By day, Blandy Experimental Farm is a research facility owned by the University. The environmental science department uses Blandy's 700 acres for both graduate and undergraduate research work. By night, however, the area comes alive with stories of hauntings from Blandy's past.
Blandy is located in Clarke County, Va., about two hours away from Grounds.
Blandy Experimental Farm was left to the University in 1926 in the will of Graham Blandy, who was a New York stockbroker, environmental science Associate Prof. Dave Carr said.
"The Tuleyries Estate, the area that includes present-day Blandy, was Graham Blandy's country home," Carr said. "He raised cattle and was a gentlemen farmer."
Blandy was not a graduate of the University, so some mystery surrounds exactly why he gave 700 acres to it upon his death.
"Obviously, if Blandy was interested in farming and wanted to give land to a university, [Virginia] Tech is the obvious choice," Carr said. "There are rumors he had a falling out with Tech, and that may be why he chose U.Va. He left the farm for the purpose of teaching young boys to farm, but U.Va. has no [agriculture] school," unlike Virginia Tech.
To keep with Blandy's wishes, Carr said the biology department assumed control over the property, using it for general botanical research from 1927 to 1965.
Once Director Ralph Singleton retired in 1965, "Blandy was essentially mothballed by the University," Carr said. "The biology department was going much more cell-oriented, so Blandy sat unused by the University until the early '80s."
Ed Connors, of the department of environmental science, rediscovered Blandy in the early 1980s and started transforming the farm into what it is today.
Blandy is currently home to the Orland E. White Arboretum, which is the State Arboretum of Virginia. Carr said Blandy receives 100,000 visitors a year who enjoy the arboretum and the gardens.
The property is also used for research in environmental science by both students at the University and others from across the country.
But that is just by day.
What happens when the sun sets and shadows begin to gather around the trees?
Raymond Geerdes took the School of Continuing Education class "Folklore of America" at Blandy in the summer of 1976, according to a historical account written by an anonymous historian.
Dr. Hal McMuller, dean of instruction at Lord Fairfax Community College, who was at Blandy that same summer, related the following incident to the historian.
Geerdes had undergone surgery a "relatively short time" before class began June 28, 1976, the historian wrote.
The class took a field trip to Washington to see the Folk Life Festival the next weekend. Geerdes, still not feeling well, left the Festival early to return to Blandy alone.
"On the evening of Sunday, July 4, [Geerdes] said he went out and sat on a rockbreak, which is located about 100 feet south of the [slave] quarters building, in the Allee leading to Lake Georgette, to relax ... It was shortly after sunset," the historian wrote. Geerdes "said it was rather foggy (it was hot and humid that day), and he thought he heard voices coming from Lake Georgette, which is just over the hill from the rockbreak. He said a black woman, dressed in black clothing with a cloth wrapped around her head, walked up the hill toward him. She was holding the hand of a little white girl dressed in white antebellum style clothing ... He said they walked directly toward him and, just before they got to him, they turned and walked to his left and disappeared behind the shrubbery which hides the stone stairs to the old Quarters. Then he heard noises which he said sounded like furniture being moved around upstairs in the Old Quarters."
Four days later, Geerdes related this story to his classmates when the class was discussing spirits in relation to folklore. It was at this time that McMuller heard the story and later described to the historian.
On July 15, 1976, the day before class ended, McMuller asked Geerdes to write the story down to provide a copy for his files. Geerdes said he was not feeling well, but he would relate the incident to his secretary on July 16, the day he planned to leave Blandy and return home.
On the morning of July 16, the students that remained at Blandy met together for one last breakfast.
"Mr. Geerdes did not join them," the historian wrote. "However, this did not alarm anyone since he often skipped breakfast. As everyone was getting ready to leave, one of the instructor's boys went to Mr. Geerdes room to see if he was ready to leave and found him dead."
The eeriness doesn't stop there. More recently, a post-doctorate student experienced a strange occurrence one night when he was completing his dissertation work at Blandy. Blandy Public Relations Coordinator Tim Farmer said he wished to protect the former student's identity, but he is currently a professor at another institution.
One night when the former student first arrived at Blandy, he is said to have woken up for no reason in the middle of the night.
"Just then I had a sensation of someone sitting down on the bed," the former student wrote. "The next thing I knew, I was having a dream. I seemed to be at Blandy, but things were different ... There was a woman in the dream and she wanted help with something. She seemed pretty upset and really wanted me to agree to help her with whatever she wanted. After a bit, I had an intuitive sense that if she couldn't tell me exactly what she wanted, I needed to say 'no'
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