Weird Western Maryland

  Among the many colorful raconteurs Alyce T. Weinberg visited in the 1970s for her classic Spirits of Frederick was 94-year-old Effie “Miss Effie” Spurrier, whose matter-of-fact recollections of her life’s many hauntings are highlights of the book. Miss Effie viewed ghosts as commonplaces of daily life, like crossroads and churches, or rocks and trees. Consider her memories of the general store at Yellow Springs, in the Catoctin foothills about five miles northwest of Frederick: A big, fat woman ran a store near us up there. She always wore the same shirtwaist and skirt. I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead. We all said she must have hid money somewhere and came back to protect it. The dog that hung around the store saw her, too, and was so scared he’d lay down and tremble. “I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead.” This chilling observation, so offhandedly presented, is a great example of what fiction writer Jeffrey Ford calls “the banal...

  Here is the entirety of a brief on Page 3 of The Daily News of Frederick, Maryland, 14 Jan. 1887: A Delicate Operation. – Dr. U.A. Sharretts, of this city, yesterday successfully relieved Mr. Geo. M. Gittinger of 60 feet of tape worm. This is the fourth relief Mr. Gittinger has had in the past 10 months, aggregating 230 feet.   I can find no reliable claim online for what the longest single tapeworm recovered from a human may have been, and I’m frankly too disgusted by what I did find to look any further. In fact, I refuse even to confirm whether George Gittinger’s fourth tapeworm (fourth!) was the longest ever recovered in Frederick, much less Maryland, the United States, and so forth. Seek that info if you must; I wish you joy of it. I’m done. Sources: “A Delicate Operation.” The Daily News (Frederick, Maryland), 14 Jan. 1887. Page 3. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021 via Newspapers.com. Ridgley, Jaime. “Treating Tapeworm.” Bygone Maryland, 26 Feb. 2017. https://bygonemar...

Photo by Jaime Ridgley, 2018.   On her fascinating Bygone Maryland blog, Jaime Ridgley provides a 21 st -century public service by photographing Frederick’s ghost signs, the fading advertisements of long-closed businesses. These are easy to overlook – until someone like Ridgley points out how common they are. So far, she has documented seven, providing not only photographs but capsule histories of the businesses they represented and the citizens who ran them. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, my favorite of the signs is the enormous “SENSATION” on the old Kintz Groceries building, but on the level of simple information, I am delighted to learn that 3-C Nectar, a soft drink bottled by Kehne Bros., was billed as “The Drink of the Gods.” What in the world could the three C’s have stood for? Here are links to Ridgley’s ghost signs of Frederick, in alphabetical order. Central Chemical Co., South Carroll Street: https://bygonemaryland.com/2016/03/15/central-chemical-company/ Fre...

A 1950s urban legend from Frederick County was nostalgically recounted by Alyce Weinberg in her classic Spirits of Frederick, first published in 1979. A manic ghost, a white-bearded, long-haired, scraggly male with beady eyes, put in an appearance about twenty years ago on Gold Mine Road near Clifton in Braddock Heights. He only showed himself to kids, and they talked among themselves of how they teased and tormented and mocked the recluse. It was a game to them. They would tantalize the grisly [sic] old man by sneaking up on him and poking him with sticks until he chased them, sidling crabwise, brandishing an axe. They called him Hatchet Harry. Gold Mine Road was only a wagon trail then that led to a stream and a deserted caved-in mine shaft that was impossible to find in the dense underbrush, though maybe Hatchet Harry had. No grown-ups ever caught up with this character, no matter what time of the day or night they went to hunt for him. Progress has changed the old dirt ro...