Come on boys and ghouls! It's time to hop on Route 666 for a spooktacular Paranormal Road Trip.
This week's stop is Washington D.C. and our special guide is R.S. Belcher, author of NIGHTWISE.
Washington D.C.'s Top 5 Spooky Places
The characters in my novel, Nightwise, pay a visit to Washington D.C.
and attempt to run a caper on the occult agencies of the U.S. shadow
government. I used to live in D.C. when I was going to graduate school
and working as a private detective. I found it to be a fascinating city
with a very unique feeling of power, criminality, culture, antiquity,
and weirdness—the city hums with all of it.
So when I lived in D.C. and then, years later, when I researched my
characters coming to town to stir up trouble, I discovered all kinds of
cool and strange things about the District. I thought I'd share them
with you as part of your paranormal road trip.
The Octagon House: This home in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood is
reported to be one of the most haunted locations in the District. The
Octagon is one of the oldest buildings in Washington D.C. and was built
in 1799. The house was declared a national historical landmark in 1960
and opened as a museum in 1970.
There has been all manner of supernatural phenomena and entities
reported in Octagon House over the centuries. As far back as the
1800's, spectral servant bells ringing are recorded through much of the
house's early history, even after the cords for the bells were cut.
Ghostly apparitions have been sighted on the stairs and stair landings,
as well as the ghost of First Lady, Dolly Madison, who has been seen in
the house on multiple occasions. The Madison's resided in the house
briefly after the burning of the White House by the British in the War
of 1812.
In 1888, a team of twelve men entered the home to either prove or debunk
the claims of supernatural activity. A first-person account of what
happened published after the group's overnight stay reported all manner
of activity in the home including bloodcurdling screams, the tromping
sound of boots, and the clanking of sabers.
The Reston Monkey House: This house was in the suburbs of D.C. , in the
quiet little community of Reston, Virginia and was the site where the
Hazelton Labs animal containment facility once stood. This innocuous
building, which was destroyed in 1995 by the owner after numerous failed
attempts to rent it, is the birth place of the first reported
American-based strain of the Ebola virus—Reston Virus, or RESTV. This
strain of Ebola was only lethal to non-human primates, but its close
relation to the Ebola strain that infects humans, viruses nasty habit of
mutating, and the facility's close location to the U.S. Capitol set off
all manner official and unofficial red flags in the 90s.
The Monkey house and its unfortunate residents—long-tailed macaques—are
highlighted in the novel, The Hot Zone by Robert Preston. Don't read it
when you're coming down with the flu. You'll be comforted to know if
you visit the site today, the new building located where the Monkey
House once was has been home to a series of child care related
businesses for decades.
The Lair of the Demon Cat: Legend has it a demon stalks the sub-levels
of the nation's Capitol Building. Washington has a semi-secret
underground city—miles of tunnels, corridors, and connecting sub-levels
that run between the numerous Federal buildings. The workers and
security personnel that navigate the maze of tunnels have reported
encountering a creature that takes the form of a black cat with hypnotic
yellow eyes. This creature, Federal workers have nicknamed “DC,” has
shown up since shortly after the construction of the Capitol in 1793.
The Demon Cat is said to appear to someone just prior to some national
tragedy, like the assassination of presidents, the stock market crash
that led to the great depression and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Security guards have claimed to fire on the cat as it came toward them,
growing in size and ferocity, only to vanish as it pounced, untouched by
the gunfire. The tales have bounced around the Capitol for over a
century. The legend may date back to the 19th century when building
caretakers employed cats to deal with the building's rodent problems. I
have even heard that there is a pair of small cat footprint tracks
embedded in the stone floor of the Capitol Rotunda near the old entrance
to the Senate hall. One of the D.C. Roller derby teams call themselves
the “D.C. DemonCats.”
Rock Creek Park: A beautiful and serene oasis of green in the concrete
heart of D.C. the park is often a refuge for joggers, lovers, and those
looking to disconnect for a little while from the hum of the urban
hive; however, the solitude attracts others with less innocent intent.
Rock Creek has a long history of being the final resting place of
victims of murders and suicides. The most famous of these in recent
memory is Chandra Levy, the intern and lover of Representative Gary
Condit. Levy's remains were discovered in the park in the early 2000s.
Rock Creek has developed an infamous reputation as a hunting ground for
serial killers, muggers and rapists looking for isolated prey. There
have been numerous discoveries of slaughtered animals in the park that
authorities and park police attribute to sacrifices made as part of the
Santeria religion. The darker aspect of Santeria—Palo Mayombe—is
popular with certain drug gangs in the District looking to get a
supernatural edge on their competition.
The Underground World of Harrison Dyar: In 1928, a truck driving near
21st and P street in the District fell into the earth as the street
beneath it collapsed. The incident revealed an intricate series of
elaborate tunnels stretching beneath the city streets, inducing bricked
walls, plastered six-foot arched ceilings, and electrical lighting.
Further investigation could not determine the architect of the covert
network of tunnels or what purpose for which they were created.
Enter Harrison G. Dyar—an entomologist with the Smithsonian, who claimed
the maze of tunnels were a hobby of his with no ulterior motive and
that he simply loved to dig. Dyar stated to the press, when he came
forward to claim the tunnels as his work, that he had discovered this
passion while digging in his wife's backyard garden in 1905 and simply
kept going. Dyar was a non-descript, hunched man of 58 in 1928 and
seemed physically incapable of such an elaborate project on his own. He
admitted to digging other tunnels under the streets of the District,
including a massive bunker chamber and more tunnels including pipe
ladders to access the various levels. This complex reached the water
table under B Street. You could toss pebbles into the darkness at the
end of one such tunnel and here it splash in the water below.
There were strange things about Dyar's underworld that were never
explained to anyone's satisfaction, including sculptures of human and
animal heads on the walls at intermittent points along the tunnels, and
on one tunnel arch, a Latin inscription—“ Facilis Descensus Averno”—from
Virgil, it translates to “The way down to the lower world is easy.”
Dyar never had a chance to be pressed on any more details to his odd,
and seemingly, incomplete story. He died at his desk of a stroke in
1929.
Many theories and rumors persist about the reason for the
tunnels, including one tale that claims that Dyar had two families and
used the tunnels to move between houses and another tale that he
suffered some form of mania that compelled him to keep digging. The
underworld of the mysterious scientist still exists, but the known
entrances have all been sealed with concrete.
Thank you R.S. for giving us such a haunting tour of D.C.!
To learn more about R.S. Belcher and his books, please visit his website. You can
add Nightwise here on Goodreads.
What did you think of R.S. Belcher's picks for spooky places?
On our last Paranormal Road Trip we visited
New York City with Shanna Swendson. Next week we'll be traveling to Los Angeles with Rachel Marks.
Join us for another spine-tingling Paranormal Road Trip...
if you dare!
