Weird Western Maryland

  Claims that giant skeletons from prehistory had been dug up and delivered to scientific institutions are not hard to unearth in 19 th -century U.S. newspapers. Such tall tales were popular in part because they underscored White prejudices that Native Americans were an exotic inhuman species, their extermination worthy of no more human sympathy that, say, the fate of the passenger pigeon; and because believers in a literal, inerrant Bible could claim these ancient behemoths as evidence for the multiple Old Testament references to giants, most famously the demigods of Genesis 6:4: There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. (KJV via BibleGateway.com) Sometimes, however, the bones of long-dead people of unusual heights (anomalously tall or short) are indeed found – unsurprisingly, given the remarkable, everyda...

  This brief 1897 newspaper item may look like a tall tale, or evidence of some paranormal Pied Piper among Western Maryland squirrels, but it actually documents a well-known, now-rare natural phenomenon. Migrating Squirrels. As evidence of the theory that squirrels migrate, a novel scene was witnessed on Saturday in the upper portion of Washington County along the Potomac River. A drove of squirrels, of which eye-witnesses estimated there were at least three thousand, swarmed across the country. Their flight was soon discovered, and about three hundred of them were killed by men and boys. Periodic swarms of thousands of squirrels have been documented in North America at least since the Lewis and Clark expedition, and while they are popularly known as “migrations,” which implies a seasonal back-and-forth, they are actually emigrations, one-way movements from one place to another as needed – in the squirrels’ case, in search of food. Vagn Flyger, the late University of Mar...