Today, Williamsburg will furnish us with yet another tale of the human spirit. This is the story of Lucy Ludwell and the Paradise House. Her home is filled with a wet, eerie, dripping sound. Many attribute this to her mental illness late in life and the obsessive need she had to stay clean. The Paradise Ludwell House is featured in ghost tours in Williamsburg and is one of Williamsburg’s popular haunted Colonial houses.
Can you handle the terrifying secrets hiding in this Virginia haunted house and many more just like them? Join Colonial Ghosts on a Williamsburg ghost tour to find out!
Who Haunts The Ludwell Paradise House?
The Ludwell Paradise House is said to be haunted by Lucy Ludwell. Her life, which ended in an insane asylum, was full of turmoil. Now, her spirit is often heard in the upper recesses of the house, obsessively cleaning herself in the bathtub. The Paradise House is one of the most haunted Colonial houses in Williamsburg.
History of the Ludwell Paradise House
Welcome back to the streets of Colonial Williamsburg. The Ludwell-Paradise House was the first place that John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Reverend W.A.R. Goodwin obtained when they launched the restoration project. Its Georgian architecture was bricked together in 1755 for Philip Ludwell III. Here it is, nowadays, standing on the north side of Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg, Virginia:
It’s still a spiffy private residence. Colonel Phillip Ludwell III, the man behind the house, owned the Green Spring Plantation in James City County and traveled frequently between Virginia and London.
There’s plenty to be said about this man, but our story is focused on his second daughter, so let’s skip forward to his death. 1767, his health failed him, and he passed away in London. Lucy inherited our dear Ludwell-Paradise house.
Lucy (Ludwell) lived lavishly in London with her husband, John Paradise, so her Williamsburg home was rented out to residents when the Paradises were away. While she was in London, the house enjoyed a colorful history, including the American Revolution, a decades-long legal battle, and a gaggle of interesting tenants, but that’s just the house.
John Paradise was a noted linguist, scholar, and friend to many important people, including Thomas Jefferson. But history notes that he and Lucy were financially unsuccessful.
As a result, his death in 1795 left Lucy destitute. She returned to her Williamsburg home in 1805 with few resources at her command. Today, many strange incidents have occurred inside the Ludwell Paradise House.
Hauntings at the Paradise House
The incidents reportedly associated with Lucy’s phantom vary, but they all agree on the same sounds.
The Ludwell Paradise house is a private residence, but let’s say you lived in the house. Today, you had a short drive home because you’re just off the main road, and traffic was light. Your stomach and mood are telling you that it was a long day, so you head into the kitchen for a glass of water and some food.
As you’re about to turn on the tap, you hear a splash. Your brain’s a bit groggy, but you realize the water should come before the splash. At the same time, you remember that you’re alone in the house. Someone, somewhere in your house, is having a bath.
The sounds of droplets cascading off an arm into a tub full of water are hard to mistake. Yet, there’s no one else here. Who could possibly be bathing in your house?
Maybe someone you know came over while you were away. You vaguely remember giving a copy of the key to a neighbor when you were going on vacation, but you’re pretty sure you got it back.
In this moment of loneliness and panic, you’re no longer certain. Maybe they made a copy. At the same time, you’re living in a haunted landmark, so who knows what strange reasons someone might have for breaking into your place. Now, you’re afraid. It could be anyone.
In the back of your mind, where terror drives unbridled inquisition, you begin to remember the story of Lucy Ludwell-Paradise.
The Story of Lucy Ludwell
Those sounds support a long and tragic tale, but how much of it is true? A disturbing amount. Part of the reason her ghost was so readily identified was that so much of her life was chronicled.
Lucy Ludwell was born in 1751 in Greenspring, near Williamsburg, Virginia, and sailed for England with her family in 1760. They settled in London, where in 1769, she married John Paradise of Rathbone-Place.
As a couple, they were members of the London elite and moved into social circles that included Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee, and Thomas Jefferson. Despite their associations and Lucy’s dazzling social flair, things did not go smoothly for her.
When John Paradise died in London on December 12, 1795, Lucy was left with no viable way to make a living. The social fabric of her society wasn’t set up to provide her with that opportunity. So, she had to survive on whatever she had: the Ludwell-Paradise House and her reputation.
Mired in some imagined lifestyle, she continued to fascinate the people around her. However, with time, they became less forgiving of her unusual behavior.
For starters, she was a suspected thief. That had to have made them suspicious. After that, perhaps, they started to wonder why she would strut around the streets with her servants, greeting passers-by as if she were royalty. Come to think of it, why on earth did she conduct carriage tours that never left her back porch? And why did she bathe so much?!
It took some time, but eventually, the people of Williamsburg decided that all of her unusual behavior could be explained by the fact that she was weird, more specifically, insane.
Whatever they suspected her non-specific condition to be, in 1812, it was clear to them that she had to be committed to the Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds. They ripped her away from her house and brought her to the Public Hospital. There, she was entombed for two years.
Lucy Ludwell and Mental Health
The mind is a complex thing. Even today, our understanding of how the brain works is limited, and treatment methods are limited by our understanding. By today’s standards, early nineteenth-century treatment methods bordered on barbaric.
Patients were drugged, restrained, and subjected to shock treatment. And those were the progressive institutions. Yet, those institutions did progress, so it’s difficult to find out exactly what Lucy might have experienced within her brick mausoleum. It wasn’t pleasant, though.
Two years after Lucy Ludwell was confined in the Public Hospital, she committed suicide. Now, her ghost is said to haunt the upper floor of the Ludwell Paradise House, endlessly bathing arms that no longer exist, leaking the sounds of her watery repose into the empty rooms of her house.
In the story, she was supposed to have bathed many times daily, but the sounds were transient. In our incident reports, they’re rarely heard more than once, but they’re an echo that serves to exemplify her memory.
Those sounds represent her odd habits, and her habits are used to prove her insanity. Those sounds are her death knell echoing through history, but while we think of them, we remember her name.
Was Lucy Ludwell Truly Disturbed?
Discovering the answer to that question would require a deep psychological analysis, but the psychiatry of her day was disturbingly primordial.
In the late eighteenth century, shackles and chains were still being used to confine patients. Still, that’s not that surprising when you consider that, as late as 1770, Bethlem let the public wander its wards to gawk at the patients.
Then again, that’s also a marginal improvement over the even older strategy of kicking people out into the wilderness.
The Public Hospital was a progressive institution, but progress was relative. It’s even tempting to blame the institution’s horrendous conditions for her eventual self-termination.
We don’t know the facts of her mind, just the facts of her time. We can’t say why she chose to take her life, but we can’t abandon her at the doors of the asylum, either.
Haunted Williamsburg
Take heed to the story of Lucy Ludwell and the Paradise House. There are many others like hers in Colonial Williamsburg—some with even more tragic endings than even this disparate and strange tale. Join Colonial Ghosts on a Williamsburg ghost tour that you’ll never forget, and hear them all! In the meantime, read our blog for even more spine-chilling Virginia ghost stories, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok!
Sources:
- https://www.ludwell.org/ludwell-paradise-house-cornerstone-of-colonial-williamsburg/
- https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0374
- https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/DigitalLibrary/view/index.cfm?doc=ResearchReports%5CRR1407.xml&highlight=
- https://usghostadventures.com/haunted-cities/williamsburgs-most-haunted/the-ludwell-house/