The story of the Belmonte estate in Prince Edward County, Virginia, is not found in official history books. What remains is the specter of a once-thriving plantation abandoned in its heyday and the systematic destruction of every document related to the estate’s activities during the fall of 1851. Court records show that, in November 1852, the property was sold at auction for a fraction of its value, with the bizarre stipulation that certain rooms of the mansion remain sealed in perpetuity.

Local historians have found seventeen references to what became known as “the Rutled incident” in private letters and diaries from the period, but all official records were destroyed. The few surviving accounts speak of an obsession so all-consuming that it destroyed everything it touched; an obsession that began with a single enslaved person, whose very existence defied all the assumptions of the time.

The truth about what happened that autumn behind the closed gates of the Belmonte estate is far more disturbing than any supernatural tale.

The Empty House

Southern Virginia in 1851 was a world unto itself, a tobacco-growing land where fortunes were built on the backs of enslaved laborers. The Belmonte Plantation was a 30,000-acre property that had belonged to the Rutlet family since 1783. The main house, a red-brick Georgian mansion, was impressive but not ostentatious, fitting a family that took pride in its old money. Forty-two enslaved people worked on the property.

Thomas Rutlet, 37, had inherited Belmont seven years earlier. He was known as a stern but not particularly cruel master, managing his estate with cold efficiency. Yet, despite his success, Thomas felt an emptiness that nothing could fill.

His wife, Catherine, was ten years younger, a pale, slender Richmond beauty. Her substantial dowry had eased the plantation’s debts, but the loss of a son in 1849 had changed her. She had grown frail, spending hours in her sitting room, gazing out the window at the fields, feeling invisible, fading a little more each day. They were two people living parallel lives in the same house, deeply unhappy in ways they could never articulate.

The Special Acquisition

It was in this atmosphere of quiet desperation that slave trader Samuel Bigcam arrived on the morning of August 14, 1851. Bigcam specialized in “special acquisitions”.

“I’ve acquired something unusual, Mr. Rutlet,” Bigcam said in the plantation office. “A unique specimen. Purchased at the Charleston market. The previous owner was a doctor, Dr. Albert Strad.”

Bigcam explained that the slave, named Jordan, about 19 or 20 years old, could read and write. But that wasn’t the special thing about him.

“This slave is what doctors call a hermaphrodite,” he whispered, “born with physical characteristics of both male and female. A true medical curiosity. The slave is trained to undergo examinations and ensure complete obedience.”

Thomas felt something change inside him.  Both man and woman. Neither one nor the other.

Twenty minutes later, Thomas looked at Jordan for the first time. The slave wore a simple cotton tunic. His face was beautiful in a way that defied categorization: delicate features, high cheekbones, large, dark eyes. His body suggested curves that resisted categorization. When Bigcam ordered him to speak, his voice emerged in a register situated precisely between male and female.

“My name is Jordan, Amo. I am 19 years old. I can read, write, and do arithmetic. I have been trained to undergo medical examinations without resistance.”

Thomas felt a growing fascination, a need to understand the mystery before him. “I’ll take it,” he heard himself say.

The Obsession

Thomas did not take Jordan to the slave quarters. He installed him in a room on the third floor of the main house, officially appointing him Catherine’s personal maid. When Thomas explained Jordan’s “medical condition” to his wife, she felt the same disturbed curiosity.

The examination Catherine performed on Jordan marked the beginning of her downfall. It began as a clinical curiosity, but gradually transformed into something more. That night, for the first time in months, Thomas and Catherine reunited in their marital bed, not out of love, but because of a shared secret.

The fall of 1851 brought the harvest, but in Belmonte, a disturbing obsession was taking root. The other slaves, particularly Harriet, the cook, noticed the change. Master Thomas stopped managing the plantation, and the bills piled up. Mistress Catherine stopped eating, growing paler and thinner, locked for hours in that third-floor room.

“Daughter,” Harriet asked Jordan in the kitchen. “Are they hurting you up there?”

Jordan looked at her with unreadable eyes. “I do what I was born to do,” she said softly. “It’s easier when you don’t think about it.”

Upstairs, Thomas acquired medical and anatomy books, filling a secret journal with sketches and notes. Catherine, meanwhile, spent entire afternoons dressing and undressing Jordan, styling his hair, ordering both feminine and masculine clothing, trying to understand what Jordan was.

“What are you?” Catherine asked him one afternoon.

“It matters, love,” Jordan replied in his neutral voice. “I am what you see. What you want to see.”

As October wore on, the plantation deteriorated. Thomas lost weight, his eyes taking on a feverish quality. Catherine became skeletal. When two farmhands, Samuel and Isaac, tried to escape and were captured, Thomas ordered them to be flogged, but he watched the scene with a distant eye, his mind elsewhere. Harriet, from the kitchen, understood that the master was disappearing into his own obsession.

The Collapse

By November, the plantation was visibly failing. The fields lay fallow, the fences were broken, the tobacco unsold. Thomas began to withdraw even from Jordan, drinking whiskey in his study. Catherine filled the void, spending entire days with Jordan, caught up in rambling monologues about her failing life.

“Do you hate Thomas and me?” Catherine finally asked, her voice breaking.

Jordan was silent for a moment. “Hating requires a kind of freedom I don’t have, Ama. I was taught from childhood that my nature makes me less than human. No, I don’t hate you. I simply tolerate you, in the same way I’ve tolerated everyone before you.”

Catherine broke down in sobs. “I think we’re destroying each other. This obsession with you… it’s like a disease.”

“Yes, love,” Jordan replied.

The final crisis came on December 15th with Dr. Edmont Carile. Thomas, in a moment of desperate need to validate his obsession, had invited the old doctor from Richmond to offer a “professional opinion” on his “medical curiosity”.

Carile, a burly, confident man in his sixties, was greeted by an almost manic Thomas. Catherine remained upstairs, ghostly. After dinner, Thomas led Carile to the third-floor bedroom. Catherine was there, sitting like a ghost by the window. Jordan stood by the door, his face neutral.

“This is Jordan,” Thomas said, in a falsely clinical tone.

Carile approached with professional detachment, asking questions. Jordan responded in his rehearsed tone.

“Can I perform a brief physical exam?” Carile asked. “Nothing invasive, just an observation.”

Thomas nodded feverishly. Carile proceeded, but his professional interest soon turned to alarm. He wasn’t observing Jordan’s condition; he was observing the depraved, feverish obsession in Thomas and Catherine’s eyes. He saw that there was nothing scientific about their interest; it was a mania that had consumed their minds and was destroying the person they held captive.

The Sealed Ending

That night, after Jordan was fired, Carile confronted Thomas in the studio.

“Thomas, this isn’t science,” Carile said, her voice deep with concern. “This is… a disease. What they’re doing to that creature, the way they live… Catherine needs help. You need help! This is madness.”

The threat of exposure, the word “madness” spoken aloud, severed the last thread that bound Thomas to reality. Fearing that Carile would reveal his secret, the depth of his shame and his obsession, Thomas grabbed a poker from the fireplace. The argument turned violent.

Catherine, hearing the noise, ran downstairs to the study. What she saw—Carile on the floor, her husband with the bloody poker—made her scream. Thomas, completely distraught, turned to her. Perhaps he saw in her only an extension of his own failed obsession, or perhaps a witness he couldn’t allow to live. When he finished, three people lay dead at the Belmonte estate: Dr. Carile, Catherine Rutlet, and finally, Thomas, who had used his own pistol in the study.

It was the slaves who found them the next morning. Harriet, seeing the carnage in the study and the third-floor room (where Thomas had gone before he died), understood the magnitude of the horror.

The news of the Rutlet suicide and murder shocked the county. Local magistrates and neighboring planters, friends of Thomas’s father, arrived in Belmonte. In the locked study, they found Thomas’s secret diary. On the third floor, they found his clothes, medical books, and Jordan, silent and motionless amidst the chaos.

They understood the nature of the “disease” that had destroyed the family. For the Virginia planter aristocracy, the truth was an intolerable scandal. It wasn’t death itself, but the  reason  for the death—an unspeakable obsession centered on the ambiguous nature of a slave—that threatened their social order.

They made a decision. The Rutled incident had to be erased.

Jordan was sold that same afternoon to a trader heading south, disappearing from Virginia forever. All the plantation documents from that fall, especially Thomas’s journal and Catherine’s papers, were burned in a large bonfire behind the tobacco barns. All official county records were destroyed.

To explain the deaths, a story of sudden illness and tragedy was fabricated. The rooms where the horror had occurred—the study and the third-floor bedroom—were boarded up and sealed.

The plantation, now an empty shell stained by an unspeakable secret, was abandoned. A year later, in November 1852, Belmonte was sold at auction for next to nothing, on the sole condition that those sealed rooms would never, ever be opened again.