What Happened In Charlottesville? A Different Take:
What happened yesterday in Charlottesville makes no sense unless perhaps you look at what I call the “underside” of Charlottesville which rarely attracts attention and which most people who never lived there never find out about. It is not the Charlottesville of Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment, the Charlottesville of the Virginia Doctrine of Religious Freedom. It is far more southern, mysterious, and dark than that.
Charlottesville “sat out” the American Civil War. There was only the Battle of Rio Hill which was only a skirmish and was then out of town north of the city. Now it is in the urban ring of the county right where they built an elementary school and a shopping center. Artifacts from the battle were displayed in a glass case outside one of the stores. Professors from the University of Virginia surrendered the city at the end of the war. This is not a big Confederate town. It was not the kind of town where you would see a lot of Confederate flags displayed etc. (We saw far more driving through Tennessee two years ago!)
The place where the “demonstration” took place I think is at the end of West Main Street on the way to the downtown pedestrian mall area. I remember that a statue of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson seemed to be right in the middle of the street practically. It was very crowded, a bad area for a demonstration to begin with. But the West Main Street Area right before the Downtown Mall where they used to have an old Vinegar Hill Movie Theater was dark and not well lighted. A University of Virginia girl went missing in the same area just a couple of years ago. Her body was later found brutally murdered and left by the side of the road. Some years before that the very same thing happened, another missing murdered girl. I understand that at least one of the demonstrators was murdered there, too. It is almost as if some unidentified dark spirit haunts the area and brings bad luck to whoever enters it. I remember walking through the area late one Friday night in September or early October with my husband right after we moved there. Fortunately we didn’t know about the legends then, and we hurried through unmolested.
I understand that they were going to move the Robert E. Lee statue to a park north of town, probably Penn Park on 29 North. That would be a far better fate for the statue of the head of the southern forces during the Civil War than West Main Street. It would also help to bring better luck to the whole town of Charlottesville and all those who inhabit it.
Charlottesville is a setting where I have set many of my young adult thriller and supernatural novels such as the upcoming thriller by Dora Benley called Curse of Egypt. You can see why.
