Hollywood Cemetery

Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond holds two U.S. presidents, 18,000 Confederate dead under a dry-stacked granite pyramid, and an iron dog collecting pennies.

A life-sized cast-iron Newfoundland sits along Cedar Avenue on what's called Black Dog Hill, watching the grave of a two-year-old girl named Florence Bernadine Rees. Florence died of scarlet fever on February 7, 1862. The statue was cast at a Baltimore foundry in the 1850s, and one widely-cited account from Ada R. Bailey, who claimed to be the family's granddaughter, says her uncle Charles R. Rees, a photographer, moved the dog from his Main Street studio to the cemetery to keep it from being melted into Confederate bullets. (A second version pins the move on Florence's father Thomas; the photographer-uncle story has better documentation.) Rees's gallery burned in Richmond's April 1865 evacuation fires. Whether the iron was actually exempt from Confederate requisition is family lore, not anything you can pull from a government record.

Visitors have left toys and coins at the dog's paws for over 130 years. A small pile of new pennies appears on it every week.

Ghost tour guides claim visitors hear barking near the statue and a low growl from people who lean in too close. A few say the dog's head has turned. Whatever's true there, the iron dog is the part of Hollywood that stays in your head, and the version of the cemetery's haunting that doesn't need a podcast to sell it.

Hollywood was founded in 1847 when a group of Richmond citizens bought 42 acres from Lewis E. Harvie for $4,075 on the bluffs above the James River. Scottish-born architect John Notman designed it in the rural garden style, the same approach he'd used at Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, modeled on Mount Auburn in Boston. Notman wanted to call it Mount Vernon Cemetery. The holly trees on the property changed his mind. The grounds run 135 acres on the edge of the Oregon Hill neighborhood, with the river below and switchbacks of carriage roads winding past Victorian monuments, family vaults, and obelisks pulled from a dozen different revival styles.

Two U.S. presidents are buried here, which puts Hollywood in a club of three places in the country. James Monroe, the fifth, came back to Virginia from a New York grave in 1858. His sarcophagus sits under a Gothic Revival cast-iron canopy that Albert Lybrock designed in 1859. Locals call it "The Birdcage," and it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971 for its architecture. The cemetery itself isn't an NHL, but the Monroe tomb inside it is. John Tyler, the tenth president, is here too. So is Jefferson Davis, who was reinterred at Hollywood in 1893, four years after he died in New Orleans, in what was less a funeral than a Lost Cause pilgrimage.

The Confederate presence at Hollywood is the part most visitors come for and the part it's hardest to write about without flinching. About 11,000 Confederate enlisted men are buried under and around a 90-foot granite pyramid that engineer Charles Henry Dimmock designed for the Ladies of the Hollywood Memorial Association. The cornerstone went in on December 3, 1868. The dedication followed almost a year later, on November 8, 1869. The blocks are James River granite, fitted dry, no mortar holding them in place. Cemetery records put the total Civil War-era Confederate dead here at roughly 18,000 once you count officers and other interments. Twenty-five Confederate generals are buried at Hollywood, including J.E.B. Stuart, Fitzhugh Lee, and George Pickett, who asked in 1875 to be buried with his men.

A pyramid built without mortar, holding the remains of 11,000 men, draws ghost stories on its own. Tour participants have described a burst of ice-cold air along the rear wall on warm afternoons, and low moans at dawn and dusk. That comes from a single ghost blog and lives at about the level of credibility you'd expect. The cemetery doesn't lean into it. The pyramid doesn't need help.

The Richmond Vampire pilgrimage ends at the W.W. Pool mausoleum here, though the full story belongs three miles away at Church Hill Tunnel. The shorthand: a 28-year-old C&O fireman named Benjamin Franklin Mosby was working shirtless next to the firebox of steam engine #231 when the tunnel collapsed on October 2, 1925. The boiler ruptured. He crawled out scalded raw, with skin in flaps and teeth broken, and died at Grace Hospital later that night. The vampire story didn't appear in print until 1976, in VCU's *Commonwealth Times*; the tunnel got grafted onto it online in 2001 and in print in 2007. Folklore researcher Gregory Maitland has traced the legend back to Mosby and called it a game of telephone. Mosby is buried at Hollywood. He's the answer the legend was reaching for.

William Wortham Pool, the man whose tomb the legend chose, was a Mississippi-born accountant who kept the books for the Bryan family, owners of the *Richmond Times-Dispatch*. He lived at 721 28th Street in Woodland Heights and died of pneumonia in February 1922, age 75. The "1913" carved into his mausoleum lintel is not his death date, no matter what the ghost tours imply. It's the year his wife Alice died, the year Pool acquired what had originally been built in the 1850s as Dunnavant's vault for her first interment. The mausoleum carries Egyptian Revival and Masonic detailing because Pool was a Mason. The rest is fan fiction. In the mid-1980s the iron door was pried open and the chamber walls were marked up by occultists, and fetishes started showing up at the gate. Ghost tour sources will tell you the family remains were eventually removed and the door welded shut. Cemetery records don't say.

There's a 2006 first-person post on Ghostvillage.com by a man named Rodney A. Womack Sr. who says he was a sheriff's deputy and had three encounters at Hollywood, including a swarm of flies after a remark near Monroe's tomb and an unseen presence in the maintenance shed bathroom that backed off when he said, "Please leave me alone today, people, I'm not feeling well." It's one man's account, retold across paranormal blogs since.

Florence Bernadine Rees was two years, seven months, and fourteen days old when she died. The pile of new pennies at the iron dog's paws shows up every week. Someone is keeping count.