This is a final project for a nonfiction writing class. It is not meant to read like an article, but rather as a story in a fiction-like format. However, unlike fiction, it is composed of real interviews, other primary research, and some secondary research.
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Spring 2023.
The Biggest Lie in Greene County.
This piece is only fragments of a history of what is known as the Wash House of Greene County. For me, it’s both a passion project and a love letter to the house that has always signaled that I’m on the road home from my university. I want to recognize that not all memories of this house are pleasant. But not all memories were unpleasant either. The real, unfettered truth of this house is something only its residents know.
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I invite anyone who knows something about the house, its residents, or its history to contact me at dover.mira@gmail.com.
THE QUILT
Two cars pass me on the solid-striped asphalt of Route 33. They’re going sixty, taking hairpin turns like lightning, but I’ve slowed to thirty-five. The road curves. The Turkey Ridge Road sign sits among a jumble of mailboxes, and I put on my blinker.
“Proceed to the route,” my phone says. “Proceed to the route.”
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I pull into the gravel driveway, my car bumping along the road like a poor alignment waiting to happen until I’m feet from the rusting gate. Raindrops tap the roof. Through the trees, there’s a swatch of the rusting roof.
I walk part of the path toward the house. I’m gripping my taser so hard, I can imagine the rubber hollowing out at my thumbs and fusing to the wires inside. Rachel’s on the phone in my pocket. She’s chatting with someone in the background until she returns and asks me what I see.
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“Tires,” is the first thing that comes out of my mouth. Feet from the porch are five tires in a stack. The grass sprouts to my waist around them, and long golden weeds cover the path to the porch. I’m facing the front of the house where the door and balcony are. From 33, all you can see is the wrap-around porch, not this hollowed-out front stoop.
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It’s got a look to it—like every inch of the place could tell you a story. The wood is bone-gray and weathered against a raincloud sky. The porch awning sags. The place itself is a ghost with sunken eyes and a vacant smile.
I tell Rachel about the saw blades hanging around the outside of the house. She tells me that this is how my very own horror movie starts. I can’t argue with that.
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But here’s the thing: I’ve passed this house on my drive to Fredericksburg for three years. At some point, it became a landmark—a place I’d drive thirty-five for on a fifty-five limit road. At some point, I started making hard turns into the gravel path, just to get a better look at it. At some point, I’d become connected to this house and the quilt forever strung on the laundry line.
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And some insane part of me—some part of me that said why yes, I am the main character in a horror movie—-wanted to know more about the ghost house of Spotswood Trail.
It’s August of 1950, and the house is quiet. Spotswood Trail was paved within the last few years, and the trees are sparse, especially around the road. The house is painted paste white, down to the smallest detail—the porch, the shutters, the trim. Roadside sits a swamp, thick, stinking of mud, and surrounded by a wooden fence. August is peak snake season, and if you’re unlucky, you might catch a glimpse of a garter or a rat snake in the weeds.
If you’re lucky though, you’ll walk down the gravel driveway, through the patches of sunlight that reach into the clearing, and smell the roses and boxwoods planted with care around the home. If you’re lucky, you’ll hear the birds chittering, the wind blowing, and the neighbors whispering about the house off Spotswood Trail.
They’re saying it’s the most beautiful home in all the mountains.
My boots are muddy as I wander back to the car. The path is overgrown and I have to balance on a decomposing log before hopping back into the gravel lot. I feel for my keys, but before I can let myself into the car, a white SUV across the road beeps. The hazards are on and it’s stopped in a sloped driveway. For a moment I tense. Did house I’d stopped to observe have residents after all? Was this one of them, come to tell me to stop snooping around the property?
But a short, middle-aged lady in a mustard zip-up pockets her keys, checks the road for cars, and crosses to the fifteen mailboxes across from Turkey Ridge Road.
I scramble across the gravel toward the woman. “Excuse me? I’m sorry. Excuse me?”
She looks up, mail in hand. I don’t think she’s used to seeing people parked across from Turkey Ridge, much less twenty-something girls in pink boots.
“I know this is strange. Do you know anything about this house?”
“Oh, sure. The Wash House.”
I stop in my tracks. “The what?” Did she say wash? As in, the very thing that had attracted me to the house in the first place?
“The story goes that they would sell moonshine out of the house.” She speaks carefully like the house might hear her telling its secrets. “So what would happen is, when they had the moonshine ready to go there would be laundry hanging out. A lot of times you would drive by the house and there was all this laundry sitting out so you knew that there was product available.” She flips the mail into her other hand. “It’s actually on some, like, postcards and stuff in the Stanardsville area. They used to call that the Old Laundry House. Everybody knew.”
I’m shifting between the balls of my feet and my toes, looking for the next question to ask. She tells me her name is Susie and she’s lived in Greene County her whole life. She’s staying with a friend up the driveway across the road.
“Do you know what happened to the house?” I ask. “It’s abandoned, right?”
“From my understanding, somebody bought the property and they’re supposed to make it into a fancy thing, like a museum where you could go in and learn about the family that lived there. It would be cool if they did.”
I ask if she knows where I could learn more about the house, and she suggests visiting the library in Stanardsville or looking it up online. We cross the road so she can retrieve her phone from the SUV, and she pulls up an article on the house.
“It says that the owners at Lydia must have bought the house,” she reads.
“Oh, Lydia. That’s the resort up there?” I point up Route 33 toward Shenandoah Park. Lydia Mountain signs cover this side of the pass, advertising cabins woven throughout the woods. She nods.
Susie gives me directions to the library in Stanardsville and tells me to be safe. I hop in my car as Susie’s SUV disappears up the driveway. Before passing the house, I check that no one is behind me, throw on my hazards, and pull my car into the grass along 33.
The weeds smell like fresh mint despite the exhaust-filled highway. I trudge down the side of the road, hair flying over my face every time a car whizzes by. I snap photos until I’ve got fifteen versions of the same image in my camera roll.
The house—dull. Gray. Empty.
Hollow, but watching.
Back in the car, I call my mother and tell her I’m going to be late for dinner.
THE MOONSHINE HOUSE
Stanardsville is one street of brick houses, yard tchotchkes, chipped paint, and miniature picket fences. The library shares a building with the community learning center and the senior center. It’s one room, so when I walk through the sliding doors, the librarian, two men, and a family look up.
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I start with the librarian, but when I ask him about the “Wash House” he furrows his brow and suggests I talk to the Historical Society. I wander the shelves, pretending to read dust jackets of the latest thriller releases. If this was a dead end, then what next? I search “Greene County Historical Society” on my phone, but they closed at three. It’s four. I search “The Wash House,” but there are too many articles to comb through now. I scroll past a few photos of the house and then tuck my phone into my pocket.
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By the exit, two men sit in armchairs with books on their laps. They’re all gray hair and country accents. I hesitate, but then remind myself that I approached Susie on the side of a road, so surely I could approach these guys in a library.
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I linger in their line of sight until they give me their attention. “Hi, excuse me? Are you local?” They are, so I ask them if they know anything about the Wash House.
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“Well, we used to pick up… I can’t remember the guy’s name,” says the first man. His smile is kind and he’s sitting forward in the armchair. Both he and his buddy are wearing Greene County Transit jackets. “He passed away. And his mother lived there and she went to a nursing home, and I don’t know if she’s living or not. But, I bet you, if you went to the Historical Society—have you been there yet?”
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I laugh. “No, I haven’t, and they’re not open anymore.”
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“They’ll probably have the whole history of that house. In fact, in our house, somebody did a little painting of the house and it’s sitting on the wall. It’s well, well known.”
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This strikes me as odd: The house is well known, but no one so far seems to really know anything about it. I ask the men’s names: Thompson and Eric. They work for the county, and they used to drive the previous Wash House owners to the Great Valu down the main Stanardsville road. Thompson tells me that he only knew of two people living at the house: an old woman and her grown son.
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“The neighbor I was talking to mentioned that they called it the ‘Moonshine House’ because they sold moonshine out of it,” I say.
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Thompson laughs. “Oh, I wouldn’t doubt that would be it.”
It’s 1955, and the only thing Veronica Shifflett wants for her fifth birthday is for Big Daddy to take her to the Mountain View Tea Room. She begs her grandmother to come too, but Alma refuses. They mean to invite Josiepapa but forget to stop by his house on Spotswood Trail. Instead, Edward closes his shop for the day—a thing he does never, if ever—and he and Veronica walk from the farmhouse behind the store to the Tea Room, just down the road.
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At the Tea Room, the owner’s wife bakes Veronica a cake and asks what she wants her to play on the Victrola. Veronica asks for “I don't want to set the world on fire” by the Inkspots. And because it’s Veronica’s birthday, as soon as the song starts, Edward stands up, leaning on his wooden crutches, and starts to dance.
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“I don't want to set the world on fire
I just want to start a flame in your heart
In my heart I have but one desire
And that one is you, no other will do.”
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Edward’s dancing makes Veronica giggle, and soon she’s up spinning too, two long, dark braids swinging and a cotton dress whipping around her waist. Edward’s dancing is awkward as he tries to match Veronica’s movements. When Edward was nine years old, he fell and bruised his right leg while hopping on spring stilts. Back then, the doctors weren’t sure what to do with him, so they took his leg off. Veronica doesn’t mind his dancing though.
"I've lost all ambition for worldly acclaim
I just want to be the one you love
And with your admission, that you'd feel the same
I'll have reached the goal, I'm dreaming of, believe me.”
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The music crescendos and Veronica looks at Big Daddy with a toothy smile. “I’m never gonna forget today.”
“I don't want to set the world on fire
I just want to start a flame in your heart.”
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And Veronica never did.
I take the road from the library to a shop called Noon Whistle Pottery and park under an awning. It’s painted blue with red trimmings, and a sign on the door says HOURS: TUESDAY THRU SUNDAY 10 TO 5, MONDAYS BY CHANCE!
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The inside of the pottery place is filled with wooden display tables holding hand-crafted plates and vases, leather-bound journals, jewelry, weavings, and wall hangings. A quiet man sits at the counter with a chunk of bagged clay to his left. One wall beside him is decorated with knob-nosed clay faces.
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John owns Noon Whistle Pottery and has been living in Stanardsville for twenty-two years. When I ask him about the Wash House, he chuckles. People used to ask about it weekly, but I’m the first one to ask in a year or two. “You used to see smoke coming out…” he says. “They had a cook stove in the kitchen. Up until five years ago, you’d see smoke coming out of the [chimney].”
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When I ask him if he knows anything about the moonshine, he tells me he’s heard plenty of rumors. He also suggests I talk to some of the older people around town.
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I wander around his shop. It’s three floors, filled to the brim with pieces from different potters and specialized artists. On the top floor, the lighting is dim and the ceiling is low. A couple is sorting through some pieces, each wearing a puffy raincoat and boots.
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“My mother met the lady that lived there,” the man says when I ask about the house. “She said ‘I know everybody thinks we make moonshine but never been moonshine made in this house before.’ I think it was like, an IHOP, or something. Breakfast stop.”
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“That’s all you know about it?”
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“Other than the rumors that if the long johns are hanging then that means the moonshine is ready. We live off the top road, just as you pass it. Our vacation home is up there. We actually have a picture of it in our house.”
“Of the house?”
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He nods.
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Later, I’m sitting in my car outside the pottery shop when there’s a tap at the window. I look up.
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A sweet-faced old woman dressed in blue is smiling at me. “Do you need me to move my car for you?”
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I take a look behind me. “I think it’s okay. I can get out.” Then, remembering John’s suggestion about talking to older folks in Stanardsville, I scramble out of my car onto the pavement beside her.
“Actually, though, do you mind if I ask you a question?” I move under the awning to avoid the rain that falls quicker now. “Do you know anything about the Wash House?”
Like John, she laughs. “Well, it’s pretty well abandoned now. It was owned by a family of ne’er-do-wells, if I may be so blunt. And of course, the story was that they had drugs and dope and liquor and all that. If the wash was hanging out on the porch, then there was a supply. If there wasn’t any wash on the porch then they didn’t have anything to sell you. But the family, they have a terrible reputation. The husband’d just come home drunk and beat the wife up and all the kids were ne’er-do-wells. Many stories. I suppose some of them are true.”
“Do you know anything else about it?”
“I think most of the family is passed away. There may be one or two kids, but if there are, I’m thinking they might be in jail.” She shakes her head. “That’s terrible to say, but I’m thinking other people would tell you that too.”
It’s afternoon in the Great Valu on Spotswood Trail when Haywood ‘Ooster” Conley makes his way to Angie’s register. He’s tall and big-boned with a furry, gray face and a mild limp that Angie only notices sometimes. He places a box of Friskies and a pack of Swisher Sweets on the belt, then pauses, and adds a pouch of peppermints.
“Hi, Ooster. How ya doin’?” Angie asks as she rings up the items. She’s not just asking. Sometimes, when she hasn’t seen Ooster in the store for a few days, she’ll make a point to look left when she passes Turkey Ridge, just to be sure there’s still smoke coming out of the old cookstove chimney. “Hey,” she adds. “How come everyone calls ya Ooster, anyway?”
“Well, it’s ‘cause when I was a boy I chased the chickens.” His voice is deep, but some of his words come out wrong, a product of growing up with a country accent and a speech impediment. “I chased the rooster. I’d say “rooster” but I couldn't say the Rs, so it came out Ooster. Call me Ooster ever since.”
Angie knows the answer, but she asks anyway. “How’s the water coming?”
“Yeah, he gonna come an’ fix it. Thanks fo’ askin’.”
Angie bags his groceries and he heads to the vestibule of Great Valu, where he plays a few lottery rounds, curses at the machine, and then leaves.
Ooster’s been saying he’ll get the spring fixed for ages now, but Angie’d stopped believing him. That house had fallen into complete disrepair when Beatrice got too old for the upkeep.
When Angie and her husband first moved to Greene County, she’d known nothing about the house. Not what was inside it, and not what was outside. They’d driven the road from Stanardsville up to the mountains, and seen the house on the driveby. Angie said “Stop, stop! I'm gonna take a picture.” But her husband kept driving, worried about stopping on the side of the road for a photo of some old house.
Angie, though, thought it was kind of special looking.
As she rang up the next Great Valu customer, she made a mental note to check for smoke in the chimney on her driveby next week.
THE WASH HOUSE
When you put the words “Wash House Greene County” into Google, you’ll find multiple laundromats and cleaners, and a clickbait article titled: “12 Things You Can’t Wash in a Machine.” A few links will take you to the landing pages of professional photographers (photos by Edd Fuller, Terri Clopton-Brasseur, and Kipp Teague included below), each hoping you’ll purchase their unique print of The Wash House, The Laundry House, or The Moonshine House.
One photographer writes: “Last week on a cold and overcast morning, I drove up the mountain to photograph the Wash House. There was no wash out that day, and the only sign of life about the place was smoke coming out of the chimney. Maybe it was too cold to hang wash out… but the place doesn't seem quite the same without the hanging clothes to brighten up the porch.”
Mixed in with the photographers, you’ll find three or four short pages about the house on Spotswood Trail. A Reddit page is titled “R.I.P. to Miss Beatrice, the owner of the Old Wash House on Route 33” and includes a photo of the house.
The name Miss Beatrice turns over in my head a hundred times. From there, I find her full name. Beatrice Shifflett Conley. Aside from that, the Reddit thread contains twenty-one comments where different users mention the local moonshine story as well as the smoke that would come out of the chimney year-round.
Another article confirms that although technically the house isn’t lived in as of right now, the property belongs to Lydia Mountain, the resort that owns cabins and hundreds of acres of land throughout the Shenandoah Mountains.
Then there’s a video posted by Lydia Mountain Films. It’s a shaky tour of the house given by some guy in workboots. His video shows a dilapidated, worn-down building. There are floorboards missing and sections of the roof hang low. Items in the house are broken or turned over. A brownie calendar says 2018 in large numbers. The sink is missing the entire front section that hides the plumbing pipes. I save the video to return to later.
One of the final articles I open is a post from 2013 on Shenandoah Valley Events’ website by Aimee Brasseur. In it, she writes: “A place just past the Rockingham county line captures the Valley’s beauty, character, and hospitality in all its glory. It is a fairy tale come true, the kind of house one would see decades ago in old Appalachian folklore.” She writes that she anticipates the view of the house every time she comes down from Shenandoah Park.
The lines that make me stop and reread, however, are these: “Nestled in an expanse of overgrown grass and trees sits my house. It’s not actually mine; however, family and friends can confirm the spell the house casts on me. The place is not much to look at…but that doesn’t matter because it’s the flaws this house has that call to me.”
Part of me is defensive. Who is this girl to call the house hers? Part of me understands the obsession. And part of me knows that I’m just the same as this girl, calling a house that I know nothing about “mine.”
The rest of me is just plain creeped out.
I call the Greene County Historical Society the next day, April 8, while sitting at a desk in the office at home. My feet jitter as the phone rings. A man picks up with a quick hello.
“Hi, I'm a student at JMU, and I was directed to the Historical Society because… on my drive home, I pass the Wash House.”
Ron, the GCHS worker for the day, doesn’t miss a beat. “Sure. It’s a very famous building in the county.” Ron has only lived in Greene County for about 20 years, so his knowledge of the county’s history isn’t as vast as some of the other GCHS workers. That said, he’s the resident Genealogist and manages the genealogy database for the county.
“So if I had the name of the family—like their last name—would you be able to tell me about them?” I ask.
“Oh yeah,” he says.
“I believe it's Shifflett.”
But Ron laughs. “Oh, the most common name in the county?”
I feel like slamming my head on the desk. “Yes. I know that the woman's name was Beatrice Shifflett. Beatrice Shifflett Conley.”
I hear Ron typing from the other end.
“Do you know why that's the most common name in the county?” I ask.
“No, I do not. There is a rumor—and I've been told this is an unsubstantiated rumor—that there was a gentleman that adopted a bunch of kids who were parentless. They took his name afterward. Here. Beatrice Meadows Shifflett married Lonnie Conley.”
Ron tells me that Beatrice grew up one of 11 children. Her parents were Louise and Rufus and Beatrice married Lonnie in 1954. They divorced after 18 years. They had four kids and Beatrice didn’t have a job. He died in 1984. She died in 2018.
“They had five children,” Ron says. “[Harold] Dewey was born in ‘43 before they were married. Let me see the notes on Harold Dewey.” There’s a pause. “Ooh. ooh. That's not good. As one person would refer to it, death by misadventure. Died at the age of 19 from an accidental shotgun blast to the neck.”
“Dewey?”
“That's her oldest son who was born out of wedlock. Then, Haywood was a Shifflett and he was born out of wedlock… He died in 2018 as well.”
After chatting with Ron, I use the information he gave me to look into the kids. As far as I can figure out, the other three—Linda, Karl Lee, and Harold—are still alive. But tracking people isn’t the easiest, and soon I move on to the quilt.
I start with the video by Lydia Mountain Films from October 2021. There’s another video that follows by Shenandoah Squatch: Bigfoot at the Old Wash House. It was posted July, 2022. In both videos, the quilt hangs on the line in the front of the house.
I find an email for the Shenandoah Squatch guy—who, I figure out, also made the Lydia Mountain Films video of the Wash House interior—and shoot him a quick message.
In two videos from 2020, a vlog posted by GetRealVlogs and an NBC29 coverage article, the quilt isn’t on the Wash House line. But why not? If the last Conleys—the mother and son—died in 2018, then how did the quilt get there? Was it not as old as I assumed?
I narrow the placement of the quilt to sometime between February 21, 2020, to October 30, 2021. But I still don’t know who put it there or why. I tap my pencil between my hands. I refresh all my pages.
And then there’s a ding from my email tab. Dwight, the real name of the Shenandoah Squatch guy, has emailed me back in record time. I’d asked him what he knew about the house or who owned it, but I didn’t honestly expect him to respond—much less, within the hour.
I open the message.
DWIGHT LEDFORD 4/8/2023, 8:05:
You need to visit my shop just down the road on a Friday afternoon and I will let you speak to the Great Grand Daughter of the original owner.
THE GRANDDAUGHTER
I head home from Fredericksburg the day after Easter. I’ll return to Stanardsville Friday to meet with Dwight and Veronica Shifflett Deane, whose name I’ve Googled about a hundred times to no avail.
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As I pass Wokonda Trail, I prepare myself to look through the trees for the house. Today the sky is blue and the sun is out, so the whole place should be glowing within the little clearing. Instead, it’s dull. If before it was a ghost, the energy of something once there, now it’s a grave, a marker for something very, very gone.
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I feel my foot on the pedal, pushing me to fifty-five.
A family tree of the residents of the Wash House, made to the best of my abilities. Please note I cannot be certian it is 100% accurate.
When I send Dwight a long email back, asking what the great-granddaughter of the original house is like and how in the world he knows her, his response is this:
DWIGHT LEDFORD, 4/9/2023, 4:33:
Neighbor.
In person, however, Dwight’ll tell you anything plus some. He owns a gift shop at the bottom of Lydia Mountain, and when I first walk in, I come face-to-face with the house on Spotswood Trail; it’s on everything. Dwight has printed it on postcards and pictures. He’s blown it up and put it on T-shirts and sweatshirts and mugs. He gives me two postcards and a coin as soon as I walk in. I struggle to fold them into the pages of my notebook.
“I try to play with all the names. Here I printed it up as the Moonshine House,” he says, lifting a filtered photograph of the house. Then, Dwight takes me to the counter and shows me a collage of photos. He says Veronica let him take some pictures of the photos she has. There are four in the image, but the most eye-catching is the one in the bottom right-hand corner. It’s a man in a broad hat and bowtie, mid-forties or fifties. His lips are parted in a frown and his brow ridge could crush boulders.
“The original owner, his name is Joseph Shifflett.” Dwight is referring to the photo that’s captured my attention.
“And this is the house. Like back in the day.” He points to the picture above, where three people stand on a porch. There are a few cracks in the upper deck, but otherwise, it’s in good shape. Despite the black and white photograph, I can tell the wood is painted white. “So this is the front of the house.” He puts a finger over one of the figures in the photograph. “See this? He only has one leg. This guy's name was Edward Shifflett.”
Dwight turns around, finding a photo on the wall of the gift shop we’re standing in before all of the tchotchkes and advertisements were thrown up around it. This photo is in black and white too. “On that old [Coke] sign, you can see his name clearly. C.E.Shifflett.”
He tells me that the property he’s on used to be owned by Edward Shifflett. Veronica still lives in the little farmhouse behind the shop where she grew up, but they’d long since sold the rest of the property. For example, Dwight’s gift shop.
“That's her grandfather,” he explains about Edward. “She was raised by her grandparents because her mom and dad abandoned her. So she knew them as her father and mother.”
Dwight shows me a picture of the Wash House from the last two years, and I ask him to tell me about the clothes on the line.
“According to the daughter who lived there, Linda Conely, that was the only dry spot on the property.” He picks the picture from the wooden shelf and hands it to me. “You know, [Linda] don't like talking about it. Because a brother and the mother died there.”
I ask if he has Linda’s contact information. I’ve been able to find what I’d assume is her number online, but it’d help to verify. He doesn’t have it anymore, but he promises to look. “This is the last clothes on the line,” he says, pulling another picture off the shelf. In it, an array of colorful clothes are pinned, but there’s no quilt. He gestures to the previous image. “But these? These are staged.”
“These are staged?” I echo.
Dwight shrugs. He says he thinks Lydia Mountain must have put them up when they took over the property. He tells me that he visited the property, like I saw in one of the videos, and got to take a look around because he knows the owners and asked permission. “I'll tell you, you don’t want to go in there.” He pantomimes the shape of the house for me. “If you look, like, the front door’s here, there's a big hole here. So what I did is I walked the outer perimeter. This is like the kitchen. I couldn't get into this area. I went upstairs, which is the most stable part of the house. The stairway is strong. It's like this building. This is old, old, old. So if I pulled up these planks, you would see the dirt. And I wasn't afraid of no ghosts or nothin’. I was afraid of animals.” Specifically, snakes. Dwight mentions seeing snakeskins everywhere he looked.
“If they never made moonshine, then why did that story start?”
“Because this whole mountain did moonshine. So that… that house is this mountain. You know. I mean, that's why I put it on a pin or a shirt. But it's weird. People around the area like the house. Inside though? Not too many of them like that house.” He says that Veronica wants it to be known that the house belonged to Joseph Shifflett. “That's what needs to be told,” he says. “Forget the Conleys.”
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Photos in Dwight's shop, given to him by Veronica.
Veronica’s voice is laced with salt, and she snaps at Dwight with ease. Dwight takes it in stride, asking her a few questions about her health and upkeep, and then turning the conversation around to the house. He half-heartedly tries to convince Veronica to let us come visit by promising to take her garbage out. She tells him she hasn’t taken a bath and she can answer questions over the phone just fine. Dwight shakes his head for my benefit but agrees.
After a few more questions, he lets me cut in.
“Hi, my name is Mira. It's really nice to meet you, Ms. Deane.”
There’s a long pause, and then: “Okay, and what's the question?”
Dwight rolls his eyes, but I continue. “I was just wondering about the last day that you were there.”
She says the last time she was in the house on Spotswood Trail, she was about thirteen. Her great-grandfather had just died and she was going with her grandfather, Edward, to inventory the house. She describes the inside and the outside of the house, emphasizing how different it was then from how it looks now.
“We didn't go to stores around here much when my grandfather was living because of his store here,” she tells me.
“We always went to Charlottesville.”
“How far away was that?”
Veronica huffs. “How far Charlottesville is now. I don't think it’s moved.”
But when I ask her less for technical details and more about her grandfather and great-grandfather, I can hear her demeanor change over the phone. I can hear the smile slide into her voice, almost as if I’m talking to a flighty little girl, rather than this crotchety seventy-year-old. “What do you remember most about them?” I ask at one point.
There’s no beat before her answer.
“Both of ‘em just loved me to death.”
Veronica Shifflett was born in 1950 to Lonnie Edward Shifflett and Iva Leola Meadows. Lonnie was 23 and Iva was 18, and neither one was prepared to raise a child. So, instead, Veronica was raised by her grandfather, Clarence Edward Shifflett, and grandmother, Mary Alma Weaver. Edward was one of her favorite people in the whole world. He was a big man, outgoing, and a jokester, and he loved Veronica to death.
While no moonshine was ever made in Edward’s father’s house on Spotswood Trail, the moonshiners were an important part of Edward’s business. As the shopkeep, he had sole control of most—if not all—of the sugar going to those who lived on Spotswood Trail, residents otherwise known as the People of the Pike. During the Great Depression and other hard times, he traded sugar for money and favors, and he was often able to give out loans to those in need. He didn’t have a car, because there was always someone happy to drive him someplace.
At Joseph Decator Shifflet’s home—the white house next to Spotswood Trail with the beautiful wrap around porch—the only alcohol ever made was wine. In the summertime, when Veronica and Edward walked the short stint of road from their farmhouse to Joseph’s house, they helped Veronica’s Josiepa pick grapes and berries from the vines on the mountain.
Veronica remembers her Josiepa’s wine as some of the best she’d ever had. She enjoyed picking the grapes, because it was something to do when she visited her great-grandfather, since she couldn’t ever play out in the front yard. There were too many snakes.
Joseph was a small man and part Apache Indian—a trait that you could see even in Veronica’s dark hair and eyes. He had a temper, but both he and Edward never scolded Veronica for anything. Instead, they often just laughed at her antics. Joseph lived in the house in the early 1900’s, and toward the later end of his time there, Susie and Joe Roach, his caretakers, lived in the house with their two sons, too.
Edward and Joseph gave Veronica anything she wanted. When they traveled to Charlottesville to shop, she’d bring one of the little alligator clutch purses Edward gave her from his store. Veronica’s favorite place in Charlottesville was a record store where her grandfather would buy her all kinds of music and “movie-star books.”
One of the highlights of Veronica’s childhood, though, was visiting her great-grandfather at his house on Spotswood Trail before his death in 1964.
While in Stanardsville, I park at the Lafayette Inn and walk around downtown. I chat with a few ladies in front of the county courthouse. They’ve heard of the “Wash House” but they only know the same thing everyone else knows. A woman at the library tells a similar story. I drive a little way up the road to the Great Valu, where Thompson and Eric, the Green County Transit men, said they’d often take Beatrice and Ooster.
It’s a small store with too many fluorescent lights and aisles of boxed or canned goods that look like they’ve been there since my birth. I wander around, asking anyone who’ll talk to me about the Wash House. A few people ask if I need directions. Some confirm that same story as everyone: It was a moonshine house. Nothing good e’er happened there. They sold drugs ‘n’ things.
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As I finish speaking to two men in the frozen foods aisle, I spot one of the cashiers. She’s mid-foirties or fifties with graying, feathery hair and a blue Great Valu vest. She doesn’t look old enough to know anything about the Shifflets, but she has a nice smile as she greets customers at her belt.
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I buy peanuts.
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The cashier’s name is Angie, and as she rings me up, she tells me about the only Wash House inhabitant she ever knew. Ooster. She says she’d never heard of him doing any Moonshine, and she’s pretty sure he never did. She also tells me that he died of a stroke while in the house. “I went to Norfolk, about 10 years ago, to visit friends,” she says. “Never been in their house. And I went, I sat in their den, and we’re introducing ourselves, and I look, and there's a picture straight across from me of the Wash House.”
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“Oh wow.” I grip the plastic of my peanuts packaging. Her story rings familiar among all the other stories I’ve heard about people finding images or paintings of the Wash House across Virginia.
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“And with him, I remember,” Angie says, returning to Ooster. “I can pass [the house] on my way to-and-from work, and I always checked to make sure there was smoke coming out of the chimney in the wintertime because I was always worried about him. I liked to make sure he was okay.”
THE CONLEYS
It’s the screaming that first alerts the neighbors. Veronica is among them, having stopped at Ottie and Clemie Deane’s house to drop off some things she’d picked up in Charlottesville. She and Clemie Deane, standing on the porch, whip their heads around at the sound coming from Veronica’s great-grandfather’s old home.
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It’s evening, but a few others come to the door too, exchanging concerned glances with Veronica and Clemie. Then comes the cry Veronica will remember forever. “If you killed Mama—!” A little girl’s voice.
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“Maybe we’d better go down there,” one of the Deanes says.
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“Maybe we’d better call the law,” another says.
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So they gather Junior and Katherine Morris, a few others in the home, and any other neighbors that heard the commotion, and they all walk down to the Wash House where they find Linda Conley in the yard, screaming at a moonshine-drunk Lonnie Conley. Linda is a child. Veronica calls her usual demeanor “jolly”—but tonight she isn’t.
A few of the neighbors make sure Beatrice, Linda’s mother, is okay, as Veronica and the rest watch from the driveway. When the sheriff arrives, the group starts to dissolve, but Veronica stays put.
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All the sheriff says is that if Lonnie wants to drink on the weekends in the future, then Beatrice’d better gather the boys and Linda and walk them down to a relative's house in Bacon Hollow. He says he expects them to do that every weekend from now on.
Before leaving Great Valu, a woman overhears my conversation with Angie and suggests I drive past the Sip Shack and talk to Buck Shifflett (unrelated to the Shiffletts of the Wash House). Buck is a co-owner of Lydia Mountain, and the woman tells me that his fiancee owns Sip Shack at the base of Shenandoah Park.
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“If you see a white jeep, then he's there with her,” she says.
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On my way over the mountains, I check, but there’s no jeep. So instead, when I’m back at my apartment, I reach out on Facebook. While I wait, I email Dwight again, hoping he can send me some of the footage he didn’t post to YouTube of the house. I also ask if he’s found Linda Conley’s number or if there’s anyone else I should speak to.
DWIGHT LEDFORD, 4/17/2023 3:12
It is impossible to get anyone's number nowadays since everyone has a cell phone and not a landline. I think you have what you need through Veronica. That house is just poor living from the late ’60s and on.
I don’t send Dwight another email until later. If he won’t help me, then I don’t have time to waste on his frustrations with the Conleys. So I call the owner of Blue Run Grocery, who Angie recommended I contact.
Like Angie, he’s keen to help, but he only ever knew Ooster from serving him in the shop and seeing him in their shared hunting club.
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“Do you remember any of the times he came to your store?” I ask.
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“Yeah, he’d come in, get plants for his garden.”
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“What kind of plants?”
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“Potatoes.”
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“And was that all he bought or did he buy other things when he came to the store?”
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“A few beers, once ‘n awhile.” Ooster used to work for Lynch Roofing, and even though his nickname was “Ooster” the hunting club called him “Woo Woo.”
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When I hang up, I refresh my open tabs. Sip Shack has sent me Buck’s phone number. Dwight has sent a follow-up email as well.
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DWIGHT LEDFORD, 4/17/2023 3:32
Veronica just thought of a person that would talk to you. Her house is located right across from the house. Her name is Margaret Smith. I have never met her but I know her son who is the current Sheriff of Greene County. His name is Steve Smith. Look up To see if Margaret Smith has a listed number. If all else fails try speaking directly to the Sheriff and ask if you could obtain his mother's number.
The Conleys lived in the house on Spotswood Trail from July 1967, until Ooster and Beatrice passed away in 2018. They rented the property for anywhere from $25–$75 a month from a family in Orange County that bought the property from the previous owners.
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Beatrice and Lonnie had three kids, Harold, Karl Lee, and Linda, but both Beatrice and Lonnie had children before their marriage. Ooster was one of Beatrice’s. The day they moved to the Wash House was the day of Linda’s first birthday.
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Around town and among the neighbors, the kids were known to be good, hardly ever getting into trouble. They were close to each other and stood up for one another. Their father, however, came home drunk on moonshine most weekends and he was in the Daily News Record multiple times for disturbing the peace while drunk. Rumor has it he burned down previous homes for insurance money. In 1942, he was suspected of “draft dodging.” He was arrested multiple times for assault. Once, for assault with an axe. One year, he got into a shoot-out with Junior
Morris, a neighbor. He shot Morris’s wife, Katherine, instead of shooting Morris himself.
Lonnie never made moonshine.
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He drank plenty—it was all over the mountains at the time. But he never made it.
I call Buck Shifflet on the 17th. He’s the owner of Lydia Mountain, and he went to school with the youngest of the Conley kids, Linda. Lydia Mountain had plans for the house, but based on the disrepair it’s in, the snakes, and the swamp, there isn’t much they can do at this time to renovate or repair it. “If we had the money, we would renovate the house and put a peach orchard up on that hill. Turn the house into a distillery so you could get ‘shine there.”
Buck shares that the family in Orange County that owned the house approached Lydia Mountain while Ooster was still living in the house. They told Buck they were going to evict Ooster and sell the property to Lydia Mountian. “We said no,” Buck says. “We would just let him stay.” But before they made the deal, Ooster died anyway.
Once Lydia Mountain acquired the property, they cleaned up parts of it, cleared away the trash, and sent workers into the house to throw out some of the clutter. Buck describes it as “in disarray.” He was surprised Ooster could live in those conditions. Places in the floor had sunk and floorboards were rotting or missing. “You could see all the remnants of their clothes and stuff that wasn’t worth taking.”
Buck’s older brother was friends with Ooster and would spend the night at the house. Then, he tells me a rumor I haven't heard before: The Conleys had a pet monkey. “They had little holes in the rooms, and the pet monkey would go through the rooms from hole to hole,” he says. “That was a cool little story.”
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Buck tells me about Linda when they were friends at James Monroe High in 12th grade. “She wore all like… skirts, but I talked her into wearing jeans about halfway through the school year. She’s been in jeans ever since.” He also describes Linda as shy.
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Finally, he tells me the current laundry on the line was staged. “I put some of it up,” he says. “And then I think Tina put that big quilt thing up.”
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Later, Sheriff Smith of Greene County gets back to me. He asks me about the project I mentioned in my voicemail and then gives me Margaret’s number. I call Margaret a few days later, and she tells me she’s been waiting for my call.
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“People always callin’ it the Moonshine House,” is one of the first things she tells me. “But I know they didn’t make no moonshine up there.” She doesn’t know much about the history of the house, but she suggests that David Deane, another neighbor, would likely be able to tell me a lot about the house.
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She says that her aunt and uncle, Joe and Susie Roach, rented the place after Joseph Shifflett died. It’s a similar story to the one Veronica told me, although Margaret insists that Joe and Susie weren’t caretakers for Joseph. “Then, another couple lived there before Lonnie Conley.”
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I hang up with Margaret and tell her I’ll call Mr. Deane. Fortunately, David has a landline, so I find his phone number within seconds of searching it up. I call him, but he’s busy and promises to call the next day. He does. David speaks with confidence as he tells me about the house on Spotswood Trail. He lives across the street, and he’s known every person who lived in the house at some time or another.
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He tells me first about Joseph Shifflett, and describes him as an average-height man with a dark complexion. Joseph’s grandfather (supposedly on his mother’s side) was an Apache Indian cheif, and settled on the hilltop behind the plot of land that now contains the house. Joseph’s grandfather took some of his men with him to fight in the battle of New Market during the Civil War, and because they didn’t return for a long time afterward, the tribe chose a new chief. His grandfather was estranged from the tribe.
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David only knows a little about the Shiffletts though, and moves on, telling me that the family that lived in the house between the Shiffletts and the Conleys wasn’t around for many years. The Conleys lived there for fifty-one years. He believes a dentist in Elkton started the moonshine rumor, but he’s not sure why. I ask him about that other rumor—the monkey—assuming there’s no way it’s true.
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He laughs. “Well the monkey… the monkey was a squirrel monkey. Somebody up on the mountain had that monkey. And it came down on the light line to that house there. I don’t think they had it. But that monkey thing was true. I don’t know what ever happened to it.”
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Finally, he tells me about Ooster. David was the one to find him in the house, but I ask him to recall some of the better things about Ooster, and David tells me that Ooster used to feed a mother cat and her babies that had made their home under the house.
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“I’d always look to see if there was smoke coming out the chimney,” David says. “If there wasn’t smoke, I’d go check on him. Haywood was a good guy. I thought the world of him.”
THE HOUSE ON SPOTSWOOD TRAIL
David Deane is standing in front of the house on Spotswood Trail, watching Mr. Ashworth wander the porch and peer through the windows. The man is old. He looks tired and ready to move on.
“You don’t know what kinda shape Haywood’s in,” David calls as he approaches. When he reaches the porch, he jiggles the knob. Locked. Damn-Ooster likely just wanted David to shoo the Ashworth man away so they could settle his finances together and this would all blow over. Maybe—David’s sure Ooster’s thinking—Mr. Ashworth wouldn’t need to kick him out of the house after all.
They finally get the front door open, and David steps inside, careful of the rotting wooden floorboards. It’s dark and musty, but David didn’t bring his phone. He asks Mr. Ashworth if he can borrow the flashlight on his.
Lit only by the single beam, David steps inside again, calling Ooster’s name. The kitchen is in the center of the house, and when David enters, he shines the phone forward, into the room. Light glints off of a tiny windchime hanging in the center of the room. The cookstove is across the floor, and a pillow is stuffed into the only window in the room to keep out the cool May air. There’s a rank, awful smell.
Plenty of bad things have happened in David’s life—for example, the time Lonnie Conley almost killed David’s aunt Katherine in a shoot-out—and David knows how to go into a sort-of mental lockdown. But he’s still surprised to find Ooster face down between the woodstove and his cot.
David slips back out of the house and asks Mr. Ashworth to call the law. The police come, and there are lights and sirens, but David doesn’t remember much more than that.
Tina Deane pulls up in a white Jeep, hops out, and introduces herself. She’s the other co-owner of Lydia Mountain, and she’s still wearing a floral business jacket and slacks from work. She introduces me to her brother, Steven, who is from Georgia.
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“We just always drive past this place when I visit,” he says. “I’m kind of obsessed with it.” It reminds him of a house in a TV show, and when Tina told him she was taking me on a tour, he jumped at the opportunity to join.
They spend a few minutes trying to unlock the gate, which has rusted shut from months of disuse. Tina pops the trunk of her car and pulls out a canister. “Good thing I carry Wd-40.” She laughs. They open the gate and we drive through.
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We start in the front of the house. Tina unlocks the door while Steven and I lift tools from the outdoor shelves. There’s an encyclopedia, and I flip it open to a page on New Amsterdam.
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“Here we go!” Tina pulls the door open, exposing a dim hallway with no floor. She frowns. “This is worse than I remember.”
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There are a few stray floorboards around the edge of the hallway, but the majority of them have fallen through to where we can see the dirt four feet below. Between the missing floorboards, there’s a doll covered in dirt and a broken frame. A series of shirts and jackets hang on the far wall. It’s worse than Dwight’s video showed too.
The boards to the left are still in okay shape, so Tina and Steven start on those. Tina warns us to stay to the edges of the room and distribute our weight. I follow them into the house, stepping over some stray puzzle pieces at the entrance.
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The first room is painted an ugly shade of purple. There’s a can of cat food on the floor and a dresser to one corner. A few shelves line the room, filled with faux flowers, doilies and other old-fashioned fabrics, teacups, candle holders, and a ceramic squirrel.
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We can’t even enter the next room, which makes Tina upset. The last time she was here, the floor was still walkable. Now, the cookstove at the center of the room has made the entire floor collapse. There’s a pillow stuffed into the window and spaces on the wall where the true color has shown through, despite the smoke damage.
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We can’t cross to the next room because of the floor, so we take the stairs to the second floor. The floors are more stable here, so we start in the first room, a small, blue one jutting from the steps. Inside are at least a hundred books. I pick a few up and feather through the pages. Sixkiller U.S. Marshall Blood for Blood, Fools Die, Survival in the Ashes, This Long Winter Past. Most of the books have some version of a shirtless man on the cover.
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I peek out at the porch in the hallway, but it looks too unstable to step onto. There’s an attic, open to a spinning weathervane on the roof. The next room is bigger, likely a master bedroom or an individual apartment. There’s an annex with boxes of old things. Tina, Steven, and I sort through bills, receipts, bottles, and even a deposition from a case where Haywood sued someone else after a motor accident. There’s a crutch, that looks ominously similar to Edward’s crutch in the photos from Dwight, and there’s an old toolbox, more books, a typewriter, math textbooks, and records.
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We return to the base floor, and Tina decides to cross the cookstove room by holding onto the walls and keeping her boots on the outer perimiter. She unlocks the door to the kitchen, and Steven and I enter from the back porch. It’s mostly big furniture: a table and chairs, a stove, a sink. The closet contains all of the Conley’s cooking items, boxes and boxes of piled-up junk—I’m pretty sure I even see another ceramic squirrel.
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Later, Tina waits outside while her brother and I try to get into the room on the righthand side of the main hallway. We each balance on the beams, avoiding the areas where the wood is weakest. The final room is a sitting room. There are sofas and dressers that have slid toward the center of the room as the floor has warped downward. A doll lays among a bag of girls’ clothes. A record player stands closed in the corner. I empty a grocery bag of dollar-store ducks.
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Inside a box, I find a photograph of three people. Instantly, I recognize Linda Conley from her Facebook page. She’s brown-haired, stout, and wearing the biggest smile. A woman stands behind her, and a teenage boy is to her right, but I don’t recognize them.
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Outside, I check out the springhouse, but it’s empty except for an old wheelbarrow. The outhouse is the only bathroom on the property, and inside, I find three scratchcards—no wins.
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Then there’s the shed, and as much as I hate traipsing through the underbrush, I grit my teeth and hop over logs and through long grasses. The entire shed slouches right. The walls are angled, the roof is sideways, and the wood is weathered. The front side is exposed to the elements. The floor is littered with wine bottles, liquor bottles, and traditionally shaped “moonshine” bottles. The shed has a second floor, so I take the ladder, skipping the first rung when it makes a soft crumpling sound under my foot.
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The top of the shed has more bottles—likely around a hundred. In one corner, birdfeeders carved from gourds have been stacked in a pile. A broken chair rests against the wall of the shed. Dead leaves clutter the remaining floor space.
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I take a seat at the edge of the shed where the floorboards meet the ladder because it seems like the most stable spot. From here, I can see the whole house. Tina’s taking a call on the logging trail Lydia Mountain built. Steven’s inspecting the outside of the house, looking for a dated foundation stone.
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The house on Spotswood Trail is waiting, watching.
A clipping from a 1964 newspaper, in which Edith Corso, youngest of Joseph Shifflett’s children, is auctioning away Joseph’s items post-mortem.
Veronica is standing in the big bedroom on the top floor of the house on Spotswood Trail. She’s surrounded by her family: Alma, Edward, Edward’s sisters, Joe and Susie Roach, and many more. The furniture around the room is mahogany, and the whole room smells like lemon furniture polish. She’s wearing a little dress and two braids as she watches her great-grandfather die.
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Only moments before, he’d told Veronica that he loved her very much. He’d told her to be a good girl. There’s a picture on the bedside table of her great-grandmother, Louella. Alma is crying. An officiant conducts the funeral right there. It’s November 1964, and Joseph Decator Shifflett is dead in his home at 91.
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Veronica is crying, too, but Edward is looking around at the faces of his sisters—from the oldest, Zettie Taylor, to the youngest, Edith Corso—many of whom hadn’t been around for a while. They’d heard their father had bone cancer and was dying, and they’d come to collect. He just knew it.
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In mourning, the family doesn’t return to the house until February. That’s when Veronica enters the house on Spotswood Trail for the last time with Edward. Veronica snaps some photos of the place out front, particularly of Alma, Edward, and Edward’s sister, Mamie, on the porch. Veronica takes in the decay of the house. It’s not the way she remembers it. It’s just not. It’s still white, but there are cracks in the balcony. The swamp stinks. The flowers are dead. The paint is chipping.
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Veronica, Edward, Alma, and Mamie enter the house and stop in their tracks.
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The place is empty, top to bottom. The house Veronica visited most days of her childhood has been gutted and left on the side of Spotswood Trail like roadkill. The dressers and silverware and glasses Veronica knew so well are gone. In their place is wooden planks of dusty floor and some old sheets.
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Veronica lifts a sheet.
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Underneath is a discarded photograph of her Josiepa. It’s the only piece of him she keeps.
I’m on Spotswood Trail, passing the house, when I see a man in blue walking the grassy path along the asphalt. He stops directly in front of the house. He snaps a few photos. I pull into the gravel driveway I’ve now parked in so many times.
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I linger by the side of the road as the man hikes back toward our cars. “Hi, I saw you were taking pictures of the house. I’m just curious. Do you know anything about it?”
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He looks surprised to see someone else on the side of Route 33, but he gestures to the house all the same. “I’ve been going by here for 20 years. We came here on our honeymoon and it was just the sheets out there. We go to Massanutten, so we’re not even from here.”
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“So what made you stop today?”
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“Because I knew the house was here.”
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“And you just wanted to take pictures of it?”
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He shrugs like the whole thing is simple. Maybe it is. “It’s photogenic.”
