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Heavily Investigated

After dark, Colonial Williamsburg stops being a museum and starts being something older. Along its lantern-lit streets and inside its 18th-century frames, visitors and workers alike report voices in empty rooms, shadows that don't belong to anyone, and doors that slam in sealed basements. The crown jewel of dread is the Peyton Randolph House — where an estimated thirty people are said to have died over three centuries. Stand near it long enough and something feels wrong, like the air is holding its breath. Mary Peachy is said to call out to strangers by name.

Williamsburg was established as Virginia's colonial capital in 1699, renamed from Middle Plantation in honor of King William III. It served as the seat of colonial power through the Revolutionary era until the capital moved to Richmond in 1779 — after which, the city's graceful irrelevance became its preservation. The restoration of its 18th-century streetscape began in 1926, bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Centuries of disease, war, and political intrigue left behind not just architecture, but — if the stories are to be believed — a rather stubborn population.