If you walk the rolling, mist-covered hills of Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery at dawn, past the resting places of U.S. presidents and thousands of Confederate soldiers, you will eventually find a grim mausoleum built into a hillside. Above the iron door, a simple name is carved into the stone: W.W. Pool. Local folklore insists that Mr. Pool isn’t just resting in peace. He’s waiting.
To understand the vampire, you have to go across town to the historic Church Hill neighborhood, where a tragedy struck on a damp autumn day in 1925.
A steam locomotive and a crew of workers were inside the subterranean Church Hill Tunnel doing repair work when the ceiling suddenly gave way. Tons of earth, brick, and debris crashed down, sealing the eastern end and trapping the train and its men deep underground.
Rescue efforts were frantic, but the conditions were nightmarish.
According to urban legends that began circulating shortly after the disaster something else emerged from that dark, collapsing tunnel alongside or instead of the crew.
Witnesses aw a ghastly, inhuman figure rise from the dust. It was tall, clad in Victorian garb, with jagged fangs and skin the color of a corpse, dripping with fresh blood and tattered flesh.
Frightened by the commotion, the creature didn’t try to hide among the living. Instead, it bolted. It sprinted westward across the city, leaping fences and dodging searchlights, moving with unnatural speed until it vanished directly into the gates of Hollywood Cemetery.
It dove headfirst into the locked, subterranean vault belonging to William Wortham Pool a wealthy Richmond bookkeeper who had died three years earlier in 1922.
The real W.W. Pool was a relatively ordinary citizen, but his final resting place looks like central casting for a gothic horror movie. Built into a steep embankment, the mausoleum features heavy stone blocks, an eerie grated door, and strange architectural details, including a stone relief of a child surrounded by animals and a lonely stone lamb keeping watch overhead.
For generations, college students and thrill-seekers have hiked to the vault. Legend states that if you visit the tomb at midnight, you can see strange shadows moving inside, or hear scratching against the stone.
To this day there are accounts from people claiming to have seen a tall, sharply dressed man in dark Victorian clothing standing motionless on the hillside directly above the Pool vault. When a flashlight beam or headlights sweep across the slope, the figure doesn’t run it allegedly just dissolves into the shadows or steps backward into the solid stone of the embankment.
