Lake Drummond

The story

Lake Drummond sits in the middle of the Great Dismal Swamp, a stretch of wet, peat-covered lowland on the Atlantic Coastal Plain that straddles southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, roughly between Norfolk and Elizabeth City. The lake falls within the bounds of Chesapeake and Suffolk, Virginia. It covers about 3,142 acres (some 13 square kilometers) yet is remarkably shallow, no deeper than about 6 feet (2 meters). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages it as the centerpiece of the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1973 and 1974.

It is an oddity in several ways. Virginia has only two natural freshwater lakes, and Lake Drummond is one of them; the other is Mountain Lake in Giles County. Both sit, improbably, on raised ground, and nobody is certain how either came to be. Drummond occupies the highest point of the swamp, and nine small ditches drain outward from it.

Geologists think the swamp itself formed when the continental shelf abruptly settled, and the whole area rests on a bed of peat. For the lake, several explanations compete. One holds that a vast peat fire burning underground some 3,500 to 6,000 years ago hollowed out the basin. Others point to a meteorite strike or a shift in the earth's crust. Native American tradition offers its own answer: a "fire bird" made the lake.

People have lived in and around the swamp for close to 13,000 years, according to archaeological evidence, though the exact story of its discovery and settlement is unknown. Accounts of the mid-1600s differ: one says few Native Americans remained by 1650, another that Algonquian-speaking coastal peoples were then living in the swamp. European colonists largely ignored it. George Washington visited in 1763 and helped found the Dismal Swamp Company to exploit it. The swamp's remoteness also made it a refuge: until the Civil War, maroon communities of people who had escaped slavery, along with Native Americans, lived on hidden islands deep inside it, and archaeologists have since confirmed their settlements. The lake takes its name from William Drummond, an early governor of North Carolina, who is said to have found it in 1665 or 1666 on a hunting trip he alone survived.

Over the following centuries, logging and other exploitation cut the swamp to roughly half its original extent. The lake's water had a reputation of its own: stained dark by tannins, it resisted spoiling, and merchant ships made a habit of filling their casks with it because it kept fresh longer on Atlantic crossings than water from elsewhere. In the early 20th century, a Lake Drummond Canal & Water Company appears in a string of Virginia court cases between 1904 and 1919, and photographs from 1931 and 1932 show lock-keeper and bunk houses, a spillway, a trapper's log cabin and a feeder ditch with old locks linking the lake to the Dismal Swamp Canal.

The legend

It is worth being clear from the start: Lake Drummond is a place of folklore rather than a haunting with witnesses. Wikipedia lists it among Virginia's reportedly haunted locations, but what attaches to it are traditional tales, not dated sightings, and we found no investigation, television episode or modern first-hand account. A tea-dark lake at the heart of a swamp, discovered on a hunting trip that only one man survived, was bound to gather stories, and those stories are the subject here.

The tale most closely tied to the lake is known as "Phantom Lovers of Dismal Swamp," a folk story set entirely around Lake Drummond, cited by Wikipedia from the American Folklore website. The available references name the story without telling it, so no plot is given here.

The second legend is better recorded. "Wicked John and the Devil," one of the stories in Grandfather Tales, a folktale collection edited by Richard Chase, concerns a man so evil that the devil himself was afraid of him. When John died, the devil gave him a red-hot coal and sent him to the Great Dismal Swamp to build a hell of his own. In the story, John is still out there, and the glow of his coal can be seen drifting through the swamp at night. That wandering light is the only "phenomenon" associated with the lake, and it lives inside the tale rather than in any witness report.

A third story is older still and is not about a ghost at all. Native American tradition explains the lake as the work of a "fire bird," an origin myth that sits alongside the geologists' competing theories of an ancient peat fire, a meteorite or a shift in the earth's crust.

The real history of the swamp, from the maroon settlements to the shipmasters filling their casks with dark lake water, is arguably as remarkable as any of these tales, and it is what the refuge and nearby parks choose to tell.

What remains today

The lake itself is the attraction: a wide, shallow sheet of dark water at the heart of the swamp, inside a protected wildlife refuge. It is not documented which of the lock, tender house and bunk houses photographed in the early 1930s still stand. Historical USGS topographic maps of the Lake Drummond quadrangle from 1940 and 1954 show how the lake, ditches and canal were laid out in the mid-20th century.

Visiting

Lake Drummond lies within the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, public land managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Camping is not allowed. Check the refuge's official information before you go and follow its rules, which exist to protect both wildlife and visitors.

For the history and lore of the swamp, the Dismal Swamp Canal Welcome Center and Dismal Swamp State Park, both on the North Carolina side, run ranger programs on its history and lore. No ghost tour of the lake is known.

Sources

1. Gring v. Lake Drummond Canal & Water Co. March 10, 1910. [67 S. E. 360.] — Internet Archive, 1910-06-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
2. Johnson et al. v. Lake Drummond Canal & Water Co. et al. June 12, 1919. [99 S. E. 771.] — Internet Archive, 1920-03-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
3. Lake Drummond Canal & Water Co. v. Commonwealth. January 12, 1905. [49 S. E. 506.] Foreclosure of Corporate Mortgage. Rights Conveyed. Immunity from Taxation. Construction of Statutes. Constitutional Provisions — Internet Archive, 1905-02-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
4. Virginia State Corporation Commission. Richmond. Commonwealth of Virginia at the Relation of the State Corporation Commission v. Lake Drummond Canal and Water Company. May 16, 1904 (O. B. 1., p. 281.) — Internet Archive, 1904-07-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
5. Wikimedia Commons category : Lake Drummond — Wikimedia Commons
6. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Lake Drummond, VA 1954 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1954 · Public domain (USGS)
7. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Lake Drummond, VA 1940 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1940 · Public domain (USGS)
8. Dismal Swamp Canal Welcome Center (North Carolina)
9. Dismal Swamp State Park — NC State Parks — NC State Parks
10. Great Dismal Swamp — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
11. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.