Seek Not the Secret Room of Stafford Hall

 Many antebellum mansions have ghost stories attached – unsurprisingly, their histories being inextricable from the horrors of slavery. One such mansion in Washington County has a legend of a cursed room, but don’t expect to visit the room. In fact, best not even to look for the room.

About a half-mile north of old U.S. 40 on Cohill Road, east of Clear Spring, is Stafford Hall, which the 1940 New Deal volume Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State describes as

a large, two-story brick and stone structure with nine double chimneys. It was built probably about 1835 by Judge John Thompson (1815-73), descendant of Colonel George Mason who came from Staffordshire, England, about 1651. Natives of the countryside have believed for years that there is a secret room in the house and that anyone who attempts to find the room will die. It is told that a prominent citizen of Hagerstown searched for the room in 1924 and died within the year; that two years later a nine-year-old child, who had spent many afternoons seeking the room, was taken ill and on her deathbed told what she had done and begged members of her family never to look for the room. (Page 339)

Those are some surprisingly recent legendary incidents, given that the federal Writers’ Program researchers were beavering away in the late 1930s. For them, the 1920s were the day before yesterday.

Even so, a Newspapers.com search of 1920s Hagerstown headlines turns up no mention of Stafford Hall in connection with any deaths, much less cursed ones. Throughout the 1920s, the master of Stafford Hall – that was how the local papers came to refer to him, “the master of Stafford Hall” – was apple farmer Leo Aloysius Cohill, who did not die until 1975, and scoffed at the legend of a secret room. 

One suspects that in the 1920s, the deaths were said to have occurred during World War I, and so on, back through the decades.

One can only speculate on the origin of the legend, but longtime Hagerstown journalist Harry B. Warner Jr.* took a stab in 1944.

An entire room offhand seems like a very conspicuous thing, and hardly the sort of item that can be easily hidden. But when you consider the size and statistics of Stafford Hall, you realize how one room more or less could easily become lost.

The home is reputed to have no fewer than 84 doors, nine double chimneys, twelve fireplaces, and 36 rooms – 37, if there really is a vanished one.

Visitors easily could get lost in such a place, and even residents probably could go months at a time without visiting certain rooms, especially those that were, in theory, consigned to the servants and therefore socially off limits.

Sometimes, Warner notes, Stafford Hall’s mystery room wasn’t even a room.

Then there’s another version to the legend which contents itself with claiming a concealed stairway somewhere within the huge building.

Certainly access stairs would have existed for the staff, perhaps even behind hidden doors, but seeking them out would have been a daily necessity, and hardly fatal.

As the servants were slaves or former slaves for much of Stafford Hall’s history, one wonders whether the legend of a cursed room once involved a designated spot for their cruel mistreatment, as in the horror stories told for centuries about the infamous LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans. Such a room might well be hidden from public view, eventually even walled off and lost to memory.

But mysterious rooms that came and went also were staples of 19^th century fantastic fiction, as in Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Lost Room” (Harper’s, 1858) and Madeline Yale Wynne’s “The Little Room” (Harper’s, 1895). Then as now, fiction inspired folklore, and vice versa. Why shouldn’t one of these flickering spaces be assigned to a big, spooky, confusing old house in Washington County?

In light of all this, an architecture-focused 1992 article on Stafford Hall by Patricia Schooley – who does not mention the legend – contains a very interesting passage:

There is a three foot mismatch between the second story floors of the front section and the ell. Oddly enough a door was located between two rooms at this juncture, but no steps were placed there until recently. Guests wandering lost through the house during a party some years ago were fortunate to land on a bed that was beneath the door. In the hall, four steps accommodate this difference.

So we know the house had at least one missing flight of stairs – if four steps count as a flight – and at least one door that residents knew better than to step through, lest injury result. Could this mundane oddity of construction have led, through the years, to the legend of a door that must not be opened, a door leading to a cursed room?

*In the same article, Warner suggests that the Stafford Hall legend lacks a certain something, compared to others in other places: "Washington county, claimed by its most enthusiastic native sons to be lacking in nothing, does fail to have one of the most important of all features, one that every well equipped county should have -- a haunted house of great fame."

Sources:

“The Haunted LaLaurie Mansion.” Ghost City Tours: New Orleans. https://ghostcitytours.com/new-orleans/haunted-places/lalaurie-mansion/. Accessed 7 Nov. 2021.

“Leo Cohill, Clear Spring orchardist dies.” The Morning Herald (Hagerstown, Maryland), 17 Feb. 1975. Accessed 7 Nov. 2021 via Newspapers.com.

Schooley, Patricia. “Stafford Hall, circa 1840, east of Clear Spring, MD.” Hagerstown (Maryland) Herald-Mail, 2 Feb. 1992. Republished on the Washington County Historical Trust website, https://washingtoncountyhistoricaltrust.org/32-stafford-hall-circa-1840-east-of-clear-spring-md/. Accessed 7 Nov. 2021.

“This County Well Supplied With Spooks On Halloween.” The Daily Herald (Hagerstown, Maryland), 29 Oct. 1958. Accessed 6 Nov. 2021 via Newspapers.com.

Warner, Harry B. Jr. “Historic Spots In County: Legend of Stafford Hall.” The Morning Herald (Hagerstown, Maryland), 2 March 1944, Page 2. Accessed 7 Nov. 2021 via Newspapers.com.

Writers’ Program of the Works Project Administration. Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State. New York: Oxford UP, 1940. Accessed 7 Nov. 2021 via the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/.