I grew up in Lexington, Virginia. My family really did believe in ghosts. My father, a college professor, told stories in our living room so spooky I would watch grown men get goosebumps.
A dear family friend, “Aunt Betty,” lived in a haunted house when I was young. When I was 18, I remembered the stories, and checked back in with her: “C’mon, was that really true?” She told the story back to me, beat by beat, with a stone-cold straight face. Her story doesn’t turn up in the book, but others do: the slamming shower door my father claims really happened to a childhood friend of his. Other images come from recurring nightmares I had as a child: a menacing figure, staring in at me from outside the house.
Lexington is a bucolic, quaint, charming, etc. town, but it has its gothic side. I remember taking ballroom dancing lessons when I was ten. The classes were held in the basement of an old hotel which had been converted to the local “halfway house.” Frequently we were required to stop while the instructors shooed away madmen who strayed into the dancing room.
Washington & Lee is, for me, the center of the town. However I needed some different Civil War generals to hang the story on to maintain the fiction, so I found A.P. Hill and Jubal Early, who are nearly as storied as Lee and Washington. If you want to glimpse the real “Julius Patchett Middle School,” be my guest.
A surprisingly large number of artists and writers come from this small town, including Cy Twombly, Sally Mann (At Twelve contains photographs of several childhood buddies of mine), Robert Goolrick, Katie Letcher Lyle.
