Shockoe Bottom, Richmond's historic warehouse and slave-trading district · Lumpkin's Slave Jail / Devil's Half Acre · Hollywood Cemetery (Richmond)
Strange Richmond Tours is run by Jeffrey, a New Orleans-trained tour guide who has spoken at multiple JFK-assassination-research conferences and previously operated a haunted bed-and-breakfast, alongside a small team of guides that includes a museum-trained historian and a Virginia Commonwealth University art history student who volunteers at the Poe Museum and interns in the archives of Historic St. John's Church. The company markets itself on guide quality over gimmicks, stating 'It's not the company, it's the guide.'
The flagship nightly walking tour covers Shockoe Bottom and Church Hill, two of Richmond's oldest neighborhoods, and includes a stop at the site of Lumpkin's Slave Jail, one of the largest slave-trading operations in the antebellum South and now preserved as part of Richmond's Devil's Half Acre historic site. A separate daytime tour covers Hollywood Cemetery, the Victorian rural cemetery overlooking the James River.
Sources
- https://strangerva.com/
- https://strangerva.com/about/
Local LegendApparitionsUnexplained Sounds
The operator's own site describes the Haunted History tour as 'a deep dive into the macabre tales of the Shockoe Bottom, the Devil's Half-Acre, the Ghoul of Richmond, the Richmond Vampire, Edgar Allan Poe, and more.' The Richmond Vampire is a well-known local legend tied to a 1925 train tunnel collapse near Church Hill; the operator's tour recounts the legend as part of its Shockoe Bottom and Church Hill route without claiming independent verification.
All of this is the tour operator's own marketing material, not documented history independently verified for this listing; it is included here as a description of what the tour covers, not as an endorsement of any specific claim.
Notable Entities
The Richmond Vampire
