There are depths to knowledge; revelation can drive you to madness just as easily as epiphany. Some question the difference between the two, excepting the utility of one over the other. But the threat of Lovecraftian horror must not obscure the spirits of the past. The tale of Lady Ann Skipwith and The Wythe House is one of these horrors.
If you keep reading, we’ll begin in the Williamsburg haunted house of the man who helped create Colonial Williamsburg: Doctor William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin.
Learn more about the many haunted Colonial houses in Williamsburg on a Williamsburg ghost tour!
Was Lady Skipwith Real?
The ghost of Lady Skipwith and the Wythe Hosue is well known throughout Colonial Williamsburg. It is said that she committed suicide in the house after discovering her husband’s infidelity. But what is the truth behind this story? While there are records of Lady Ann Skipwith, there are none that state this gruesome end. However, the activity inside the Wythe House seems to beg otherwise.
The Wythe House
W.A.R. Goodwin was a man of the cloth, a historian, an author, and a firm believer in the souls mingling with Williamsburg’s many minds.
As a pastor in 1907, he actively helped complete the restoration of Bruton Parish Church just in time for the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the Episcopal Church in nearby Jamestown. In 1909, he accepted another position and moved to Rochester, New York, but his life in Williamsburg was far from over.
He would eventually return, reportedly stricken by the history that crumbled in the buildings around him.
In 1924, he began the restoration project that became Colonial Williamsburg. With funding and support from The Rockafeller Family, Goodwin and his local team started buying up property and began the restoration in earnest. Goodwin would eventually pass away in 1939; his body was buried in his beloved parish.
Goodwin began the project that has given us a window into the lives of Colonial Williamsburg’s spirits, but he was, more specifically, the last living person to inhabit the Wythe House.
Colonial Williamsburg acquired the property in 1938, but Miss Skipwith’s tale occurred far before that time. The Wythe House has its own stories, and many spirits roam the halls of this haunted house in Williamsburg.
Hauntings of The Wythe House | The Ghost of Lady Skipwith
Ghost stories aren’t usually considered official history. They’re seen as referencing history, not defining it. That’s fine; tangential learning thrives deep in the soul of story-telling. Incidents are necessarily second-hand, but these are the most agreed-upon details about the Wythe House hauntings.
- Around the Witching Hour, it is said that a strange, unwieldy thumping noise may violently break the midnight silence on the stairs.
- Straining your ears against the stillness, you might recognize the sound of hampered footsteps in the night.
- Others have told strange tales of a ghostly female, Lady Skipwith, clad in a beautiful Colonial dress,
- She often looks at herself in the mirror before vanishing from sight.
- Occasionally, the smell of an unknown woman’s perfume lingers lazily in the air.
The Story of Lady Skipwith
This tale has always started at a ball in the Governor’s mansion. Lady Ann Skipwith bobbed along in the turbulent atmosphere with her husband, Sir Peyton Skipwith. At some point during the night, a conflict between the two frothed over, and Lady Ann fled into the gloom.
In her haste, she broke the heel of one of her shoes. It’s said that she wore the other shoe up the stairs and into her quarters at the Wythe House, so it probably broke near the door.
What were Lady Ann’s last moments like before she took her own life? We may never know, but the results are always the same regardless of the answer.
Most tellings suggest her husband and her sister, Jean (Miller) Peyton, were having an affair. This caused the tragically fatal clash between Sir Peyton and Lady Ann and the end of her wife. This perspective is supported by the fact that he married Jean soon after Lady Anne’s death.
But those are twenty-first-century speculations, and we must finish the story before we crack the history.
This is where Lady Ann Skipwith’s story ends. It’s said that she committed suicide, although the gruesome details are left to our imagination.
Perhaps it’s best that way. Those moments are personal; they belong more to her than to history. Her body is reported to be resting in the nearby Bruton Parish Churchyard.
The Real Story of Lady Skipwith
The question is, does Lady Skipwith belong to history at all? If you cross-reference the names of the sisters, Jean and Ann, you can discover their historical doppelgängers. Anne (Miller) Peyton died in childbirth in 1779, and she’s not buried in the Bruton Parish Churchyard.
Her husband did end up marrying her younger sister, but clearly, she did not commit suicide. She was a real person, though, so why the story?
The story of Lady Skipwith is meant to explain the many unexplained and eerie events at Wythe House.
The Ghost of Lady Ann is an attractive explanation for those disjointed happenings. But discovering that the person we’ve chosen to explain those events wasn’t involved with them shouldn’t relieve our minds. Rather, it should send them whirling, looking for other explanations.
Colonial Houses in Williamsburg Are All Haunted
It is a macabre tale that calls upon a dead heroine. The smell of perfume has an element of sophistication about it; it is a reminder of social mores and the intoxicating immediacy of human relationships.
Yet, the sound on the stairs truly troubles me: it is frantic and unwieldy because that was the character of those moments. One may read despair in her story because despair may drive someone to defect from the living to the dead, but that explanation is not objective truth.
Lady Ann Skipwith’s ghost is a part of history. Her story is a story of the lives that have come before us.
Maybe some spirits care about their role in history, and maybe some spirits don’t. It’s hard to know. We know that the scents, sights, and sounds on the stairs have embedded themselves in our cultural memory.
Haunted Williamsburg
Remember our tale as you listen to the many others spun by the spirits in Williamsburg, VA. If you’re lucky and remember the lives that thrived in the Wythe House, you’ll experience something in Colonial Williamsburg that will add new depth to our current story of spurned love and ultimate loss.
There’s much more to know about this house and its surrounding lands. Many macabre tales and lands saturated with history surround Williamsburg and the events that have taken place there. Join Colonial Ghosts on a Williamsburg ghost tour to see the Wythe House and much more!
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Sources:
- http://www.librarything.com/profile/JeanSkipwith
- http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/events/george-wythe-house/
- https://flathatnews.com/2013/10/07/the-legend-of-lady-skipwith/
- https://www.thenewsprogress.com/community/article_5d06b9f6-194f-11eb-9426-cf3d174777ca.html