It was customary for wealthy colonial planters to send their children to Europe to be educated. Colonel Byrd himself, before age nine, had been sent from his American frontier home to England to study under noted educators while being watched over by Old Country relatives. He had returned to Virginia only after attaining “a happy proficiency in polite and varied learning” and “the polish for which he was afterward noted.” From Evelyn's birth, it was taken for granted that she would be educated in like manner.

In December 1717, Colonel Byrd and his family were visiting in England when his wife died unexpectedly. Upon his return to Virginia the next year, the colonel left nine-year-old Evelyn behind to continue her education. There she grew into a charming beauty and later was presented at court, where she met and fell in love with a young nobleman, Charles Mordaunt, the grandson of the Earl of Peterborough. Under most circumstances, this would have delighted Colonel Byrd, but the Byrds were staunch Protestants and, as the colonel soon learned from his confidants in London, Mordaunt was an ardent Roman Catholic. Byrd positively refused to allow his daughter to marry Mordaunt; any Catholic was unacceptable to him. On his orders, Evelyn was brought home to Virginia.

Andrew Jackson, long after meeting the witch.

At the family plantation, she refused to see any suitors or even discuss the possibility of marriage. Her family expected Evelyn to get over her lovesickness after a time, but she did not. Not until the colonel, who had remarried and started a second family, built the fine manor house Westover on the plantation in 1730 did the girl spark any life. She showed interest in Westover’s magnificent furnishings and the great gardens around it; she remained “ever constant” to her Virginia friends; but she still shunned romance.

Evelyn gradually weakened, and she died on November 13, 1737, in her twenty-ninth year. She was buried in an elaborate tomb at the site of the old Westover Church, leaving “an air of mournful romance denoting her presence” floating about Westover.

Some weeks before Evelyn’s death, she had told her best friend, Anne Harrison, that she would return after her death, and, according to Anne, Evelyn did just that, the first time about a year later. Anne was walking in the Westover gardens when an apparition—a young Evelyn, far lovelier than she had been in her last years—floated nearby.