By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
For Halloween, I thought I’d try to walk in the footsteps of a neighborhood phantom. But the local ghosts proved hard to find. While inexplicable lights and creaks have been reported in certain old houses, and there have even been ghost tours of the city, the documentation on the subject is vague and thin. Marguerite duPont Lee’s Virginia Ghosts—a book full of intrigue, offering anecdotes like “The Haunted Kitchen” and “Telekinesis in Lynchburg”—doesn’t mention the Friendly City or even the surrounding county. The two-volume set of The Ghosts of Virginia by L. B. Taylor Jr. contains some fascinating lore, such as “The Spectral Canine of Goochland,” “Aunt Esther’s Ghostly Pumpkin Pie,” “Chased by a Dead Horse,” and my personal favorite, “The Ghosts Who Love to Read”—but the Friendly City receives hardly any notice, the nearest apparition showing up in Bridgewater.
I did come across a ghost named Evelyn Byrd, however, which immediately recalled our own Evelyn Byrd Avenue. Could there be a connection? Legend tells that Evelyn Byrd, born in 1707, was forbidden to marry the man she loved (perhaps because he was a Catholic). She died at the age of thirty, allegedly of a broken heart. Since then, she has made a number of appearances around her family’s old plantation in Charles City County, often dressed in white. A gentle specter, she is reported to drift about in a quiet way without scaring anybody, which makes her seem like the right type of ghost to be honored in the Friendly City, but why would we choose a phantom from so far away?
One of the nice things about living in a smallish town is that it’s easy to get your city surveyor on the phone. I called ours, and found him eager to help. No, he said, he doubted the street was named after the ghostly Evelyn Byrd. He suggested a more recent person of that name, who had lived here in the city: Evelyn Byrd Deyerle, born in 1906, the sister of Dr. Henry Deyerle, who had been a prominent figure when roads were being built on that side of town. Since there is a Deyerle Avenue running parallel to Evelyn Byrd, it seemed I had my answer. A trip to the public library, where an obliging librarian helped me search through the genealogy shelves, confirmed the identity and local residence of Evelyn Byrd Deyerle. So our Evelyn Byrd was born two hundred years after the one in the ghost story. But did that mean there was no link between them?
I dug into the genealogies and found . . . so many Evelyn Byrds. Evelyn Byrd Nelson Page. Evelyn Byrd Page Lee. Evelyn Byrd Beverly Lee. Evelyn Byrd Page Wood. The name proliferated, rising through history like an unquiet spirit. I started to feel like I was trapped in an echo chamber, or perhaps a labyrinth in a spooky movie, spinning around while a voice from some invisible source whispered variations of the same name in my ear.
I come from a family with some repetitive naming traditions. Certain names in my father’s family are so common, people who hold them have to be identified by place or other details (as a child, it seemed perfectly normal to me to have an uncle called Ahmed Milwaukee). In my husband’s Amish family tree, as if the recurrent Millers and Yoders weren’t enough, there are generations of women named Barbara. So I’m used to the idea of reusing names. But as I scrolled through dizzying records, tracking the Evelyn Byrds sprinkled among the Harrisons, Bollings, and Taylors, it seemed to me that the somewhat presumptuously designated First Families of Virginia had a clannish intensity of name repetition even the Amish couldn’t beat. The name Evelyn Byrd—conveniently gender-neutral for many years—goes back at least to the ghostly Evelyn’s father, William Evelyn Byrd. It extends to the distinguished archaeologist Evelyn Byrd Harrison and the aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd. There is even a quite awful novel called Evelyn Byrd. Recently, according to her Instagram, the actor Byrdie Bell—nickname of Evelyn Byrd Bell—visited the home of her phantasmal ancestress, whom she calls “the first Evelyn Byrd.”
And what’s it like to walk on Evelyn Byrd Avenue? Well, it’s dreary. There’s a dullness here on even the most brilliant fall afternoon, a sense of emptiness to the road between the chain stores and chain restaurants that leads you up the hill to the chain hotels. This is a place to drive through, along with the steady stream of cars passing between the big university and the highway. It’s a road that discourages lingering, wearying the eye with a string of almost identical structures, the anonymous-looking brick storefronts, the standardized signs and parking lots, the clipped little bushes standing in a row. At University Boulevard, the sidewalk peters out, leaving a would-be walker stranded amid the traffic. I think I’ll turn around here, because if I keep walking, I know I’m only going to see more of the same.
There’s something inherently ghostly about repetition. A ghost is sometimes called a revenant—one who returns. Maybe there’s a certain logic to the conjunction of a well-worn family name and a road lined with parking lots and retail chains. Still, I sense a difference in energy between these two styles of repetition. The name Evelyn Byrd surely carries its own historical hauntings, but it also belonged to a person who lived here, unlike Beach Bum Tanning, Texas Roadhouse, or AT&T.
Feeling a little morose after my walk, I curl up with The Ghosts of Virginia to reread “The Happy Grave of Adam Kersh.” This report concerns a deceased cabinet maker, familiarly known as Uncle Ad, who appears on starry nights to sit on his tombstone near Bridgewater and while away the hours playing his fiddle. I’d gladly adopt, for the Friendly City, this amiable and sensitive ghost, who is said to select his music according to his listener’s mood: “a toe-tapping melody, a bright tune for those who have a happy heart; a sad dirge for those of dour disposition.”
With thanks to Kayla Grose at Massanutten Regional Library and Charlie Wingard at the Department of Community Development
