Blennerhassett Island

A state park island in the Ohio River where Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett built a grand Palladian mansion in 1798 — it burned down in 1811. A detailed replica was rebuilt on the original foundations in the 1980s. The couple got tangled up in Aaron Burr's treason conspiracy.

Blennerhassett Island sits in the middle of the Ohio River just south of Parkersburg, and its history reads like a novel that no publisher would accept as plausible. The island was first inhabited by Native Americans and was the final home of Nemacolin, chief of the Delaware Nation, who died there in 1767. In 1798, Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett -- wealthy Irish aristocrats who had fled Europe under circumstances they preferred not to discuss -- purchased the island and built a magnificent Palladian-style mansion that was considered the finest private residence west of the Alleghenies. Then Aaron Burr arrived, and everything fell apart.

In 1805, just one year after killing Alexander Hamilton in their famous duel, former Vice President Aaron Burr approached the Blennerhassetts with a scheme that remains partly mysterious to this day. The plan, as prosecutors would later characterize it, was to raise a private army, invade Spanish territory in the American Southwest, and establish a new independent nation with Burr at its head. Harman Blennerhassett provided financial backing and offered his island as a staging ground. In 1806, the conspiracy unraveled. Both Burr and Blennerhassett were arrested. Burr was tried for treason and acquitted, but the Blennerhassetts were financially ruined. They never returned to their island. The mansion burned in 1811, and the dream of the Ohio River paradise died with it.

In the 1980s, the mansion was painstakingly reconstructed as a historical tourist attraction, and it is in the rebuilt house and on the grounds surrounding it that the hauntings are reported. Margaret Blennerhassett is the island's most frequently seen ghost. She appears along the shoreline, walking with a book in hand, as though she has simply stepped out of the mansion for a riverside reading session. Her ghost has been spotted across the entire island, but she seems drawn particularly to the water's edge, where she paces the bank of the river that once connected her to the outside world.

In one of the more remarkable accounts, a group of campers who had set up a tent and campfire on the island heard rustling outside in the middle of the night. When they opened the tent flap, they saw the figure of Margaret's ghost sitting near their campsite, calmly reading one of the books the campers had brought with them. She appeared oblivious to their presence, absorbed in the text as though she had simply found something interesting and helped herself to it.

Children visiting the island have reported seeing other children who were not part of their group -- small figures who play among the trees and along the riverbank before disappearing. Some researchers believe these ghost children may include baby Margaret, who was born on the island but did not survive infancy. Others suggest the spirits may be Native American children connected to the island's pre-European history, when Nemacolin's Delaware people lived and died on this ground.

Blennerhassett Island was featured on the television program Ghost Hunters, which investigated the location and recorded findings that the show's team characterized as significant. The island is accessible by sternwheeler from Point Park in Parkersburg, and the reconstructed mansion and grounds are open for tours that cover both the island's documented history and its paranormal reputation.

The layers of history on Blennerhassett Island -- Native American, colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum -- have created a palimpsest of spiritual energy that investigators describe as unusually rich. The island holds the memory of Nemacolin's last days, the Blennerhassetts' doomed ambitions, Aaron Burr's treasonous conspiracy, and the fire that destroyed a mansion built as a monument to new beginnings. Margaret Blennerhassett, walking the shore with her book, may be the most peaceful ghost in West Virginia -- a reader undisturbed by death, still enjoying the island she never wanted to leave.