Researching the Richmond Vampire

The wind off the James River always seemed colder near Church Hill. In the late 1920s, when Richmond was still wrapped in coal smoke and streetcar bells, people began whispering about something that moved between the shadows of the Hollywood Cemetery hills and the old Church Hill Tunnel. They said it was not a man, not an animal, but something burned and broken that crawled from the earth itself.

On a humid October night in 1925, a work crew was repairing damage near the collapsed Church Hill Tunnel. The tunnel had partially caved in during a streetcar construction project, trapping workers inside. Rescue efforts dragged on for days. When crews finally broke through twisted brick and earth, they found bodies crushed beneath rubble and others lost in suffocating darkness. But according to legend, one survivor was not as he had been.

Witnesses claimed that a blood-soaked figure staggered from the tunnel mouth. His clothes were shredded, his skin torn and hanging, and his teeth clenched around something no one could quite identify. His eyes glowed in the lantern light, reflecting like an animal caught in the dark. Some swore he leapt onto the rocks and vanished toward the river. Others said he ran straight into Hollywood Cemetery, disappearing among the mausoleums.

Soon after, livestock near the riverbanks were found drained and mutilated. Dogs howled at nothing. Night watchmen reported something scrambling across brick walls with unnatural speed. One caretaker at Hollywood Cemetery refused to return to work after claiming he saw a figure perched atop the W. W. Pool mausoleum, its stone steps marked by strange scratches and what looked like dried blood.

The story grew darker with each telling. Some said the creature had once been a railroad worker trapped in the collapse, twisted by pain and starvation. Others believed it was something older, awakened by the disturbance of the tunnel. Church Hill residents began locking doors before dusk. Children were warned not to wander near the cemetery. Even hardened policemen avoided patrolling alone along the river after midnight.

Years passed, and no official record ever confirmed a monster. Newspapers dismissed the sightings as hysteria fed by tragedy. The tunnel collapse was real. The deaths were real. But the vampire was never found. Still, on fog-heavy nights, locals claim you can feel it. A pressure in the air. A sudden silence among crickets. The sense that something is watching from the dark arches of the old tunnel.

Today the entrance to the Church Hill Tunnel remains sealed, a bricked-up scar in the hillside.

Hollywood Cemetery still rises above the river, quiet and dignified. Yet the legend persists. They say if you stand near the old mausoleum at twilight and listen carefully, you might hear a scraping sound beneath the stone. Not the settling of brick or the sigh of wind.

Something moving.

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