Tales from the road: 'Ghost cats,' communing with Early's spirit

Piers Lamb, the excellent communication director of The Wayside Inn, conducts a tour.

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After a nine-hour drive through the rain from Nashville — including a brutal stretch on I-81 (“The Devil’s Highway”) — I finally pull into the parking lot of my accommodations at The Wayside Inn & Larrick’s Tavern in Middletown, Va. A short distance up the old Valley Pike here in the Shenandoah Valley the armies clashed during the Battle of Cedar Creek, fought Oct. 19, 1864, which just happens to be Mrs. B’s birthday (but not the same year!). 

Kyla is related to some guy
named Robert E. Lee.

Minutes after parking, I check in with a nice, young lady at the front desk named Kyla, who spills the beans on her 5x great uncle, some dude named Robert E. Lee. Never heard of him.

“His painting stares at me every day,” she says cheerfully, gesturing toward the wall in front of her.

Anywho, the next thing I know I’m standing, dazed, in front of the late 18th-century inn, where Piers — The Wayside Inn’s enthusiastic communications director — is conducting a tour for a septuagenarian motorcycle club called the Voyagers. The drone of traffic on the Valley Pike in front of the inn nearly spoils his excellent talk about the colorful history of the place.

Over the years, according to Piers, a veritable who’s who of arts, culture and finance have stayed at the Wayside Inn, including Eleanor Roosevelt, James Earl Jones, Tom Cruise and John Rockefeller Jr.

During the Civil War, officers from both sides frequented the inn and tavern, including “Little Phil” Sheridan of Battle of Cedar Creek renown. (A monument to Union Colonel Charles Russell Lowell, mortally wounded at Cedar Creek, stands in front of the Wayside Inn.)

Jubal Early

A few feet away, a motorcycle club member is enjoying a huge martini, which I need about nine of following my nerve-wracking drive. Seconds later, the white-haired, martini gulping biker club member — Kim from Illinois, an inn guest — blurts: “I think ghosts rearranged the change in my room.” OMG! I’m staying in spacious Room No. 1, inhabited by Confederate General Jubal Early during the war. If the grumpy ghost of “Old Jube” haunts me with Lost Cause mythology or moves my change tonight, I may have to move to the Hampton lnn in Harrisonburg.

Naturally, guests in the tour group wonder about ghosts in the inn, so Piers feeds the need.

“This is one of the seven most haunted inns in Virginia,” he says.

The Wayside Inn in Middletown, Va., has welcomed guests since the late 18th century.

Piers tells us of an old telephone in one of the rooms that would never stop ringing, even after the yanking of its plug from the wall. Plus, among other ghostly experiences, guests have heard troops tramping through the inn and kitchen workers have had their aprons tugged by unknown forces. (The Mirror Room, where seances once were held, is supposedly the most haunted in the place.)

But by far the weirdest Wayside Inn story is of “ghost cats” moving from Room No. 2, where Sheridan supposedly stayed, to Room No. 1, Early’s room and — gulp! — MY ROOM.

I think this is gonna be a long, one-eye-open night.

READ MORE about The Wayside Inn & Larrick’s Tavern. 

The Jubal Early Room, where I spent a sleepless night.