Weird Western Maryland

  Among the many colorful raconteurs Alyce T. Weinberg visited in the 1970s for her classic Spirits of Frederick was 94-year-old Effie “Miss Effie” Spurrier, whose matter-of-fact recollections of her life’s many hauntings are highlights of the book. Miss Effie viewed ghosts as commonplaces of daily life, like crossroads and churches, or rocks and trees. Consider her memories of the general store at Yellow Springs, in the Catoctin foothills about five miles northwest of Frederick: A big, fat woman ran a store near us up there. She always wore the same shirtwaist and skirt. I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead. We all said she must have hid money somewhere and came back to protect it. The dog that hung around the store saw her, too, and was so scared he’d lay down and tremble. “I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead.” This chilling observation, so offhandedly presented, is a great example of what fiction writer Jeffrey Ford calls “the banal...

  Here is the entirety of a brief on Page 3 of The Daily News of Frederick, Maryland, 14 Jan. 1887: A Delicate Operation. – Dr. U.A. Sharretts, of this city, yesterday successfully relieved Mr. Geo. M. Gittinger of 60 feet of tape worm. This is the fourth relief Mr. Gittinger has had in the past 10 months, aggregating 230 feet.   I can find no reliable claim online for what the longest single tapeworm recovered from a human may have been, and I’m frankly too disgusted by what I did find to look any further. In fact, I refuse even to confirm whether George Gittinger’s fourth tapeworm (fourth!) was the longest ever recovered in Frederick, much less Maryland, the United States, and so forth. Seek that info if you must; I wish you joy of it. I’m done. Sources: “A Delicate Operation.” The Daily News (Frederick, Maryland), 14 Jan. 1887. Page 3. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021 via Newspapers.com. Ridgley, Jaime. “Treating Tapeworm.” Bygone Maryland, 26 Feb. 2017. https://bygonemar...

Photo by Jaime Ridgley, 2018.   On her fascinating Bygone Maryland blog, Jaime Ridgley provides a 21 st -century public service by photographing Frederick’s ghost signs, the fading advertisements of long-closed businesses. These are easy to overlook – until someone like Ridgley points out how common they are. So far, she has documented seven, providing not only photographs but capsule histories of the businesses they represented and the citizens who ran them. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, my favorite of the signs is the enormous “SENSATION” on the old Kintz Groceries building, but on the level of simple information, I am delighted to learn that 3-C Nectar, a soft drink bottled by Kehne Bros., was billed as “The Drink of the Gods.” What in the world could the three C’s have stood for? Here are links to Ridgley’s ghost signs of Frederick, in alphabetical order. Central Chemical Co., South Carroll Street: https://bygonemaryland.com/2016/03/15/central-chemical-company/ Fre...

  One of the most intriguing stories in Alyce Weinberg’s classic Spirits of Frederick is consigned to two sentences on the last page, Page 97: A young man told me that something pulls the covers off his bed, and caresses his wife while he is asleep beside her; and that some invisible force crowded him off a bench in Baker Park after dusk. He believes a ghost is in love with his wife. I would love to know the wife’s side of this story. I would love to know many things. The history on the Friends of Baker Park website gives no indication of the place being haunted, but the implication in Weinberg is that the ghost in the park is also the ghost in the home, and that it’s the people who are haunted, not the place. This arguably is the case with all hauntings, including ones much better documented than this jealous husband’s. Still, this cryptic claim is probably a good excuse to visit Baker Park, which is bounded on the east by North Bentz Street and on the south by Carroll Par...

  A local newspaper published this account of an 1897 Halloween party at the Woman’s College of Frederick: Hallowe’en was celebrated in fine style by a phantom party in the college Hall. About eight o’clock a ghostly procession could be seen wending its wayl through the corridors to the Hall where lanterns of pumpkins, ears of corn, autumn leaves, and the skeleton of Mr. Smith, made the scene one to be remembered. After a march in which sixty girls joined[,] each carrying long tin horns filling the air with soft sweet strains, dancing was indulged in until the lights were suddenly turned on and you were requested to unmask, then began the fun. Fortunes were told and bright futures prophesied for all, corn and flour were freely used, which cou’d be easily told from the looks of the chapel the next morning. Refreshments were served later in the evening, and at eleven o’clock the crowd dispersed after having spent a most delightful evening. Thanks are due to the kind friends w...

Cumberland's Commandments. To promote his huge, and hugely expensive, 1956 epic The Ten Commandments -- at the time, the most expensive movie ever made -- veteran Paramount Pictures producer/director/showman Cecil B. DeMille partnered with the Fraternal Order of Eagles to erect granite Ten Commandments monuments nationwide.  This was great, low-cost publicity in every corner of the land, even if DeMille, Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner were not on hand for the unveilings (as they mostly were not). And the erections continued for many years, long after the movie's initial theatrical run. I don't know how many of these originally were erected in Maryland, but apparently only two remain, both in Western Maryland, and both erected after the movie's premiere 8 November 1956. One is in Memorial Park in Frederick, and was erected in 1958; the other, erected in 1957, is on the lawn of the Washington Street courthouse in Cumberland. Interestingly, the best current tally of these...

Previously, I listed the five Washington County locations covered by Atlas Obscura . The site has six locations in Frederick County. Frederick: National Museum of Civil War Medicine . “A Civil War Museum with some notable medical antiques.” Also at Roadside America . Frederick: One-Million-Liter Test Sphere . “This four-story steel sphere in Maryland was used to test biological weapons.” Jefferson: War Correspondents Memorial . “One of the only memorials dedicated to journalists who died in combat.” Middletown: The (First) Washington Monument . “Built by the patriotic residents of Boonsboro in a single day.” Thurmont: Lawyer’s Farm . “This Maryland farm is known for its amazing corn mazes and its 30-foot junkbots.” Also at Roadside America . Thurmont: Catoctin Furnace . “A pre-Industrial Age iron furnace and the site of a nearly-forgotten piece of Black history.” Next: A project dedication!