The Unhappy Bride of Tuckahoe

Since moving into Tuckahoe a few years ago, Tad and Sue Thompson, a young modern couple with three small children, have either heard of, or personally experienced a few strange things at the house. "I guess the most distinct one," says Sue, "was one time in the middle of the night I woke up and heard the vague hum of voices downstairs, and a tinkling sound, like glasses or a chandelier. As I became fully awake, it sounded more like a party was going on, a really happy one. I roused Tad and said 'do you hear that,' and he said he did. It definitely sounded like a party, but it was muted. It was like it was far off somewhere. Tad went down to look but he didn't find anything. I'm not a great believer in this sort of thing, but it was very real that night. We heard something!

"There have been a couple of other things," Sue Thompson continues. "Once I saw someone or something in white at the little school house building. The door was open and I thought it was Tad. But it wasn't, and I never knew who it was. Other times I feel like I hear a baby crying in another part of the house, when I know all my children are accounted for."

Sue also tells of a time in April 1982 when an English woman friend of hers was visiting the plantation. "She went to the laundry room while I was in the kitchen, and she came back a few minutes later and appeared a littled startled. She asked me if I had been in the laundry room, but I told her I hadn't. She just stared at me. Then she told me she had seen something in there." On another occasion some friends were leaving Tuckahoe early one morning when they stopped to check a tire on the car. As they did, they happened to look toward the house. "They said they saw a figure in white near the garden toward the tool shed," Sue explains. "They said it was sort of hovering above the garden."

And one day Tad was showing a reporter about the house. They had just left one upstairs bedroom and crossed over to the Red Room when they heard a crash in the first room. It sounded like something had slid across a table and fallen to the floor, but when they went back in to look nothing was amiss. Yet the sound of the crash could be clearly heard on the reporter's tape recorder when they played it back.

Sue has a possible theory. "My feeling is that if there is an unhappy ghost at Tuckahoe, it might be Judith Randolph. She's buried here. She had a tragic life." The story behind this, as chronicled in "Mistress Nancy," and other books on Tuckahoe and the Randolph family, is that Judith was married to Richard Randolph many generations ago. There was an alleged scandal. Judith's younger sister, Nancy, was said to have had an affair with Richard and became pregnant. This was kept secret even from close family members. When the child arrived, delivered at another plantation by servants, it was either born dead or was killed, and the whole affair was hushed up. Nevertheless, ugly rumors circulated, so to clear up the matter, Richard, who was accused of snuffing out the baby's life, stood trial for murder. He was acquitted, as was Nancy, by a brilliant defense devised by none other than Patrick Henry.

Judith Randolph, however, later had a son who was born deaf. Deeply religious, she believed that in keeping quiet about what actually had transpired, the Lord was using this deafness to punish her, and she lived for years with guilt. Richard later died unexpectedly, and some have offered that he may have been poisoned by Judith. All of this leads Sue to wonder that if one of the ghosts of Tuckahoe is a sad one, could it be the return of Judith who grew up there so many years ago?

But by far the best known of all spirits at Tuckahoe is the "distressed bride with flowing hair" who, dressed in wedding veil and satin gown, wrings her hands as she "rushes along the Ghost Walk." This walk is a charming vista down a surfed alley lined with old fashioned or suffruticosa box, named in behalf of this spectral presence seen by many for more than 200 years. The legend is that she is running away from a husband she was forced to marry who was three times her age.

One account, in a faded newspaper clip published decades ago, tells of "a sad little ghost, whose tragedy is a matter of family record." She had been married when very young, and much against her own wishes, to a bridegroom many years her senior. "Shortly after her marriage, she died, presumably of that ailment dear in the memories of our ancestors —a broken heart—and lies in the family burial ground on the estate. We can let our fancy weave a very pretty story of an attractive if impecunious lover, whom her family would not permit her to marry rather than sacrificing her youth and beauty to age and wealth, an old familiar story."