Teens Feared, Loved an Ax-Wielding Hermit

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 road, and kids have changed too. Brave little daredevils have disappeared from what is left of the woods at Braddock, and so has Hatchet Harry. This old repeated tale was scary once, especially to parents who were worried about the safety of their children and who did not believe in ghosts.

Clearly, Weinberg means for us to understand that Hatchet Harry was an urban legend made up by delirious teens to scare one another on dark nights.

This makes the axe-wielding hermit a close cousin to The Hook, the legendary maniac who somehow roamed Lovers’ Lanes for generations, all over the United States. The Hook’s depredations were discussed mostly in whispers during a thousand sleepovers until he was outed in the early 1980s by pioneering folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand and by breakthrough horror novelist Stephen King, who classed all such yarns as “Tales of the Hook”:

The story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare little kids after the sun goes down.

No longer a desolate “wagon trail” – nor, probably, a Lovers’ Lane – Gold Mine Road nevertheless parallels I-70 to the south, between South Clifton and Mount Phillip roads. Googling "Hatchet Harry," however, turns up mainly UK references: a gangster in a Guy Pearce movie and an ax-throwing business in Newcastle.

Sources:

“About Hatchet Harry’s.” Hatchet Harry’s Axe Throwing. https://newcastle.hatchetharrys.co.uk/about-us/. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: Norton, 1981.

"The Hook." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hook. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021. 

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. New York: Penguin, 1983. See Chapter 1, “Tales of the Hook.”

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 “The Haunted Mountain,” Page 71.

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