Old House Woods, a 50-acre tract of land in Diggs, has long been associated with tales of strange sites and eerie happenings. Local residents are familiar with stories of a headless man searching for his lady love, a pirate ship sailing over land and vanishing into the trees, and the presence of ghosts at the old house, which no longer exists.

Mathews native Rosalind Hammond, now of Ohio, conducted extensive research on the old stories in the 1970s and wrote a paper titled “The Haunted Hudgins House: Excerpts from Folklore of Mathews, Virginia: Ghostlore and Witchcraft.”

While searching recently for information on Old House Woods, which was once owned by his ancestors, Forrest Morgan of Mathews, a history buff, trained amateur archaeologist and Mathews County Historical Society member, came across Hammond’s research.

He discovered that her work had partly been based on first-person interviews and partly on a treasure trove of Works Progress Administration-era files about Old House Woods that are kept in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. The WPA files consist of hundreds of pages of first-person interviews and research conducted by the late Harriet Miller of Mathews in the 1930s.

In order to make the folklore about Old House Woods more readily available to Mathews residents, Morgan has asked Hammond to give a presentation to the Mathews County Historical Society this spring, and he plans to delve into the WPA files himself.

There is no online index to the materials and the hard copy versions “cover many topics and geographical areas and run several hundred pages,” said Morgan, so retrieving the information is going to take quite a bit of time and effort. Not only that, but there are costs associated with copying the materials, and he hopes to find funding to help cover those costs.

Morgan has also conducted some archaeological research in the area and has found several hundred English artifacts such as pipe stems that date to the early 1600s. He said that Gloucester’s Fairfield Foundation plans to conduct further archaeological research pending receipt of a grant.