Show notes
Today we explore three unusual stories from Virginia folklore: the ghost legend associated with Sarah Shelton Henry, the mystery of the Beale ciphers, and the modern tale of a werewolf-like creature in Henrico County. Along the way, we will separate the documented history from the legends that grew around it.
Virginia was one of the thirteen colonies that declared independence from Britain, but its human story reaches back much farther.
Archaeological evidence shows that people have lived in what is now Virginia for at least sixteen thousand years. Early communities were mobile hunters, fishers, and gatherers. Over thousands of years, many became more settled. During the Late Woodland period, farming, towns, and far-reaching trade networks became increasingly important.
By the early 1600s, Virginia's Indigenous peoples spoke languages belonging to three broad families: Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan.
In Tidewater Virginia, Wahunsenacawh—known to the English by his title, Powhatan—inherited authority over six groups. Through diplomacy and force, he expanded that alliance to include between twenty-eight and thirty-two tribes and smaller chiefdoms. This alliance did not include every Native nation in Virginia, and its population numbered in the tens of thousands.
European contact also began earlier than the original article suggested. Spanish Jesuits attempted to establish a mission in the Chesapeake region in 1570. Jamestown, founded in 1607, became the first permanent English settlement.
Relationships between the English and Virginia's Native peoples included trade and diplomacy, but also warfare, dispossession, and forced displacement. Virginia's Native nations survived those events and remain part of the Commonwealth today.
This long and complicated history provides the setting for some of Virginia's most enduring folklore...
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