Weird Western Maryland

  Trestle over Potomac at Twenty-first Bridge Road, Rawlings, looking toward West Virginia. Too many ghost stories in old newspapers are vague on where, exactly, something took place. Refreshingly pinpointed, however, is this account from 1898, which I quote in full. My only change was to break up the long paragraphs, for online readability: Trainmen on the Baltimore and Ohio and West Virginia Central railroads employed near Cumberland, Md., were recently frightened by the shape of a headless woman that makes her appearance at Greenwade’s siding, near Twenty-first bridge, between Cumberland and Keyser, W.Va. Freight trains are side tracked there, and when the trainmen are waiting a headless woman emerges from an old culvert or bridge and walks up and down the track. Whenever any of the men attempt to follow her, she disappears. One railroad man was so badly frightened that he left the service of the road. Others say that if the headless woman keeps up her antics they, too, wi...

Oak Hill Cemetery in Lonaconing is the setting of this undated post at the Ghosts of America website, by a writer who identifies only as “Jeri”: This sighting occurred in the late 1990s. I told a few people about what we saw, but was [sic] received with skepticism. I finally just stopped telling the story. I stumbled across ghostsofamerica.com and decided to tell the story one more time. My husband and I were at Oak Hill Cemetery on a late afternoon in July. No one else was there. We drove around to the top row, parked the car, and got out to look for ancestors buried there. It was odd how quickly a strong wind started to blow. Both of us were looking down at the lower road, and a figure (seemingly oblivious to us) was walking in the direction of where it elbowed up to the next level. He was dressed as an old time miner. What he had on was very recognizable. He had on a mining hat and was carrying what looked like a lunch bucket. He looked like he was covered in coal dust. It was...

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 to...

Georges Creek Boulevard and woods, today. Whenever I start explaining my Weird Western Maryland project, some student immediately says, “Oh, you mean like Bigfoot.” The modern legend of Bigfoot is certainly one of my research interests, as is the wider field of cryptozoology, or the search for unknown animals. Bigfoot also is one of the modern legends best known to my undergraduates, thanks to Hollywood and to decades of T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, chainsaw art, and other merchandise. And as Western Maryland is largely wooded, students tend to assume that Bigfoot, if it exists at all, abounds regionally. In fact, Bigfoot sightings are not all that common in Western Maryland. (Southwestern Pennsylvania, just across the Mason-Dixon Line, is an entirely different story, one we’ll get to later.) The only Allegany County sighting in the excellent database of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) took place more than 20 years ago and in a surprising, far-from-re...

A roadside attraction that should be better known is the red-eyed Bigfoot statue in Ricky Linaburg’s front yard at 13139 Warrior Drive, a.k.a. Maryland Highway 636 in Cresaptown, between C&J Cycles and Three Guys Guns. Like most such Bigfoot statues, this one seems to be based on Frame 352 of the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film. As the statue is on private property along a busy street, best to gawk at it from one of the nearby parking lots, without trespassing. Sources: “Patterson-Gimlin Film.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterson-Gimlin_film . Accessed 14 Oct. 2021. “Real Property Data Search.” Maryland State Department of Assessments & Taxation search engine. https://sdat.dat.maryland.gov/RealProperty/Pages/default.aspx . Accessed 14 Oct. 2021.  

  More than 60 years after the fact, longtime Allegany County resident Anton “Toni” Urbas (1909-1995) recounted that he would have been killed in the 1920s by anti-immigrant vigilantes, if not for divine intervention. This was during the George’s Creek coal miners’ strike of 1921-1924, while Toni was a young teenager, aged 12 to 15. It was a violent, lawless time, an opportunity for ugliness to emerge from the shadows, and Vale Summit racists had formed a new cell of a vicious group that was then at the peak of its nationwide influence: the Ku Klux Klan. While Toni often declined to name his long-ago tormentors – “What was to be gained,” he asked in 1988, “by creating another cycle of anger?” – he was quite specific about other things. A Klan ringleader, for example, lived in “one particular home on the Top Row.” And the Klan’s late-night Vale Summit headquarters was the kerosene-lighted sanctuary of the Methodist Church. “They would come to the meeting place under total dark...

The legend that 18 th -century surveyor John Savage – likely namesake of Mount Savage, Savage Mountain, Savage River, etc. – narrowly missed being killed and eaten by his cannibalistic companions originated with one of his contemporaries, the Virginia planter William Byrd II, known reverently in his time as “William Byrd of Westover.” A prolific writer of fact and fancy intermixed, Byrd reads in the 21 st century like the quintessential Southern slaveholding plantation owner, a matter-of-fact chronicler of all the cruelty, sadism, sexual predations and general cluelessness endemic to the species. His writings also ooze sarcasm for those he considered less worthy than himself – which was just about everybody. Here is the relevant John Savage passage just as Byrd wrote it, complete with the then-standard “f” for “s.” Byrd describes the 1736 expedition that surveyed the upper reaches of the Potomac River – an expedition that Byrd and other officials had commissioned – then adds this ...