Miss Effie's Neighbors? Out of This World
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 banality of the supernatural.”
The storekeeper’s ghost seems to have been a recurring presence, and one that didn’t especially bother Miss Effie, who was not the type to “lay down and tremble.” The one-time apparition she saw outside a Yellow Springs church, however, was another story. Here’s how Weinberg relates that incident:
One dreary day, she saw a diaphanous figure come out of Brook Hill Church and squat down on a big rock. Asked how it looked, she says, “It was spooky lookin’. I didn’t look long. I run.”
This may have been a memory from Miss Effie’s childhood or adolescence. As she was buried, nearly a century later, in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, she is the focus of a detailed 2017 article on Chris Haugh’s excellent Stories in Stone blog, dedicated to that cemetery’s inhabitants. Haugh reports that Effie was born in Yellow Springs in 1886 and married her first husband in 1905, after which the young couple lived with his family in Harmony Grove.
If her Brook Hill sighting occurred circa 1900, it certainly was not at the current Brook Hill UMC building, the oldest parts of which date only from 1962. Extensive additions, including the 400-seat sanctuary, occurred in the 1980s.
My guess is that Miss Effie saw the ghost outside the original church building, built in 1851 – and, moreover, that she saw it during the 15 years the original building was empty, neglected and, no doubt, spooky lookin’. Renovation didn’t begin until 1897, when Miss Effie was 11 years old.
That church, demolished in 1976, was within sight of the present one, about a quarter-mile southeast, at the intersection of Yellow Springs and Bethel roads.
Small wonder, then, that Brook Hill United Methodist
Church’s online history, otherwise comprehensive, mentions no early-20th-century
rock-squatting apparition. (It does, happily, report that the neighborhood was known before
the Civil War as Sistersville – because “four
widowed sisters lived nearby.”)
Miss Effie’s brief recollection, as reported by Weinberg, may be the only record of that ghost. Perhaps young Effie was the only person ever to see it. If so, some would suggest, that was because only she was supposed to see it.
“I believe God sends people back,” Miss Effie told Weinberg, “to warn other people to do better.”
Sources:
Haugh, Chris. “All Hallow’s Eve at Mount Olivet.” Stories in Stone, 28 Oct. 2017. http://www.mountolivethistory.com/stories-in-stone-blog/all-hallows-eve. Accessed 29 Nov. 2021.
“History of Brook Hill.” Brook Hill United Methodist Church website. https://www.bhumc.org/about-brook-hill/history-of-brook-hill/. Accessed 29 Nov. 2021.
Weinberg, Alyce T. Spirits of Frederick. 1979. 2nd ed., 1992. Photos by C. Kurt Holter. Illus. by Audrey. Self-published; graphics and typesetting by Greenleaf Graphics, Frederick, Maryland. See “Miss Effie,” Pages 8-11.
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