Urban Legends of Virginia

By Charles A. Mills

Mind bending stories from the Old Dominion. A collection of Virginia’s most notable Urban Legends, many include the true stories behind them.
• Is Bigfoot stalking George Washington’s Mount Vernon?
• Did Bunny Man kill thirty two people?
• What really happened at The Crypts?
• What are those secret societies hiding?
• Lost treasure stories, true or false?
• Many more………..
Stories just too weird to be real…or are they?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles A. Mills
• Release date: Oct 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519965493

Charles A. Mills

Chuck Mills has a passion for history. He is the author of Hidden History of Northern Virginia, Echoes of Manassas, Historic Cemeteries of Northern Virginia and Treasure Legends of the Civil War and has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles on historical subjects. Chuck is the producer and cohost of Virginia Time Travel, a history television show that airs to some 2 million viewers in Northern Virginia. He lives on the banks of the Potomac River on land once owned by George Washington.

Book preview

Monsters and Ghouls

The Mount Vernon Monster

On May 12, 1979, the front page of The Washington Post carried an article entitled,

The Mount Vernon Monster.  For nine months, in 1978 and 1979, a strange creature wailed and screamed nightly in the woods just a mile from historic Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate in Virginia.  Some people called it The Mount Vernon Monster, others Bigfoot.  The creature was elusive, frustrating capture attempts by the police, flyovers by a U.S. Park police helicopter, searches by volunteer youth patrols, and the determined efforts of the Fairfax County game warden to track it down.  And thus an urban legend was born. 

Witnesses began to appear.  One witness reported, ... just as I got to the edge of the woods, it screamed a second time. And I could feel the reverberations...I could feel it in my chest, like if you stand in front of a bass speaker, I could feel it in my chest, and it made every hair on the back of my neck stand up. And I could hear twigs break and branches snapping.  Years later accounts are still circulating, I was one of those teenagers in the late 70's who heard the Mt. Vernon monster. I actually had a tape recording of it but my little sister taped over it. Yes, down an unpaved road leading to Union Farm we parked our cars late at night and quietly waited. Dogs would start barking nearby and sure enough we then heard the howl of the Mt. Vernon Monster.  I also have a friend who saw the creature not far from the back gate of Mt. Vernon, off Old Mt. Vernon Road near the Potomac River one snowy day. She was nearly 200 yards away and at first glance thought it was a man walking towards the woods. She quickly realized it was not. She described it as large and hairy.

The story made its’ way into oral history projects, which are now being cited by monster hunters as historical authentication of the creature’s existence, ...one of the game wardens, said ‘The thing seems to know when you leave the woods, then it starts to holler.’ One resident said she spotted the monster. She described it as a creature about six feet tall, which lumbered into the woods after being sighted.

The howling stopped as abruptly as it began, but the story lives on despite the fact that in a 1999 researchers David Leeming and Jake Page unmasked the Mount Vernon Monster as a hoax.  Sound recordings of the monster’s roars were sent to Eugene Morton at the National Zoo for analysis.  Morton, an expert in interpreting animal sounds reported that the monster’s howls were, in fact, the chirp of a baby robin played at one eighth normal speed over stereo speakers, turning it into a hideous low rumble. (Leeming and Page, 82)

The Beast of Gum Hill

A Bristol man recently claimed that he and a hunting companion encountered a Bigfoot type beast near Gum Hill in Washington County.  The two came across a large figure sitting on a rock.  As the men approached, the figure rose, whistled and made other noise and then