The Twelve Nightmares of Christmas: Day Two

There is a haunted house in Church Hill, Virginia, ancestral home of the Throckmorton family. Generations have lived here, and one of the family keeps returning after death.

Elizabeth Throckmorton died soon after she was buried. She had wasted away after her father had forbidden her to be courted by an Englishman he didn’t find suitable as a match. Elizabeth had met William Taliaferro on a visit to London, and had fallen in love. Elizabeth’s father, however, thought that Taliaferro just wanted to marry Elizabeth for her money, and he intercepted the couple’s love letters. The young woman pined after her lost love, and after his letters stopped coming, she lost the will to live.

Everyone assumed that Elizabeth had died from a broken heart, but in reality, she had only slipped into a catatonic state. She was roused from her coma by grave robbers. According to lore, two of the family’s slaves dug up the casket to get at the jewelry on the corpse. They removed her earrings and necklace easily, then tried to wrench the rings from her fingers. When that didn’t work, they tried to cut Elizabeth’s half-frozen fingers off with a sharp hunting knife. The pain and shock woke the girl from her coma.

Frail as she was, Elizabeth managed to climb out of her grave and make her way up to the manor house. But there, her journey back to life ended. No one inside the house could hear her knocking on the massive front door, and she froze to death on the front porch, in the raging swirls of a vicious blizzard. Another slave found her the next morning, her body covered with the snow that had fallen overnight.

Now, whenever it snows, the family members that still live in the house are visited by Elizabeth’s spirit. Visitors to Church Hill have seen a trail of blood leading from the family plot to the front door of the manor house. Happily, another manifestation is more cheering. The family can hear the sounds of light footsteps running up the stairway to the warmth of an upstairs fireplace. It’s comforting to imagine that even though Elizabeth Throckmorton perished just outside the front door, her spirit made it safely inside.

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