Weird Western Maryland

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...

In late 1949, as the Cold War got increasingly tense, the Pentagon became interested in accounts of "green fireballs" over the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico and other military installations in the West. While meteors in the night sky can flash green*, they aren't terribly common, and these green fireballs were becoming so common and spooking so many personnel that the Air Force asked Dr. Joseph Kaplan of UCLA to look into them. On 3 Nov. 1949, Kaplan reported his findings at a Pentagon meeting. Kaplan believed the green fireballs seen at Los Alamos represented a previously undetected type of "auroral display" -- though he conceded this explained neither "the rapid horizontal motion reported" nor "the occurrence of these phenomena at low magnetic altitudes" (qtd. in Gross 13). Needless to say, Kaplan's explanation "did not escape criticism," in the words of UFO historian Loren E. Gross (60). In the ensuing animated discussion, one...