It’s Halloween in the NRV!
To be honest, I am not a fan of Halloween. I hate making costumes – I go for a pun costume because it is cheap. When I was pregnant, I cut out cat paws and put them on my stomach and went as a pregnant pause (paws). That is as far as I will go.
I hate spending money on candy for kids and parents I don’t know. I feel for some of you folks in neighborhoods like Oak Tree, Vista Via, Sleepy Hollow, and the like, who have van-loads of kids coming to your neighborhood for candy. I remember getting a panicked call from a friend who lived back there asking if we had candy because he had run out so early.
However, Christiansburg is THE place for your Halloween spookiness thanks to some sisters.
The Montgomery County Female Academy
On the corner of Franklin Street and 1st Street in Christiansburg, about where the Verizon Building and Papa John’s is today, was the Montgomery Collegiate Institute, founded in 1853 by the Christiansburg Presbyterian Church. In 1860, the school was moved to what is now 208 College Street, and renamed the Montgomery County Female Academy. The academy was later torn down and replaced by Christiansburg Middle School which became Montgomery Central which later became the temporary Blacksburg Middle School which then became an operations center for Montgomery County Public Schools.
In 1876, Oceana Seaborn Goodall Pollock, (what a name), bought the school at a public auction. Later, when she was getting rather old and frail, she bequeathed it to her sister Mrs. Martha Wardlaw and Martha’s daughters, (including her daughter Virginia Wardlaw).
Around 1900 Martha’s family came to help out. Here is the family:
Mrs. Martha Goodall Wardlaw, her children and grandchildren:
- Mrs. Mary W. Snead and her sons:
- John Snead, and Fletcher who would later marry Ocey Martin.
- Mrs. Caroline W. Martin and her daughter:
- Ocey Martin, first cousin and wife of Fletcher Snead.
- Miss Virginia Wardlaw
- Mrs. Bessie Wardlaw Spindle (already living in Christiansburg at the time)
Things at the school were going well until Caroline showed up. She would change courses suddenly and move room assignments. Some of the students would wake up in the night and find the sisters, dressed heavily in black, at the end of the bed performing some kind of ritual.
John Snead was living with his wife in Tennessee when his aunt Caroline came by and convinced him to come to work at the school. John’s wife was none too pleased with Caroline and kicked her off their property, but even then, John went with her to Christiansburg.
This was a bad idea.
John had a bit of bad luck. When he was traveling with Caroline, he fell off a train near Roanoke. The brakeman said it looked like he was trying to die by suicide. Later John almost drowned in a cistern, (which is under the current building), but was rescued by Sonny Correll, the college caretaker. Soon, though, John would die. His aunt Virginia, was in John’s room and screamed. Others ran to the room and found John on fire, his pajamas and bed saturated with kerosene. He died several hours later. His aunts claimed it wasn’t suicide, but a terrible accident. An accident that paid out to his aunts as John had changed the beneficiary of his life insurance from his wife to his aunt Virginia.
Rumors fly quickly in a small town and many of the residents didn’t buy what Virginia was selling. But the insurance company paid out anyway. Case closed.
John’s brother Fletcher decided to try his luck in Christiansburg. He was a married man in Tennessee, but supposedly divorced his wife before moving to Virginia. Soon after, he married his first cousin, Ocey, Caroline’s daughter. No one saw the couple ever court or go out, but at least they are familiar with their in-laws.
While all of this is going on, three of the sisters, Mary, Caroline, and Virginia found themselves deep in debt. But this didn’t phase the sisters. They carried on about town, dressed in black from head to toe. Knocking on the doors of the townspeople just because. They would travel frequently to the cemetery. With all the debt, the heavy-handedness of Caroline, and the increasingly weird events surrounding the sisters, students left the school. The school closed in 1908, and the sisters, Fletcher, and Ocey left Christiansburg.
Ocey Snead
Fletcher and Ocey moved to New York City. Her first child, a daughter, had died and now she was pregnant with her second, Fletcher peaced out to Canada under an assumed name and left Ocey with her mother and aunts. He never contacted her again.
No one alive knows the reason why, but Ocey’s mom and aunts treated her terribly, ever since she was an infant. They tried to starve her to death. Ocey became really ill about the time of her second pregnancy. A doctor came in and found that Ocey was depressed, malnourished, and weak. Later he would tell police that she seemed afraid of those around her. Spoiler alert.
The doctor left instructions for Ocey’s care. When he would come visit, the doctor would be greeted by one of the sisters, always veiled completely in black. He would find his orders were not being followed. Being the upstanding doctor he was, he stopped coming. Another doctor was summoned. This guy would sneak food to Ocey and even climbed through a window to care for her after the baby was born, but Virginia caught him and threw him out of the house.
The first doctor was summoned back to the home. He found Ocey very weak. Virginia thought it would be a good idea for the doctor to let Ocey know she was dying and that she needed to make a will. This time the doctor wasn’t having any of the sisters’ shenanigans. He ordered a nurse to care for Ocey, but the nurse lasted a day before the sisters kicked her out. When they couldn’t pay the bill for Ocey’s care, Virginia offered $1000 from Ocey’s will to the doctor, who declined. Noting that Ocey was”under some hypnotic influence,” the doctor decided to do something about it. What he didn’t know was that the sisters were giving Ocey regular doses of morphine for supposed postpartum pain. Before going to the police with his suspicions, the doctor went back to check on Ocey only to find the home abandoned. The sisters and Ocey had moved to a different area in New York City.
In this new home, Virginia dressed heavily in black as always, found a lawyer to help Ocey write her will. When he came to speak with Ocey, he suggested they get a doctor and some food for her. The sisters said they didn’t have the money. The lawyer offered to write them a check to care for Ocey. While the sisters went to look for a pen, Ocey and the lawyer talked. Ocey handed him a will she had written and had hidden under her pillow. She left everything she had to her grandmother. When the sisters found out, they bribed the lawyer to make them the beneficiaries. The lawyer refused and was fired.
The sisters then moved to East Orange, New Jersey. Here, Ocey was close to death. The apartment was a shack. There was no heat or gas for cooking. It was sparsely furnished. On November 29, 1909, police were called to the apartment for a fatal accident. They found 24 year old, 80-pound Ocey dead and naked in a tub with her head under the faucet. Next to the bathtub were her clothes with a note pinned to it. The note read:
“Last year my little daughter died. Other near and dear kindred too have gone to Heaven. I long to go there too. I have been ill and weak a very long time now. Death will be a blessed relief to me in my sufferings. When you read this I will have committed suicide. My sorrow and pain in this world are greater than I can endure.
— Ocey W.M. Snead”
Ocey was buried in Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County, New York next to her father, seven year old brother, and two day old daughter. Ocey’s son, David, was sent to an orphanage and died there at age nine months on July 18, 1910 and was also buried there.
Give credit to the police department as they investigated this instead of just saying “Welp. Suicide.” They started asking Virginia some questions and found her answers were hinky. They noted that Ocey had been dead at least a day, and that there were several life insurance policies taken out on her by her mother and aunts. Even more suspicious, several “suicide” notes were found in the possession of Ocey’s mother, Caroline – written in the same handwriting as the suicide note found on Ocey’s clothing.
The sisters were arrested.
Mary Snead was acquitted and moved to Colorado with her son Albert. She died in California in 1937 at age 88.
Caroline Martin, Ocey’s mother, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to seven years in the New Jersey State Prison. She was later transferred to the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum where she died in 1913 at age 68. There are rumors that Caroline also poisoned her husband and killed her seven year old son by pushing him down a flight of stairs – all for insurance money.
Miss Virginia Wardlaw starved herself to death while waiting for trial. She died in 1910 at the age of 58. She is buried in Christiansburg’s Sunset Cemetery.
Fletcher changed his name to John Lucas and moved to Ontario. He was questioned by police and found to be innocent. Fletcher moved to California and died as Fletcher Snead in Los Angeles in 1955 at the age of 80.
But wait, there’s more
Married couple, the Hancocks, opened the back door of a boarding house at 24 Wells Avenue in Roanoke, (now the Hotel Roanoke), on Easter 1908 and found a baby on their doorstep. They took the baby in and named her “Rita Josephine.” A few weeks later, two ladies, dressed heavily in black, took up lodging at the home. The older woman, a “Mrs. Martin” loved all over Rita. When the baby got sick, Mrs. Martin suggested she take the baby to Christiansburg because “the air was better” there. Mr. Hancock was like “WTF” and refused. The sisters begged to be given Rita. They called the Hancocks incessantly – all day and night.
Soon the sisters gave up. They left the boarding house, their room in a shambles, with two suitcases left in the room. One of the suitcases contained enough baby clothes for the first year of a child’s life. There was also a scented salve that Mrs. Hancock swore had the same scent as Rita’s clothes the day she was found. Rumor has it that this baby was Ocey’s daughter who supposedly died a couple days after birth. However, one of the resources I have for this story says Ocey was buried next to her daughter. According to Find a Grave, Ocey’s daughter is indeed buried next to her. So either the Hancock’s were trying to cash in on the fame, the sisters were trying to get someone’s baby back, or Ocey had another child.
The hauntings
Students who attended the old Christiansburg Middle School claim the place is haunted by the three sisters dressed in black. It’s local lore passed down every year. Usually when I hear of hauntings, I think that the ghosts are victims. But only recently did I learn the whole story behind Chrstiansburg’s black sisters.
If you want to hear an amazing storyteller share the story of the Black sisters, please listen to Jenny over at Vile Virginia. And while you are at it, check out some of her other episodes.
Resources
Mary Alberta Snead (1908-1908)
The Black Sisters – Montgomery Museum
The sisters in black: The murder of Ocey Snead, 1909
Three sisters and their haunting history | Archive | roanoke.com
Lisa Sedlak 