Established in 1776, Washington has a very long history, though very few structures survived the burning of Washington not once, but twice, during the Civil War.

The old courthouse on Market Street, Water Street’s Marsh House, Myers House and Hyatt House are four of those structures. Not only do they share the distinction of being built in the 1700s, they share another: they’re all stops on Terry Rollins’ Washington Haunts historic ghost walk.

But not necessarily because they’re haunted.

Two of them are, according to Rollins: The Hyatt House is haunted by the spirit of the British sea captain who built the house in 1785 and the courthouse — North Carolina’s second oldest courthouse and now home to the BHM Regional Library — is haunted by a man accused of murder, who shot and killed himself there during his trial.

However, the Myers House, built in 1780, is on the tour for an entirely different reason: that strange superstitions and even stranger customs were alive and well in Washington during the 18^th century. And when Herman and Debra Gaskins moved their law offices into the historic home, they found proof of that very thing—witch bottles,

There, in the dirt cellar, in the area beneath the front door, a row of emptied, yet corked, wine bottles buried neck down in the dirt floor.

“In the 1700s, when that house was built 1780, the Salem witch trials had happened less than 100 years previously, and people were still fearful of witches, that there was still evil lurking on the streets at night,” Rollins said. “People believed that witches still roamed the streets, especially at night, and people believed they needed to protect themselves. There were two ways to do that.”

In colonial America, one of those ways involved priests and holy water. The other involved bottles of wine.

“You would empty it in whatever fashion suited you best, then you took something from your person — hair, nail clippings, urine, blood — and put it in the wine bottle and then you recorked it and buried it near the front door,” Rollins said.

If a witch approached, the spirit of the witch would be drawn to the contents of the upside down bottle, sending its spirit to be trapped inside.

“So once you buried one, you had a responsibility — you had to watch all your neighbors, your friends, your enemies, and if anything bad happened to that person in the next few weeks, you had proven that person a witch and you were in possession of their soul,” Rollins said.

“It’s all quite fascinating — when you think of the 1700s, with the Founding Fathers and the great thinkers of that time, there were still these crazy, superstitious rituals out there,” he laughed.

The witch bottle story may have earned Washington’s oldest house a place on the ghost walk, but the Federal-style frame house’s history is evident before one even walks through the door. A pedimented porch, framed with dental moldings, and wide planked steps sets the tone. Inside the original rooms off the wide central hall have been transformed into a law library, an office, a small parlor. Tucked in the back is a formal dining room to rival any in local historic houses. Throughout, chair rails trail from room to room, while yellow pine floors, their planks wide and worn from generations of use, give an overall, and rather homey, feel to the office.

Most impressive are the front door, a few interior doors and the banister leading up the dog-leg staircase to the second floor: the centuries-old wood has either never been painted or has been stripped back to the original state.

Upstairs, bedrooms have been converted into offices with views overlooking the North Carolina Estuarium, and a third-floor attic/servants’ quarters, with its foot-wide plank floors and shorter ceilings and doors, largely has been turned over to storage.

Though ghost walkers get to hear the story of the Myers House witch bottles, the interior isn’t on the tour. Rest assured, past residents may have been frightened of approaching witches, but Myers House is warm and welcoming, a structure that’s made the transition from home to office without losing any of its history.

Rollins will be holding the first Washington Haunts tour Saturday at 8 p.m. Ghost walkers meet at the foot of Market Street, at Harding Square. Tickets are $10 cash, no reservations required, and are sold starting 30 minutes before the tour. For more information, contact Rollins at 252-402-8595, or visit the Washington Haunts Facebook page.