By Sophia Cooper | scooper@alextimes.com
Wellington Watts began his time at Alexandria Colonial Tours as a tour guide while working his full-time job at the American Trucking Associations. More than two decades later, he owns the company and still gives the occasional tour.
Alexandria Colonial Tours, which was founded in 1985, has options for different tours including ghost tours, historical tours and scavenger hunts. As a history major in college, Watts joined a Toastmasters International club where he gained public speaking skills and found he loved using them.
He sent the previous owners of Alexandria Colonial Tours an email asking them what to expect if he wanted to work in the tourism industry full-time and they replied with an unexpected answer.
“They sent me a long paragraph of different options and they said in about five or six years, you might make what you’re making now,” Watts said. “And then the last sentence was, ‘Well, how would you like to own our company?’
“Oh yeah, it happened that fast,” he added.
The love that he has for his job was driven by his love of history, he said.
“The joy was that this was, the ghost tours, the ghost stories themselves were nice, but they were a vehicle to talk about history,” Watts said.
Watts noted that in telling the story of Short Jack, he can bring up the history of trolleys bringing people to and from Washington, D.C.
The story goes that Short Jack was thrown out of a tavern and paid no attention to where he was; he only sat down and fell asleep. There was a thick blanket of fog and the trolley driver was unable to see that Short Jack had fallen asleep on top of the trolley tracks. By the time that the trolley driver realized a person was on the tracks, it was too late.
“History can always lead into the ghost story because you can tell about some history and then you can lead into the story,” Watts said.
Watts explained that part of his job as a tour guide is to close the gaps in the stories.
“I didn’t put a lot of stock into the ghost stories, frankly. When I took them as a customer, I thought, well, these stories are so full of holes that you can’t take them that seriously,” Watts said. “So when I became a tour guide, I had to close some of those holes.”
When asked if he believes in ghost stories, Watts said he’s “still questionable” and they’re “just fun to tell.”
Watts recounted that there have been times that strange things have happened on tours that he cannot explain. He said that one of the tour guides, Ken, was giving a tour in front of Carlyle House. While the house is supposedly unhaunted, the same cannot be said for the lawn which was used as a hospital during the Civil War.
Ken put his lamp down, gathered the group around him and felt a tap on his right shoulder. He turned around and nobody was there, according to Watts’ account. He finished his story and went to the next location on the tour. Another tour guide, Kelsey, then stopped at the same place for her tour, also felt a tap on her right shoulder and nobody was there when she turned around.
“Ken [was] standing to my left and Kelsey’s to my right and Ken leans over and says, ‘You know, I had a strange thing happen at the Carlyle House just before my story was over. I felt a tap on my right shoulder and turned around and no one was there,’” Watts remembered. “Of course, Kelsey heard that and turned white.”
New ghost stories get added to the tour because people tell Watts about ghosts they say they have encountered. Watts recalled that, about 15 years ago, a little boy approached him, pulled on his sleeve and said he saw ghosts all the time.
“I thought, ‘Oh boy, all right, kid, you saw the movie, you [can stop] pulling my leg. And stop pulling my sleeve,’” Watts said. “So I thought, ‘OK, well, let me find out what’s going on here.’”
The kid told him where he lived and that when he comes down to the kitchen at night to get water, he sees dead people. He said the kid told him that he saw two people hanging by their necks from the rafters in his living room. Watts said that the kid was “adamant” and that he “knew what he saw.”
Watts said he did some research on the kid’s story and found that the house was standing during 1812 and that the two dead people that the kid was seeing were most likely two spies that alerted the British that Old Town was undefended during the war.
Watts said he hopes that anyone who has taken a tour with him learned something, had fun and felt connected to Old Town.
“That’s one of the reasons I [first] took the ghost tour. I had to learn about [the people of Alexandria,]” Watts said. “And hopefully other people will feel the same way and they’ll feel that they got connected to the community of 250 years ago.”
After 25 years of giving tours, Watts said he has the script memorized and has given the tour so many times that it comes naturally. He added that he has fun giving the tours, joking that he thinks he has more fun than anybody else.
“It’s just a natural thing for whatever reason,” he said. “I just have fun with it.”
For many of the tour guides at Alexandria Colonial Tours, this is not their full-time job. Watts said the company’s tour guide roster includes barbers and nurses, people who were accountants, teachers and people who have worked for the State Department or other government offices.
Watts said his general manager was previously a stand-up comic. Because of the nature of the job, a tour guide usually has experience in public speaking and performing in some way.
He said the ghost tour career draws people in due to its uniqueness and it carries a responsibility to communicate something to someone else that they did not know.
Watts said he feels blessed, and he did not see himself doing this while he was in college.
“My grandfather was a minister and he would take trips to the Holy Land once a year. And when I was 9 years old, I got a chance to go and that was a fantastic experience,” Watts said. “And I would tell people, they would ask me, ‘What’s your dream job?’ And I would say, ‘Well, I want to be a tour guide in Jerusalem.’”
He said while that job would have been ideal for him, it wasn’t realistic and he did not want to leave the country.
“I didn’t think, and none of the guides thought, 25, 26 years ago, when we were all part-time, that giving ghost tours or working this job in any way leads to anything full-time,” Watts said.
Watts said that he is not there to get the people on his tour to believe in ghosts.
“But if your hair stands up in the back of your neck, so you feel the need to form a prayer circle after your tour, we’ve done our job,” he added.
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