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...

Photo courtesy Dana M.Bridges. In my first post, a few days ago , I shared the official, university-approved, one-page summary of my Weird Western Maryland sabbatical project. I will spare you the entirety of the complete five-page, 2,400-word proposal that wound its way through the coils and recesses of Frostburg State University , but I do want to share its final paragraph: When this project is published, I hope to dedicate it to the memory of one of my former Frostburg State students, Dave Knotts, who was 30 when he died in a hunting accident in January 2020. He loved talking to me about this sort of thing, and I vividly remember his telling me, with great animation, about a supposedly ever-fresh bloodstain on the centuries-old floor of the Tomlinson Inn in Garrett County, which he was shown as a teenager. Dave himself thought it was probably groundwater seepage, but as he warmed to his story, he almost convinced himself otherwise. I hope these topics energize my future students ...