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Heavily Investigated

Walk the hills of Hollywood Cemetery after dusk and the silence gets thick in a way that has nothing to do with quiet. People swear they've heard voices drifting from the Confederate pyramid — low, indistinct, like men still waiting for orders. A spectral dog is said to keep eternal watch over a child's grave, seen and then simply gone. And then there is the Vampire: witnesses claim a blood-soaked figure with jagged teeth fled the 1925 Church Hill Tunnel collapse straight into these grounds — and never left.

Designed by Philadelphia architect John Notman and dedicated in 1849, Hollywood Cemetery takes its name from the holly trees that blanket its 134 rolling acres above the James River. The record shows a Victorian garden cemetery of considerable distinction — two U.S. presidents (Monroe, Tyler), Confederate President Jefferson Davis, generals Stuart and Pickett, and over 18,000 Confederate soldiers rest here beneath a 90-foot granite pyramid. That it also became Richmond's preferred address for vampires and restless spirits is, the archivist notes, an entirely separate achievement.