Boy Murdered by a Witch?




Charlottesville, Virginia is a gorgeous university town in Virginia where raising horses and gentle living predominate. But, there is a darker history there, one involving a witch who supposedly killed six boy scouts. It involves an old mansion called "Dunlora."


An historic rural mansion called Dunlora was handed down to a woman presumed to be a witch, right around 1900. By the 1920s, when people were enjoying the recreation of camping in the woods, locals avoided the woods near her home, feeling uncomfortable with the legends.

One time, however, a boy scouts leader and six troops went into the woods to camp, near the mansion. They apparently did not know about the legend.

The story goes that the scout leader awakened to a strange sound. He went to see if the boys were causing mischief in the tents, but the found the tents all open, and no boys there.

The leader supposedly screamed out their names, wandered the woods, stumbling to the mansion where a candle lit a window inside.

The house, however, was dusty and messy inside as if no one had lived there for a very long time. He called out their names, but got no answers.

Just as he was about to leave, the leader heard the door to the basement open and thought he heard a voice. When he went down there, the flashlight shined on a boy lying on the floor. The leader saw a form standing nearby, the light lifting to see the face of the grinning witch.

He tried to escape, running outside and taking the road. He looked back, seeing her glowing yellow eyes and the six boys standing with their bellies split open and guts spilled onto the road.

It was said the scout leader curled up in a ball and rattled loudly nonsensically, which was how the police found him the next day.

When they found the tents, they discovered the boys inside the tents, their disemboweled. And, next to the fire stuck in a log was the bloody knife that was owned by the scout leader. 

He was arrested for killing the children and considered insane. He was put away in an asylum.

There is a further legend that one month after their killings, seven fully grown trees showed up along that roadway - one of them crooked. Locals said, it was the spirits of the children and the leader.

This is one of those legends that grows with time, like the Bunnyman Bridge from my hometown area in Northern Virginia. Virginia is one of the most haunted states, by my belief from studying the haunted sites and history, as well as having grown up in a very haunted home in Fairfax, and summer home in New Point. 

If you liked this legend, you might also like my articles about the Bunnyman Bridge and Old House Woods and other Southern Virginia haunts

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