Williamsburg Home of a Poisoned Founding Father
101 Palace Green St, Williamsburg, VA 23185
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Interior access included with a Colonial Williamsburg multi-day admission ticket; exterior viewing of the Palace Green is free.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved walkways, some steps to entry
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1755 · National Historic Landmark District · Founding-Era Legal History · Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Holding
Richard Taliaferro, a leading mid-eighteenth-century Virginia builder, designed and erected the Wythe House around 1755. The two-story brick residence on the western edge of the Palace Green is among the more architecturally refined surviving private homes from the colonial capital. Taliaferro presented the house to his daughter Elizabeth on her marriage to George Wythe, a Williamsburg lawyer and rising legal scholar.
Wythe was a foundational figure in early American law: the first Virginian to sign the Declaration of Independence, the first professor of law at the College of William and Mary, and the teacher of Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay. General George Washington used the house as headquarters in the days before the Yorktown siege in 1781.
The Wythes eventually moved to Richmond, where George Wythe lived until his death. On May 25, 1806, Wythe, his free Black ward Michael Brown, and his cook Lydia Broadnax fell violently ill after eating breakfast. Brown died almost immediately; Wythe lived another two weeks before dying on June 8. Investigators determined that arsenic had been added to the coffee by George Wythe Sweeney, Wythe's grandnephew and a beneficiary in his will, who was deep in gambling debt. Sweeney was tried for the murders but acquitted in 1807 because Virginia law at the time barred Black witnesses — including Lydia Broadnax, the only eyewitness — from testifying against a white defendant.
The Williamsburg house passed through subsequent owners before being acquired by Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s and restored as a museum. It has been interpreted continuously since the mid-twentieth century and is listed contributing to the Williamsburg Historic District.
Sources
The Wythe House features in most published Williamsburg ghost itineraries, and Colonial Williamsburg's interpretive program acknowledges the folklore without endorsing it as history. The most-told story concerns Ann Skipwith, wife of Sir Peyton Skipwith and a friend of the Wythes, who is said to have left a Governor's Palace ball in tears in the 1770s, run through the streets to the Wythe House, and died of a fall on the interior staircase. Records do not corroborate the specific manner of her death, and historians treat the narrative as oral tradition layered onto a real eighteenth-century figure.
Visitors over the decades have reported the sound of footsteps on the upper landing and on the stairs, particularly at dusk; the partial figure of a woman in eighteenth-century clothing glimpsed in upstairs bedrooms; and a recurring impression of being watched in the rooms used as Wythe's library. A separate strand of folklore attaches to George Wythe himself, with annual claims of presence near June 8, the anniversary of his death.
Colonial Williamsburg does not run paranormal investigations on the property. Several independent evening ghost tours stop outside the house and recount the lore from the public sidewalk.
Notable Entities
Tour the restored Georgian residence where George Wythe taught law to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington briefly headquartered during the Yorktown campaign. Colonial Williamsburg interpreters discuss Wythe's legal career, his murder by his grandnephew, and the enslaved household members whose lives and testimony shaped the story.
Several Williamsburg evening walking tours include the Wythe House exterior as a stop, framing the Wythe poisoning case and ghost tradition. Tours operate independently of Colonial Williamsburg.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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