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...

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 ...

  This brief 1897 newspaper item may look like a tall tale, or evidence of some paranormal Pied Piper among Western Maryland squirrels, but it actually documents a well-known, now-rare natural phenomenon. Migrating Squirrels. As evidence of the theory that squirrels migrate, a novel scene was witnessed on Saturday in the upper portion of Washington County along the Potomac River. A drove of squirrels, of which eye-witnesses estimated there were at least three thousand, swarmed across the country. Their flight was soon discovered, and about three hundred of them were killed by men and boys. Periodic swarms of thousands of squirrels have been documented in North America at least since the Lewis and Clark expedition, and while they are popularly known as “migrations,” which implies a seasonal back-and-forth, they are actually emigrations, one-way movements from one place to another as needed – in the squirrels’ case, in search of food. Vagn Flyger, the late University of Mar...