Home › United States › Virginia › Fredericksburg, Va
Historic haunted places in Fredericksburg, VA. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
4 listings shown.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
An old tradition tells of a young Englishwoman brought to Chatham to end a romance with a commoner, whose figure as a White Lady walks the river-bluff path called the Ghost Walk ar…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Col. Fielding Lewis spent his last years in the master bedroom poring over debts from financing the Revolution, and he died there. Staff and visitors describe heavy boots pacing up…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
George Washington's mother spent her last 17 years here and tended the garden until her final summer. Reports are gentle: warmth felt in the garden, a sense of being watched from t…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Staff credit former tavern keeper John Frazer, who died upstairs in 1793, with years of small pranks: unplugged sockets, tricorn hats knocked to the floor overnight and postcards s…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Fredericksburg's haunted ground is layered twice over — a colonial port underneath a Civil War battlefield city. Wikipedia records Fredericksburg as an independent city in Virginia with a population of 27,982 at the 2020 census, located near where the Rappahannock River crosses the Atlantic Seaboard fall line, and a prominent port in Virginia during the colonial era. The Washington family is woven through its surviving streets: George Washington's mother, Mary Ball Washington, lived her last years in the house at 1200 Charles Street that Wikipedia records as the Mary Washington House, now a house museum operated by Washington Heritage Museums, and his youngest brother Charles built the house on Caroline Street that became the Rising Sun Tavern.
The second layer is the war. The Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, in the National Park Service account collected for this guide, commemorates four major Civil War battles fought in and around the city: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness, and Spotsylvania. The nightly ghost-tour operator's own history of the city describes what that meant inside the town itself: over 26,000 wounded Civil War soldiers flooded into the city, in its telling, transforming nearly every home, church, and store into a place of suffering, and over 12,000 soldiers fell in a single brutal battle. Those are the operator's numbers, presented as its framing — but the park's four-battle record underneath them is documented, and it is why Fredericksburg's downtown historic district, with its 18th-century brick walkways still intact, carries a battlefield's memory inside a port town's streets.
Two Caroline Street buildings anchor the documented core. The Rising Sun Tavern, Wikipedia records, was built in about 1760 as a home by Charles Washington, youngest brother of George Washington, and became a tavern in 1792; Washington Heritage Museums' own page gives the same arc — originally built in 1760 as Charles Washington's home, later transformed into a bustling tavern by 1792, at 1304 Caroline Street. A few blocks north, the Hugh Mercer Apothecary Shop at 1020 Caroline Street preserves the practice of Dr. Hugh Mercer, who, Wikipedia records, fled Scotland after the Battle of Culloden, met George Washington during the French and Indian War, and moved to Fredericksburg on Washington's advice to practice medicine and operate an apothecary.
This section is folklore — reported by the ghost-tour operator and ghost-tour writing, and never asserted as fact here.
The nightly operator, Fredericksburg Frights, builds its route from the war's residue. At the Ironclad Inn, it reports heavy footsteps pacing empty hallways and door handles rattling after midnight, in a house it describes as once home to a civilian prisoner of war. At Kenmore, the historic plantation house, it reports phantom soldiers seen staggering across the grounds at twilight, in a house it says still bears the scars of artillery fire. At the Mary Washington House, it tells of Mary Washington's apparition refusing to let go of the home her son purchased for her. Its wider repertoire names Nurse Abby Gibbons, whose caring shadow is said to tend phantom soldiers; the Lewis Store, where the furious grief of Betty Washington is said to surge; and the city's Masonic cemetery, which it calls the oldest in the Western Hemisphere and describes as guarded by intense, volatile energy. All of these are the operator's stories, told here as it tells them.
The Rising Sun Tavern has the city's best-known individual ghost in ghost-tour writing: John Frazier, the tavern keeper who, in that writing, died in 1793 in an upstairs room of the tavern he ran, and who is reported to flicker lights and tug at visitors' hems — a mischievous presence, in the telling, rather than a frightening one. The apothecary has a quieter claim, and it comes from the nightly operator itself, which invites visitors to learn about "the thieving spirit of Dr. Hugh Mercer snatching modern items inside his restored apothecary." Frazier's tricks and Mercer's thefts are folklore in their sources' telling, and stay labelled that way here; the 1760 house, the 1792 tavern, and the restored apothecary underneath them are documented.
Hountix lists 4 places in Fredericksburg, VA. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The Rising Sun Tavern is a Washington Heritage Museums house museum at 1304 Caroline Street — a tavern you tour in daylight, led by site interpreters through rooms the museums group describes as filled with authentic furnishings and period artifacts. Its own page gives the visiting frame: guided tours presented as guests arrive, with no predetermined start times; about 45 minutes per tour; the last tour of the day beginning at 3:30 p.m.; admission $12 for adults and $6 for youth ages 6–18 at collection time; and seasonal hours of Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday noon to 4 p.m. from April to October, shortening in winter.
Wikipedia's documented history and the museum's own page agree on the building. It was built in about 1760 as the home of Charles Washington, the youngest brother of George Washington, and it became a tavern in 1792. The museums group frames the visit around what the building became: a bustling tavern that played a role in the social and political life of colonial Virginia, where, in its description, the clinking of glasses and lively conversations were a staple of daily life. That social world — travellers, townspeople, and Washington-family connections on a colonial port's main street — is the documented substance of the tour.
The haunting attached to the tavern comes from ghost-tour writing, not from the museum's own pages collected for this guide, and it centres on one named man. John Frazier, in that writing, ran the young tavern in the early 1790s and died in 1793 in an upstairs room; his spirit is reported to flicker the lights, tug at dress hems, and play small tricks on staff and visitors — a playful presence in the telling, most often described as mischief rather than menace. Frazier's death date and his tricks are presented here exactly as the ghost-tour writing presents them — its tradition, attributed — while the 1760 Charles Washington house and its 1792 conversion to a tavern are the documented building underneath the tale.
*Website: https://www.washingtonheritagemuseums.org/museums*