Margaret Blennerhassett lost her Ohio River island to Aaron Burr's treason scandal and died in a New York poorhouse. In 1996 they dug her up and brought her home, and now people say she is back on the island, reading.
Small girls touring the mansion on Blennerhassett Island, in the Ohio River off Parkersburg, West Virginia, sometimes come over to their mothers and ask if they can go play with the other girl in the black walnut room. Scott Cain, a guide there, says it has happened twice, both times a child of four or five. "But there's nobody here," he said. Locals split on who she is. Some say the Blennerhassetts' infant daughter, born in the house and dead before her first birthday. Some say a Native American child, from what Cain calls "hundreds and hundreds of graves all over this property."
The woman is easier to name. Margaret Blennerhassett has been reported all over the island, often with a book in her hand. West Virginia's own tourism office lists her among the famous ghosts of Parkersburg, describing her walking the rooms of her beloved mansion. A regional folklore archive puts her outside instead, on the shoreline, with the daughter who died there and whose grave nobody has ever located. And a WBOY series on West Virginia hauntings tells of campers who pitched a tent on the island, woke to rustling in the dark, opened the flap, and found her reading the books they had brought with them.
She had six years in that house. Harman Blennerhassett married Margaret Agnew, his own niece and nine years younger, in 1794; both families called it incest, and the couple sold their County Kerry estate and left Ireland. The mansion went up on the island's northern end in 1800, and she filled it, reading to guests in French, staging Shakespeare, hosting music and dancing.
Then the Blennerhassetts let the estate become the headquarters for Aaron Burr's military expedition to the Southwest. In December 1806 Virginia militia occupied the island, plundered it, and wrecked the house. Harman was arrested twice and jailed. Burr was acquitted of treason and walked away; the Blennerhassetts were ruined. The abandoned mansion burned to the ground in 1811.
Margaret spent the rest of her life elsewhere, publishing two books of poems out of Montreal under the name "A Lady." The storyteller Jason Burns says a lot of it is about wanting to be back on her island: "she's in other parts of the world, and she can't get back. She's not allowed to come back." In 1842 she returned to petition Congress for the destruction of her home. She won the appeal and died on June 16 of that year, in a New York City poorhouse, before a dollar of it reached her.
She stayed buried in Manhattan until 1996, when a Parkersburg funeral director had her exhumed and reburied beside the rebuilt mansion. "They have no connection to New York," he said.
They brought Margaret home and gave her a grave beside the house she wanted back. The daughter she is seen with on the shoreline has never been found.
