WJLA · 7News
The houses remember. My job is to listen.
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Enter the GiveawayThe Segment
Living in History is Sharon Virts’ recurring guest segment on Good Morning Washington, airing on WJLA · 7News out of Washington, D.C. Each visit carries one piece of the past forward — a house, a family, a mystery, a name cut into stone — and asks what it still has to teach us.
It is the on-air companion to everything else she does. The same instinct that led her to rescue a crumbling 1810 mansion on the edge of Leesburg is the instinct behind her novels: history is not a subject kept at a distance. It is in the buildings we still walk past, the floorboards we still hear, the rooms where people we will never meet once lived.
And Sharon does not arrive as a scholar looking in from the outside. She arrives as someone who lives inside a house built by a United States Senator, who spent three years bringing it back room by room, and who found her first novel in what the house remembered. When she talks about the past on air, she is talking about a place she is standing in.
Where to Find It
New segments air on Good Morning Washington and are collected here as they arrive.
On Air
Sharon's segments on history, preservation, and the stories our houses keep — from Good Morning Washington and beyond.
Good Morning Washington · WJLA · 7News · September 28, 2026
Sharon shares the journey that bridges her love of history, storytelling, and architecture — from restoring the once-neglected Selma Mansion in Leesburg to launching her debut novel, Masque of Honor, and the Fields of Honor series. She also offers a first look at the third installment, Swamp of Lies, coming in 2027.
Watch the SegmentGood Morning Washington · WJLA · 7News · October 22, 2026
When Sharon and her husband rescued the crumbling Selma Mansion in 2016, the multi-year restoration seemed to awaken the spirits of its past — footsteps where no one is present, doors that slam on their own, the smell of bread baking from an empty oven. Sharon talks about embracing those occurrences as an invitation from the past, and how the energy of the house shaped her Fields of Honor series.
Watch the SegmentBehind the Segments
Two conversations on the morning news — and the two hundred years of American history underneath them.
The History Behind It
Before there was a novel, there was a mansion on the edge of Leesburg that had been left for dead.
Selma has been part of the American story since 1810, when Armistead Thomson Mason built it at the foot of Catoctin Mountain in Loudoun County, Virginia. He was a general of Virginia militia, a United States Senator at twenty-eight, and heir to one of the founding era’s most prominent families — a grandson of Thomson Mason, and kin to George Mason of Gunston Hall. He named his house from the Gaelic: Selma, beautiful castle.
He had nine years in it. On February 6, 1819, Armistead Mason was killed in a duel at Bladensburg, Maryland by his own cousin, John McCarty. His widow Charlotte raised their children in the house he left behind. Then came nearly two hundred more years of American life passing through Selma’s rooms: the Beverley family through the Civil War, the mansion raided and stripped; a fire at the end of the nineteenth century that consumed the original Mason house; Maryland Governor Thomas Swann; and Elijah B. White, who rebuilt on the old foundations and carried what survived into the new walls.
By 2016, when Sharon Virts and Scott Miller walked through the doors, the house had been picked over and abandoned for years. Windows were broken. Antique fireplace tiles had been pried away by thieves. The grand staircase stood open to the weather. A rosewood piano still sat in the ballroom — too heavy to steal, too damaged to play. The restoration that followed took three years and touched every column, mantel, and molding, with more than 109,000 people following along online.
What Sharon found inside is the reason this segment exists. Living in a house built by a man who died on a dueling field, she kept meeting the people who had lived there, and their stories began insisting on being told. That duel became the opening of Masque of Honor, the first novel in her Fields of Honor series, and Selma became the shadow narrative running through all of it. On air she tells the arc plainly: a house nobody wanted, and the writing life it handed her.
“Through all the weeds and vines, we noticed daffodils poking through the overgrowth — yellow and hopeful, dancing in the breeze. That is why the daffodil became synonymous with Selma’s rebirth.”
— Sharon Virts
Good Morning Washington · September 28, 2026
The History Behind It
Some houses keep their history in their walls. This one seems to keep it in the rooms.
Restoring an old house means learning to share it. Sharon and Scott bought a mansion that had stood empty for a long time, and once the work began, the usual rules of an empty house stopped applying. Footsteps in rooms where no one was walking. Heavy doors slamming on their own. And, more than once, the unmistakable smell of bread baking when no one was baking bread.
If that sounds like the opening of a ghost story, it helps to remember whose house Selma was. Its builder, Armistead Thomson Mason, was thirty-one when his cousin killed him on a dueling field in 1819. His widow Charlotte stayed on with their young children. A century later came fire, a rebuild, and then decades of decline in which the house was looted and left open to the weather. Two hundred years of ambition, grief, war, and ordinary family life are soaked into those floorboards. If any house had something left to say, it would be this one.
Sharon has never treated the occurrences as something to explain away or exorcise. She treats them as an invitation from the past — a reason to keep listening. That posture is what she brings to the segment, and what she brought to the books: the Fields of Honor series, and her historical mysteries Veil of Doubt and The Grays of Truth, all of them written on the conviction that old walls hold on to what happened inside them.
The segment aired on October 22, 2026 — in the week the year turns toward All Hallows’ Eve, the season when we let ourselves believe the past is still nearby.
“The past is not behind us. It lives in our stories, our art, our homes, and our conversations.”
— Sharon Virts
Good Morning Washington · October 22, 2026
Keep Exploring
The segment is one door into the work. These are the others.
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