Dead ready to rise up, Spirit Walk again

In Maplewood Cemetery, where town skeletons lie buried, the ethereal shall become corporeal and stories long forgotten will again be told.

Mayor J. Samuel McCue will face trial. Benjamin Franklin Ficklin, cofounder of the Pony Express who died after a surgeon nicked his artery trying to remove fishbone from his throat, will reminisce. Gen. Alexander Archer Vandegrift, the first four-star general of the Marine Corps, will hold court.

Even reclusive miser Johnny Yergain, who became a rich, hooch-selling near-hermit after someone punk’d him at a party by pinning a hankie to his suit, will venture into public 175 years after his death.

Specter spectacle

It’ll be a specter spectacle at the 15th annual Spirit Walk, a hair-raising fundraiser for the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society and yearly haunting of city streets by locals who have moved out of town and left their baggage behind.

Think of it as television’s “This is Your Life” combined with “Re-animator,” a bad zombie movie, which is a redundancy. Scheduled for 6 to 9:15 p.m. Friday and Oct. 24 and 5 to 9:15 p.m. Oct. 25, the nights of the living dead will feature ghostly guides and spectral encounters throughout downtown.

“It’s a lot of fun to be a part of it, to research your character and portray him and really get into that history,” said Bryan Hagen, who will channel the spirit of Confederate Brig. Gen. John Marshall Jones. “We have guides who meet the groups in the cemetery and take the groups from spot to spot where other characters take over.”

The fundraiser has the support of a ghastly cast of about 50 local actors and musicians portraying historical residents from 18th-century to 20th-century Central Virginia.

“We try to mix it up with different eras,” said Mendy St. Ours, artistic director for the walk. “In Charlottesville, we could do whole pages on the Civil War or Revolutionary War, but we want to present a variety of people from different walks of life.”

Mr. Hagen’s spirit is not the best known of area Civil War heroes. Born in 1820, Jones was a West Point graduate who was a captain in the U.S. Army serving in Utah until the Great Unpleasantness began and he resigned to join the Confederate Army. He fought in major battles, was seriously wounded at Gettysburg and was killed at the Battle of the Wilderness.

“We want to try and keep the characters away from the well-known people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison,” Mr. Hagen said. “There won’t be a James Madison. There will be a Dolley Madison, but no James. We want people who have had a contribution to the area, but aren’t in the history books.”

Ghostly guests

Kitty Foster, a free-black householder, is likely to show up. The daughters of the Fox family, who were run off their mountain property by officials forming Shenandoah National Park, will provide recollections of life street-peddling to make ends meet after being left homeless.

“We pick up on things that are in the news like the discovery of the Foster home at a construction site at [the University of Virginia] and what happened in the national park,” Ms. St. Ours said. “The [actors] research their characters and prepare monologues. Most are concerned about having enough information and then find out they sometimes have too much. It’s a lot of fun for the actors and the guests and a great fundraiser for the historical society.”