Robert Weathers starts the tour just across the street from the deep shadows near St. John’s Episcopal Church. It’s a parish in Hampton that dates back to the 17th century.
He turns ominous at the very beginning.
“Our history is not all squeaky clean. Our history can be difficult. Our history can be dangerous.”
The group heads into the churchyard, where a woman dressed as a creepy little girl with pigtails half-hides behind a tree.
She skips out, performing a kind of jump rope rhyme about yellow fever, which struck Hampton Roads more than 100 years ago.
“One, two, three, four, panic, fever, muscles sore…”
Chenna Cook, the actress who plays the girl, is one of the performers ambushing people on the Hampton Horror tours put on by the Hampton History Museum during the run-up to Halloween. The museum has two shows a night, at 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m., through Sunday. Friday and Saturday are sold out.
Weathers takes a small group through an hour-long stroll through the downtown area, stopping to revisit some of the city’s darker times.
The tour features a story about Joan Wright, the first witch recorded in America. It also covers pirates, a drowning victim whose husband was charged with her death in a high-profile trial, a Prohibition-era bootlegger from Phoebus and a zombie legend.
“Things… happened here in Hampton where people might have met an untimely death, and there's a story to that,” said Seamus McGrann, the museum’s promotions director. “Something that occurred in history that was truly horrifying.”
The museum has held the annual tours for almost a decade, McGrann said.
But this year, Weathers — who has worked as a character interpreter portraying George Wythe at Colonial Williamsburg — created a new script and added characters.
