Delaware's vampire governor, Dover ghosts, creepy Lewes dolls & haunted restaurants (2025)

Do you like a good scare?

Here are a few tales and true-life spooky and creepy things in and around Delaware that might give you the shivers or live rent-free in your head maybe longer than they should.

Cuddle up with a blanket and a cozy beverage and read along ‒ if you dare.

Woodburn

Ghosts have long been thought to haunt Woodburn in Dover, the official residence of the governor of Delaware.

The middle-period Georgian house built in 1798 by Charles Hillyard III has been home to gentleman farmers, senators, doctors, an abolitionist, a dentist, a judge, and eight recent Delaware governors, according to the state of Delaware's website. It was purchased by the state in 1965.

The "Woodburn Ghost" first appeared ‒ if you believe ‒ in 1815.

At the time, Dr. Martin Bates and his wife, Mary, son-in-law and daughter of Hillyard, were owners at the time. They said overnight guest Lorenzo Dow, a local preacher, asked the couple during breakfast if they should wait to begin the meal prayer until the other guest in the house came to the table.

Dr. Bates, confused by the question, told Dow that there were no other guests in the house. But Dow said he met a gentleman who wore a powdered wig, knee britches, and a ruffled shirt on the staircase.

It was an exact description of Hillyard, the home's builder, who had died in 1814.

Since then, Hillyard has been spotted by others in the home, according to Dover history, and "was known to enjoy a strong drink." If a glass of wine were left downstairs at night, an empty glass in the morning would be a giveaway that Hillyard had imbibed, according to the state's website.

Jeanne Tribbitt, the wife of former Gov. Sherman Tribbit, regularly checked the stairway for Hillyard's presence. She also left out a glass of wine for him multiple times but the ghost was no longer thirsty.

No one in Gov. John Carney's administration has left a glass of wine out for the ghost, nor has anyone reported sightings or visits while they were inside Woodburn, according to Ashley Dawson, deputy director of communications.

But Dawson said "a young girl ghost" was said to have tugged on women’s skirts and men’s jackets in Woodburn during a 1992 wedding reception for former Gov. Mike Castle. Also, one year, holiday decorations in Hall House, which is on the property, were rearranged in the morning differently than they were the night before.

Former Gov. Pete du Pont, known for his good nature, enjoyed throwing Halloween parties at Woodburn when he served as the 68th governor from 1977 to 1985.

The du Pont family decorated the house and the Governor would dress as Dracula to greet the guests.

He wore a black cape, drew a steep widow's peak on his forehead, and welcomed trick-or-treaters with a deep "Good Eeeevening …," according to his family who included the details in du Pont's 2021 obituary.

Gov. Carney and his wife Tracey also dress in costumes and greet guests on Halloween at Woodburn, still a popular Halloween stop for Dover and state residents.

The haunted world of Jamie Wyeth

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, artist Jamie Wyeth makes no bones that he's drawn to the supernatural and enjoys giving people chill bumps.

"My life has been full of ghosts," Wyeth said during "Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled," a recent exhibition at the Brandywine Museum of Art, now at Maine's Farnworth Art Museum until Sunday, Oct. 13.

Halloween was a big part of life for Jamie and his father Andrew Wyeth. Their paintings have included jack-o-lanterns, masks, ghosts and scarecrows, and Jamie's self-portraits feature his body with a pumpkin head. The pair are said to have inspired The Great Pumpkin Carve, a three-day Chadds Ford traditionwhere over 70 giant pumpkins are carved and lit bylocal artists. The 2024 event is Thursday, Oct. 17 through Saturday, Oct. 19.

Jamie's contributions to creepy over the years include art such as a ghostly, wide-eyed portrait of Michael Jackson, who visited the Chadds Ford museum and the home of the late George "Frolic" Weymouth; sketches from a morgue; paintings of decapitated deer and a burning cow carcass; and a nightmarish diorama of a butcher shop with buckets of blood and dismembered animal body parts.

"You're even weirder than I am," said author Stephen King during his first meeting with Wyeth after the author asked the artist to create drawings for a paranormal TV series "Kingdom Hospital" that King developed in 2004.

Wyeth's weird world includes houses and studios filled with pieces from his taxidermy collection. The exhibition at the Brandywine Museum showcased a taxidermied dog that sat on a pillow.

Wyeth, 77, studied anatomy by working in a morgue alongside a doctor and examining corpses. He dissected bodies and said his sketchbooks smelled like formaldehyde for years.

Wyeth's diorama "Butcher Shop" created in 2015 is a gory tableau with a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" quality. It depicts a hulking butcher with gray-tinged skin and decaying teeth who grimaces as he holds a cleaver in one hand and dips his other hand into a bucket of blood. All around him are meat hooks and animal parts.

Wyeth hinted that there might be more dioramas in his future.

In honor of Halloween's significance to the Wyeth family, Victoria Wyeth, Andrew's granddaughter, and Jamie's niece, will host a virtual gallery talk, including spooky and seasonal works by both artists, including some not previously on public view.

The programs at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 28, and Tuesday, Oct. 29 are on Zoom. The cost is $25. Visit brandywine.org/museum/events/

Spookiness in Lewes

No one mentioned ghosts but it was hard not to get the shivers when we took a tour last October of the Burton-Ingram House on the Historic Shipcarpenter Street Campus at 110 Shipcarpenter St. in Lewes.

Maybe it was due to the cool, dreary, overcast that cast gloomy shadows, but some rooms on the second floor of the Federal-style house built around 1785 had some creepy elements.

If you're freaked out by old dolls, a condition called pediophobia, be forewarned. The Burton-Ingram House has several antique dolls in an upstairs nursery, vintage toys, aging rocking horses, baby shoes, and a slightly haunting child's portrait that reminded us of a baby vampire.

Lewes celebrates its eerie past throughout the year with tours known as "Haunted Histories." Tours at 8 and 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18 are hosted by the Lewes Historical Society and First State Paranormal Investigations.

Halloween drinks: Halloween cocktails, drinks to try in Delaware, at home

Guides walk and share true tales of long-ago residents. A special "midnight" tour will be on Saturday, Nov. 2 at 10 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. The cost is $35 per person and the tour, which starts at the Historic Lewes Shipcarpenter Street Campus (which some say is haunted), is suggested for participants 13 years and older.

Bring a flashlight ‒ and someone to hold your hand.

The demon statue of Smyrna

From 1984 to 2004, a towering statue of a fertility god from a 1950s Hollywood movie, that to some resembled a demon, sat off Route 13 across the Smyrna Rest Area. It served as a roadside attraction and helped promote a local travel agency.

When the business moved, the statue stayed in its spot until it was bought by a New Jersey man who transported it to Lumberton, New Jersey. It's no longer there but might now have ahome in a backyard in Southampton, New Jersey,which is in the Pine Barrens.

The pagan god statue, which has four horns on its head, red glowing eyes and a headless serpent in one hand, served as a prop in "Tarzan'' movies, had a role in 1955's"The Prodigal"with Lana Turner, and later was used in 1961's science fiction flick"Atlantis, the Lost Continent."

Various news stories over the years said the statue was about 11 feet tall. A 1970 News Journal clipping said the Hollywood prop, then called "a mythical monster," was 20 feet tall.

The movie prop was purchased in the spring of 1970 from an MGM studio auction in Hollywood, according to News Journal archives, and given on Christmas Eve toRobert Piane,a longtime Wilmington restaurateur and caterer. It was placed in front of his home on Sylvanus Drive in Rockwood Hills, a neighborhood in north Wilmington.

The statue was parked at Piane's restaurant Piane Grill in downtown Wilmington at 913 N. Market St.

The statue was gone from the site when the restaurant closed in 1977. It sat off Ogletown Road for a few years and was loaned to use for parties, parades, and other events until going to Smyrna.

'Headless Horseman' of Welsh Tract Baptist Church

Heads up when you travel along Welsh Tract Road.

The headless ghost of Charlie Miller is said to haunt the Newark roadway.

Miller was just 16 when he supposedly lost his noggin to a British army cannonball during a Revolutionary War skirmish near Welsh Tract Church that has become known as the Battle of Cooch's Bridge, according to local author and ghost writer Ed Okonowicz in his 1994 book "Spirits Between the Bays, Volume I, Pulling Back the Curtain.

"The teenager, in search of his lid ever since, is said to occasionally gallop along local roadways bellowing: "I waaant myyyy heeeaaaad!!!" (Headless bellowing is a ghostly skill.)

But wait, there's more. According to the story, Miller, seeking revenge for his death, will unsheathe his sword and lop off the head of anyone whom he thinks is a Redcoat.

Scoff if you will, but there are some facts behind the folklore. The church on Welsh Tract Road was erected in 1746 from bricks brought from England, according to a published history of the church prepared in 1952. On Sept. 3, 1777, during the Cooch's Bridge battle, a cannonball was fired and passed through the old meeting house. Look closely at the west side of the church and you can see the patched brickwork between the two first-floor windows that covers the cannonball damage.

The published church's history says two Revolutionary patriots named Miller are buried in the graveyard. Neither is named Charlie Miller nor died in 1777 when the cannonball was fired.

Rockwood Mansion

The estate at 4651 Washington Street Extension in Penny Hillwas started in 1851 by wealthy Wilmington merchant baker Joseph Shipley while living in the village of Allerton,near Liverpool, England, and completed in 1854.

Shipley, a descendant of prominent Quakers, wanted the Victorian Gothic Revival mansion to be similar to Wyncote, his country estate in England. Shipley, a bachelor with no children, shared Rockwood with his unmarried sisters, Sarah and Hannah.

Shipley died in 1867. After the death of the last sister, Hannah Shipley, in 1891, a great-nephew, Edward Bringhurst Jr., took over the estate. He and his family moved into Rockwood the next year and extensively redecorated the interior.

A marker near the house tells the story of "Edward's Playhouse." The ruin, near the walking path, was the surviving part of a farmhouse that had stood on the site when Shipley first purchased the land. In the 1890s, the Bringhurst family altered the structure and turned it into a playhouse for their youngest child, Eddie, who died at age 55.

Various Bringhurst family members lived at Rockwood until 1972 when the estate, on the National Register of Historic Places, was donated to New Castle County.

The ghosts of young Eddie and another ghost named Mary are believed to haunt the mansion. Mary lived at Rockwood until she was 100 and died there.

In 2006, Rockwood's then-museum director Philip Nord told The News Journal visitors often smell perfume and see a woman in what was Mary's room. The mansion was featured on an episode of the paranormal SyFy TV show “Ghost Hunters,” which aired in 2016.Investigators said they encountered Eddie's spirit in the dining room.

The Ticking Tomb at the London Tract Meeting House Cemetery

The Legend of The Ticking Tomb hasn't skipped a beat since it began, possibly almost 290 years ago. The 18th-century Pennsylvania grave in the historic London Tract cemetery in Landenberg, Pennsylvania, about five miles outside Newark, sometimes attracts curious visitors eager to hear its supposedly faint but non-stop ticking.

The site was practically a rite of passage for folklore buffs and local teenagers and still entices new generations. The 1729 meeting house, on White Clay Creek Preserve, is surrounded by a crumbling fieldstone wall and a graveyard that's the last resting place of two Revolutionary War soldiers.

Legend has it that if you put your ear to a certain gravestone, you'll hear the beating of a chronometer swallowed long ago by a fat toddler. The child, Fithian Minuit, apparently inspired by his inner rhythm, later grew up to be a watch repairman, according to News Journal files recounting a tale told by the Chester County (Pa.) Historical Preservation.

Minuit supposedly died while visiting his wife's grave. When he was buried with her, the chronometer, still in his belly, continued to tick. Others claim the noise is the telltale heart of a local settler yearning for a long-lost American Indian lover. The London Tract church was built not far from a Native American village.

But a less romantic historian has rebuffed both tales. In a 1984 News Journal article, the historian said the only scientifically accepted reason for the ticking people have claimed to hear is water dripping on an underground stone.

The gravestone that supposedly ticks ‒ no sign says "Ticking Tomb" ‒ is said to be a small, flat stone, carved only with the initials R.C., located to the right of the church. It lies next to a heart-shaped tombstone dating back to the 1730s. White Clay Creek park manager Bill Morton in 2004 told The News Journal he didn't believe any parts of the still-ticking pocket watch story and he had been working there for nearly 20 years.

"You try swallowing a quarter-pound pocket watch," Morton said. He added that visitors won't hear any ticking sounds when putting an ear to any tombstone. "I don't know anyone who's heard it."

Fort Delaware

Fort Delaware was built in 1848 on Pea Patch Island near Delaware City and was originally built to protect the ports of Wilmington and Philadelphia.

It became a Union prison camp during the Civil War, housing up to as many as 12,595 Confederate prisoners of war at one time. Conditions were harsh. Thousands died there of everything from smallpox to various forms of diarrheato scurvy.

Manned briefly during World Wars I and II, the island and fort were finally abandoned and declared surplus property in 1944. Ownership was transferred back to the state and it became a state park in 1951.

Fort Delaware is well-known for “ghostly” activity and has been featured on the A&E reality show "Ghost Hunters" and other TV shows.

Daryl Marstonfrom "Ghost Hunters" in 2023 told Delaware Online/The News Journal that Fort Delaware is hands-down the most haunted place in the state. It's also one of the spookiest places he's visited around the country, he said.

More on Fort Delaware: Have you been to this Delaware haunt? It's a top haunted attraction in the US

Diamond State Ghost Investigators and park staff offer three-hour recreational paranormal investigations and use electronic magnetic field detectors, data recorders, and other techniques. Tickets ($60) are on sale at delawarestateparks.reserveamerica.com Participants must be 13 years old or older.

Cossart Road or 'Devil's Road'

For years, enduring urban legends about devil worship and supernatural goings-on have surrounded this narrow, roughly 2-mile-long road north of the Delaware state line, near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Local teenagers have whispered that it's a place, sometimes called "Devil's Road," where ghosts, devils and other spirits roam. Paranormal seekers have been known to cruise Cossart Road. Web sites also are devoted to various unfounded tales that perpetuate rumors of a so-called "Devil House" or "Cult House."

Some say trees bend weirdly along the roadway and one was long known as the "Skull Tree" because of its knot of exposed roots.

There's nothing really scary about Cossart Road, other than how narrow it is.

But 20 years ago, near the road, on a patch of land between Kennett Pike and Montchanin-Chadds Ford Road just north of the Delaware state line in Pennsylvania, movie director M. Night Shyamalan thought differently. He filmed "The Village," a thriller about monsters living in a woods near there. He constructed an 1897 village in a hayfield on land owned by former Wilmington Mayor Hal Haskell. Some scenes also were shot in Centreville.

Letty's Tavern

A haunt in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania's downtown area not only exudes an air of dignified history but it is said to be the home of a resident ghost who likes to make her presence known.

Letty's Tavern occupies the landmark site at 201 E. State St. known for almost 45 years as the Kennett Square Inn.

After the inn closed in 2020, Jacob Short, Dan Daley and Matt Killion purchased the 10,239-square-foot building on the corner of Broad and State streets.

Hikes, history and heebie-jeebies: Walk this way: 6 places to hike, soak up history, see autumn leaves and maybe a few ghosts

The pub and lounge opened on April 9, 2021, smack dab in the heart of Kennett's Historical District.

Short told Delaware Online/The News Journal in 2021 he heard the nearly 200-year-old building known as the John and Susan Love House was haunted even before he and his partners purchased the restaurant, he didn't give it a second thought.

"I didn't really believe," Short said.

Then, after midnight in 2021, Short, his wife, and two business partners were hanging wallpaper and doing other renovations in the location when something happened that made him change his mind.

Short said they heard what sounded like footsteps running around the second floor. Then, they heard it again.

They checked all around, but no one else was in the building.

"We all looked at each other and said 'Is that Letitia? Is that Letitia?' " Short said and speculated they were visited by the ghost that previous owners had told them about who goes by the nickname Letty.

"After we heard it several more times, we were convinced Letty was here," he said.

The partners weren't scared, but excited and decided to name the pub after the friendly ghost.

Short said unexplained footsteps and running sounds are still heard inside the restaurant, usually after 11 p.m.

"She seems to be a night owl," he said.

Stories of ghosts supposedly haunting local restaurants are not uncommon in the Chester/Delaware County region which is steeped in colonial history.

For years, the former Chadds Ford Inn, an 18th-century landmark now home to Brandywine Prime Steakhouse at U.S. 1 and Pennsylvania Route 100, was said to be haunted by two ghosts known as Katie and Simon.

But when restaurateurs Dan Butler and Mike Majewski took over the location in 2007, they chalked up the "ghosts" to phantom vision.

"Nothing," Majewski told Delaware Online/The News Journal when asked if he encountered any apparitions. "I haven't seen anything."

Ghosts? Busted.

Patricia Talorico has been writing about Delaware for more than 30 years. You can find her onInstagram,X (formerly Twitter)andFacebook. Email ptalorico@delawareonline.comor leave a message at 302-324-2861