Ghost Stories Dimitri Hepburn

Ghost Stories

Dimitri Hepburn

When I taught middle school, we used to take our 8th graders on a college tour to either Washington D.C. and its surrounding areas or to Atlanta. On one of the trips, we had the opportunity to visit one of the oldest plantations in the country. It was one of the very first plantations in Virginia. The plantation was still owned by the same family that had owned it since its very first years. Direct descendents of slave masters lived in the house. They waved from a window at my students and me. It was strange, as strange as it would have been if an alien had landed on the roof of the big old house and waved at us. We toured the property and the first floor of the main house. We heard ghost stories about a woman depicted in a painting. The frame of the painting was beat up and battered from all the places it had mysteriously fallen off the wall on its own, a manifestation of the late subject’s disappointment with the positioning of her painting. We were told that moving the painting to a place where she had a view through the window to one of her favorite spots on the property was enough to put her soul at ease. It was hard to believe ghost stories after that moment. In all those hundreds of years that black men, women, and children were owned, raped, beaten, tortured, killed, insulted, and who knows what else and none of those souls had reason to haunt the house? Were they still bound by the slavemaster’s rules in the afterlife? Did they not have more reason to be restless souls than this woman who did not like the view from where her painting hung on the wall?