Seek Not the Secret Room of Stafford Hall
Many antebellum mansions have ghost stories attached – unsurprisingly, their histories being inextricable from the horrors of slavery. One such mansion in Washington County has a legend of a cursed room, but don’t expect to visit the room. In fact, best not even to look for the room. About a half-mile north of old U.S. 40 on Cohill Road, east of Clear Spring, is Stafford Hall, which the 1940 New Deal volume Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State describes as a large, two-story brick and stone structure with nine double chimneys. It was built probably about 1835 by Judge John Thompson (1815-73), descendant of Colonel George Mason who came from Staffordshire, England, about 1651. Natives of the countryside have believed for years that there is a secret room in the house and that anyone who attempts to find the room will die. It is told that a prominent citizen of Hagerstown searched for the room in 1924 and died within the year; that two years later a nine-year-old child, wh...