Kaines allow for ghostly visitor at Exec. Mansion

She can’t explain the light that burned brightly without electricity or the overturned salt dishes on the dining room table, so Anne Holton puts it this way:

“I think, well, it’s an old house,“ Holton said in an interview yesterday. “There’s room for her and us.“

“Us” would be Holton, husband, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and their children. “Her” would be the ghost of the Executive Mansion in Richmond.

Not that Holton has actually seen the ghost, but she’s lived in the mansion twice — her father, Linwood Holton, served as governor when she was a child — and she’s heard the stories. She’s open-minded enough not to dismiss the rumors of hauntings out-of-hand.

Rich in history, Richmond also is rich in ghost stories.

“People relive history through ghost stories,“ said Sandi Bergman, who operates Haunts of Richmond and leads ghost tours downtown. This is her busy season.

Bergman tells ghost stories about the Church Hill train tunnel where cave-ins killed workers and swallowed a locomotive; Monumental Church on Broad Street that was built as a memorial to the 72 who died in an 1811 theater fire and are buried beneath the church; the state Capitol, where an 1870 collapse killed dozens; and the Poe Museum because, well, it’s the Poe Museum.

The ghosts of these stories aren’t menacing, but are simply making their presence known. The Executive Mansion ghost is said to be a woman who attended a party there long ago, died the next day and may have returned because “she felt comfortable there,“ Bergman said.

Some stories involve humanlike figures that vanish when approached. Others focus on cold spots in warm rooms, the odd moving of objects, disembodied voices, train whistles, or faces in windows.

All require some suspension of reason to believe — unless you’re the one who experienced them. “I don’t see ghosts,“ Bergman said. “But I still believe in them because I hear some really believable stories.“

Anne Holton can tell a few.

She recalled during her childhood at the mansion when a storm came through and knocked out power for days. Everything went dark — except a light in the stairwell linked to the mansion ghost.

“Someone might have gotten hurt without a light, so we were always grateful to her,“ Holton said, laughing.

In those same years, the family came downstairs to breakfast one morning and found the salt from the small dishes at every place-setting dumped on the table.

Other ghostly pranks at the mansion include a sink where the hot water runs cold and the cold water hot “when it feels like it,“ Holton said. A private phone in the bedroom used to ring, very briefly, at the same late hour every week. Holton discovered that Gov. Mark Warner and his family had the same experience — though they had a different number.

After a hiatus, the phone rang again last month.

Then there was Thanksgiving a couple of years ago when a young nephew kept pointing to the stairway — the ghostly stairway — and asking, “Who’s that lady?“

No one else saw anything.

Bill Lohmann is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Follow him at http:// twitter.com/wlohmann.