News

Fletcher ghost story lives on

Dave Cooley holds a copy of the Life magazine featuring the Rugby Grange ghost story

By Bill Moss, Published: October 5, 2016

FLETCHER — The story of the White Horse of Death had been told for 77 years by the time it reached Dave Cooley, the young Henderson County Chamber of Commerce president, in 1957.

A call from the national press was not unprecedented. About every year, around Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, a reporter would call Cooley seeking access to Carl Sandburg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln biographer who lived at Connemara in Flat Rock.
“Life and Time and people like that, they spent a fortune back then,” Cooley said.
The request he got in 1957 was unusual.
“I had a call from Life saying they were going to do this thing and they wanted a couple of white horses,” Cooley said in a recent interview. “I was involved with the horse show, and G.B. Nalley was a walking horse person who lived in Easley, S.C. I talked to Nalley, and he was tickled that Life was interested in him and his horses. He brought two beautiful white horses up here and camped out at the Grange the night before the photographer came and spent a half a day shooting pictures of that horse.”
Why white horses?
The story goes back to the Westfeldt family and the death of a son-in-law at the house, known as the Rugby Grange, in 1880. Somehow, Life editors had heard about the Westfeldt ghost story in the small town of Fletcher and decided to include it in a feature called “Ghostly American Legends: The Early Tales Die Hard Even In This Skeptical Age.”

Death at the Big House
The original story from the Westfeldt family goes back to the 1880s and was told by two sisters. Two granddaughters of the Westfeldt family patriarch, Gustaf Adolphus George Westfeldt, Jenny Fleetwood Westfeldt and her younger sister, Dodette Westfeldt Grinnell, told the story in remembrances written later in life. The story revolved around the death of Hunt Reynolds, a Kentucky horse breeder who was married to their Aunt Meta.
“Uncle Hunt Reynolds died at the Big House,” Jenny recalled. “He, Aunt Meta and Christine [“Sissy” Westfeldt Price] were there and the others of the summer family, Uncle Bo and Aunt Louise and their family (from New Orleans) … Uncle Tuppy [Phillip] had gone to ride on Gretchen… To be on time for meals was a most important thing at the Big House. It was growing dusk, near dinnertime, and Uncle Tuppy had not come in. The family were [sic] in the bay window watching for him, expecting him to ride up to the front. They were worried about him. Someone called out, ‘There he is, going across the lawn!’ They sent out to see if he had come, but Uncle Tuppy had not come in. My father, who was one of the watchers in the bay window, said, ‘Well, you know who rides on a white horse.’ The next day Uncle Hunt died in Uncle Cuddy’s [Patrick’s] boyhood room.”
Dodette Westfeldt Grinnell, 11 years younger than her sister Jenny, recalled the story in essentially the same way with a few more details. But it would seem that only Jenny could have been describing the story from personal memory, since she would have been about 12 years old. Dodette would have been 2 or 3.
According to Dodette, her uncle was not on a recreational ride that evening. Rather he was on a mission of mercy to Asheville to get medicine for Reynolds, who was very ill. She quotes her father exactly as her sister did, and offers more detail about her other uncle, Phillip Otto Westfeldt (Uncle Tuppy).
"About dusk, one May evening, many years ago, in 1880, my father, grandmother and two of my aunts were sitting out on the front gallery of the Grange, watching for an uncle of mine, Phillip Otto Westfeldt, we called him Uncle Tuppy, who had earlier in the afternoon ridden into Asheville to get some medicine that was urgently needed for another uncle of mine, Hunt Reynolds, of Frankfort, Ky., who was in one of the downstairs bedrooms, very ill at the time. As I said it was almost dark but still there was light enough to see plainly.
“All of the members of the family
on the front porch saw distinctly a man on a white horse riding up the front driveway, which comes right by
the front of the house and goes on around the house. … The horse and rider came on but did not pause at
the front steps. Going right on around the gray stone house. Then my father, cutting across, ran to the back of
the house, where he could see anyone coming around the circle from the front, but he saw no horse and no rider. He came back to the family, seated on the front gallery, and exclaimed, ‘Well, we all know who rides on a white horse.’
“The next morning at about 4 o’clock my uncle Hunt died. My uncle Tuppy, who had gone into Asheville to obtain the drug so thoroughly needed, came riding in on his bay horse shortly after the man on the white horse had come by. He had been unable to find anywhere in Asheville the drug needed. The Grange is so situated that it is very easy for anyone to cut across the grass from the front gallery to the back of the house, where the road, which is a circle, comes around and no one could’ve come around the house without having been seen by my father, who had cut across. Also there were servants in the kitchen and in the backyard at the time. No rider came around to the back, and no horse and rider could have left the driveway as there is a very steep hill leading to a large spring on east and a steep hill on the south and west. The man on the white horse disappeared from view, an apparition apparently.”
“This,” Dodette added, “is a true story.”

‘Ominous Hoofbeats’
The Life magazine version, called “Ominous Hoofbeats,” was a little less true than the original. Besides changing the name of the house from the Rugby Grange to the Cliff House, the Life writers switched the identity of the dying man.
“One nightfall, nearly a century ago, a milk-white horse, riderless and unbridled in the moonlight, galloped past Cliff House, a lovely mansion above a valley near Hendersonville, N.C.,” said the 97-word Life summary of the tale. “Within hours the patriarch of the family died. Thereafter, as long as the family was at Cliff House, the white horse appeared each time that someone died. Later occupants reported seeing or hearing the horse, but it brought no ill tidings to other families. Today Cliff House stands empty and silent, and a white horse crossing the lawn evokes only echoing hoofbeats across the valley.”
None of the second-generation Westfeldts who wrote about the death of George Westfeldt mentioned the white horse legend in connection with his death, nor did they mention subsequent family deaths portended by a riderless white horse circumnavigating the stone house.
No one knows why the magazine changed the setting from the Rugby Grange to the Cliff House.
“I called it the Grange. It’s always been called that,” Cooley says.
The house is on a cliff, we might stipulate, although in these parts it’s more commonly called a ridge. The Grange, now in use as an event place, can be seen from I-26 on a hilltop beyond the westbound rest stop.
However, the reference to the house standing “empty and silent” would have been true. Owned in 1957 by George Gustaf “Big George” Westfeldt (grandson of the family patriarch Gustavus Adolphus George Westfeldt), the house was closed up and not in use as a residence.
“No one was there I saw except Nalley and his horses, the Life photographer and me,” Cooley said. “I picked the Life photographer up at the Skyland hotel and took him out there.”

Ghost story lives on
Frank FitzSimons in From the Banks of the Oklawaha, tells a similar version of the Rugby Grange ghost story: “For several generations the Westfeldt family, a prominent family of New Orleans, has owned Rugby Grange. One of the legends connected with the place is that the family was sitting on the porch at dusk one summer evening long years ago. The family saw a riderless milk white horse galloping up the driveway and on past the porch. Within a few hours, the patriarch of the family suddenly became sick and before a doctor could be summoned he died. After this happened, as long as the family remained at Rugby Manor, occasionally the white horse was seen or its hoofbeats were heard galloping up the driveway. Each time this happened, some member of the family dropped dead.”
Although From the Banks of the Oklawaha, Volume I, was published in 1976, the book was a collection of stories Frank FitzSimons Sr. read on WHKP radio in the late1950s and early 1960s.
In my research for The Westfeldts of Rugby Grange I learned that ghosts persist to this day at the Rugby Grange.
Wendy Waggoner Henderson, whose family owned Wendywood, a summer camp on Lake Summit in Tuxedo, told of visiting the Rugby Grange with other campers in the 1960s. Asked why they would go there, she said they wanted to “see if we could see the white horse ghost.”
One more ghost story is “Helen Come Forth,” in which local teenagers made their way to the old house, knocked on the door and called, “Helen Come Forth,” for a ghost to appear. Invariably, the children would hear a noise within and run terrified away from the house.

This story contains excerpts from The Westfeldts of Rugby Grange, by Hendersonville Lightning editor Bill Moss, published in 2012 by the Fletcher Arts & Heritage Association. Copies are available at Mr. Pete’s convenience store and Lulu’s consignment store in Fletcher and the Henderson County Historical and Genealogical Society.