic possession.  It was on Friday November 23, 1990 . . . the day after Thanksgiving . . . Black Friday . . .  three weeks before I was to meet Vivi for the first time.  My parents, sister, brother-in-law and niece went to Rich’s Department Store in Downtown Atlanta.  My niece rode the famous Pink Pig Flyer.  We then walked over to Underground Atlanta.  I started feeling a little weird.

Some trashy looking boys in their late teens were standing off to the side of a stairway, watching us approach the stairway.  Just as my sister reached the top of the stairs, they slipped closer and a whistled at her.

Normally, I would have paid little attention to their behavior other than considering them jerks.  However, something took control of my brain and told me to go beat up the teens.   After 12 years of rigorous mountainside farming, I was quite capable of that.  Then some rational force took over and reminded me that the punks had been watching us from a long distance.  This was a set up.  I felt like I had been drugged, but couldn’t figure out who would do such a thing.  Never forgot that feeling of someone or something taken control of my brain, however.

An industrial strength demon

You will learn in the next chapter that after Vivi left for Paris, my former wife arrived back on the farm.  She claimed to have not mentioned anything about us filing for a divorce in August.  After I played the tape of her asking for a divorce yet again and telling me to have a list of our properties prepared by August,  she went into a zombie like state.  Her body froze and she stared out into space for about a minute . . . then remembered nothing.

About a week later, the anti-wife drove down to Georgia again to start a new teaching job. I tried sleeping in the Master Bedroom alone, but could not sleep well.  I don’t know if I was just experiencing postpartum depression – aka missing Vivi being beside me – or was sensitive to a demonic presence in the room.  I moved back to my old jail cell.   By the third week in August the nights become much cooler.  I decided to raise the windows in the bedroom.  I woke up that night from what I thought was a nightmare.  In the dream, something really evil had been watching me from the window on the east façade of the bedroom.

The next night I woke up to all three dogs in my bedroom, barking ferociously and biting at a creature on top of me.  Its claws were buried in my chest.  Its head was a skull, but he was wearing a cardinal’s red cassock and hood.  An upside-down cross was suspended from his neck.  In panic, the only thing I knew to do was yell, “In the name of Jesus Christ, be gone!” 

By golly, just like in the movies, the demon withdrew back through the window screen about 15 feet away, with the dogs chasing and barking after him. I never slept with the windows open in that house again.   Two days later, eight Virginia State policemen and a Commonwealth’s Attorney would attempt to kill me.  My life was saved by an African-American US Marshall.  Always had a fond spot in my heart for US Marshalls after that day.

The last night that I spent in the old farmhouse on Toms Brook was July 20, 1996.  Juliana the Schoolteacher was with me.  Nothing weird happened at all, even though I hoped that Juliana would at least get to experience the sweet little Sweeping Ghost Girl. I did kiss her on the forehead in the shower, but didn’t tell her the significance.  With the anti-wife gone, all the evil spirits on the farm were no longer interested in us.  Juliana did get to join the exclusive club for women that had only one other member . . . Vivi.  Susan the FBI agent was actually never in my Virginia farmhouse and just on the farm once.

On Friday, I had met with National Park Service Director Roger Kennedy about a huge grant that Cobb County, GA was getting for restoration of Civil War fortifications. It was in that meeting that I learned that Vivi had stayed in Virginia for two years looking for me.  She had stopped by Roger’s office to say goodbye, just before flying back to France with her 9-year-old daughter and 2- year-old son. 

The Truth is out there somewhere!