Woman in White Never Reached the House

The old Snyder farm on Legeer Road in Garrett County was haunted, according to Cynthia Snyder Beitzel (1885-1968), who grew up there. Moreover, the haunt manifested in at least three different ways.

First, there was a mysterious sound that came and went, a sound described -- however stereotypically -- as chains rattling. In the days when cargo was hauled by teams of horses, people who heard the sound assumed a team was coming; in later years, when cargo was hauled by motor truck, the sound was assumed to be a truck laboring up the road. But there were no horses, and no trucks, just the rattling sound.

Second, horses were said to get skittish on that stretch of Legeer Road, and have to be coaxed or compelled past the Snyder place.

Most interestingly, a woman in a white flowing gown would be seen walking from the spring house up the hill toward the Snyder farmhouse. If you looked away, even for a moment, or tried to approach her, she'd be gone. And if you simply watched her from the steps, and waited for her -- well, she'd be gone then, too. For whatever reason, the woman in white never reached the house.

August Snyder (1858-1930) was among those who claimed to have seen her, but none of the Snyders admitted recognizing her. Who knows? She may have been there when the family first bought the land on Oct. 4, 1864, during the Civil War.

Horse-drawn buggies still travel Garrett County roads, and a 223-acre farm on Legeer Road, northwest of the Bittinger post office, is owned by Beitzels to this day. The farm's primary structure, according to online tax records, dates from 1880. 

Could this be the old Snyder farm? One wonders whether horses still shy away, and whether the woman in white has reached the house yet.

Sources:

Abel, Florence Harris. The Beitzel Family. Baltimore: Gateway P, 1986. Pages 100-101.

Real Property Data Search. Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation. https://sdat.dat.maryland.gov/RealProperty/Pages/default.aspx. Accessed 13 Nov. 2021.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rail Victims Moved 10 Miles in 100 Years

Image
Looking toward Frostburg from the Brush Tunnel near Corriganville. A popular spot with 21 st -century ghost hunters is the Brush Tunnel, on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad near Corriganville, just west of the Great Allegheny Passage parking lot on Cash Valley Road. Built in 1912 to accommodate parallel tracks as part of the Western Maryland’s Cumberland-to-Pittsburgh extension, the Brush Tunnel likely had its share of the miseries and fatalities common to all old-time tunnel projects. But oral tradition sometimes associates the Brush Tunnel haunting with a pedestrian disaster after construction was over, when tourists stepped out of the path of one train only to be hit by another train going in the opposite direction. While she neither names the tunnel nor mentions a haunting, Betty Van Newkirk briefly summarizes the fatality in a 1995 article:   When trains began to travel through the tunnels, around the huge horseshoe curve below Frostburg, and down the long grade toward
Read more

A Dedication to Dave Knotts (1989-2020)

Image
Photo courtesy Dana M.Bridges. In my first post, a few days ago , I shared the official, university-approved, one-page summary of my Weird Western Maryland sabbatical project. I will spare you the entirety of the complete five-page, 2,400-word proposal that wound its way through the coils and recesses of Frostburg State University , but I do want to share its final paragraph: When this project is published, I hope to dedicate it to the memory of one of my former Frostburg State students, Dave Knotts, who was 30 when he died in a hunting accident in January 2020. He loved talking to me about this sort of thing, and I vividly remember his telling me, with great animation, about a supposedly ever-fresh bloodstain on the centuries-old floor of the Tomlinson Inn in Garrett County, which he was shown as a teenager. Dave himself thought it was probably groundwater seepage, but as he warmed to his story, he almost convinced himself otherwise. I hope these topics energize my future students
Read more

Yule-Tree Vendors Played Rubes in Big City

Henry Beitzel of Accident in Garrett County was, by all accounts, a savvy entrepreneur with multiple income streams (farming, mining, maple-sugar making), a hardworking craftsman who laid brick for the new English Lutheran Church building, an avid newspaper reader who sent six children to school. He was, in short, no dummy. Yet, when he and two friends traveled by train to Pittsburgh to sell a crop of home-grown Christmas trees in December 1892, they amused themselves -- and, doubtless, attracted business -- by playing wide-eyed, ignorant hillbillies, predecessors of the later stereotyped characters in Li'l Abner, No Time for Sergeants and The Beverly Hillbillies. Their rube act made good copy for the big afternoon daily, The Pittsburg Press , which for years had Pennsylvania's second-largest circulation, behind only the Inquirer of Philadelphia (and which would not add the "h" to its name until 30 years later). The Press headline told the story:     Visitors From M
Read more