The Witch of Pungo

It's no secret that I love old junk and abandoned buildings. I've got a collection of photographs of old buildings that I have taken over the years from various locations in the US, but one of them really stands out.

When we were in Virginia in 2001, several people told me that I should go see the Witch of Pungo's house if I liked creepy, dilapidated old buildings. It didn't take much to get me in a car and on my way to see what the fascination with this old place was. We drove to Pungo, having no directions as to exactly where the house might be located, but, Pungo being a very small town, it would've been hard to miss. It was a stormy day and the house lived up to it's spooky reputation, so I cranked off a couple shots and hightailed it out of there.

Fast forward 7 years. I gifted a friend who likes abandoned buildings with a print of the Witch of Pungo's house. I really didn't know much of the story behind it, so we looked it up. It turns out that the story of the Witch of Pungo, Grace Sherwood, is not only infamous Princess Anne County folklore and the title of a popular children's book, she was exonerated of being a witch in July 2006 on the 300th anniversary of her ducking.

Here's the question. In one of the articles we read, it said that all that remained of Grace Sherwood's house was the chimneys, and they had been had been torn down in 1998 due to safety issues. If that is true, then who's house is this that I photographed in Pungo in 2001?