Weird Western Maryland

  Lightning bolts can be terrifying enough, but ball lightning is something else again. Floating horizontally only a few feet off the ground, these glowing plasma globes, generally associated with thunderstorms, can bob, weave, change direction, even “follow” observers in ways that seem unnervingly intelligent. They have been known to roam the interiors of houses, and they have a nasty habit of “exploding” when they hit something solid. Once ball lightning was dismissed as folktale or hallucination, discussed seriously only on woo-woo TV shows such Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World – where, on Episode 13, Sir Arthur called ball lightning the “most important of all mysteries,” because of the tantalizing prospect of plasma technology. Today, if not quite “tweedy with respectability,” as Ryan Shirlow put it recently in Fortean Times , ball lightning nevertheless is regarded as a real – but really weird – weather event. “Scientists say they have much to learn about the mysterious p...

  In June 1961, Gale B. Cohill of Clear Spring – then a Democrat member of the Maryland House of Delegates – committed an impromptu act of heroism on the family farm that may have impressed even the General Assembly. While Cohill was helping spray the orchards at Stafford Hall, the slave-built estate where he grew up, the blower on one of the spray trucks ignited, and one of its three motors caught fire. At risk were the other two motors and the gas tank. If those went up, too, the farm workers would have an inferno on their hands. Most people, confronted with such a situation, would run away from the burning truck. Cohill ran toward it, hopped into the cab, and drove the flaming truck straight toward Conococheague Creek. His thought, to the extent that thought was involved, was to douse the fire by driving into the water. Between truck and creek, however, was a closed gate. When Cohill stopped to open the gate (picture, for a moment, doing that, then getting back in ), ...

  A pet crow supposedly had learned to talk. However, when Ora Ernst showed up at Stafford Hall in Clear Spring to take Jim’s photo for the Hagerstown Daily Mail, the bird had nothing to say. But he did produce human-sounding remarks like ‘ah’ and ‘uh-huh’ when offered candy by his adopted mother, Mrs. V.L. Ebersole. The crow was discovered in a nest nine years ago by Bernie Williams, a brother-in-law of the Ebersoles*, who raised him for seven years and taught him a vocabulary which includes “How are you?”, “Hell-looo”, and “Hello” minus the last syllable. I bet Ora Ernst said “Hello” minus the last syllable, and other things besides, when she got back to the office. Based on my four years as a general-assignment reporter at a daily newspaper, I have a great deal of sympathy for Ernst, who clearly drew the short straw in the newsroom that day, but I also wish she had pointed out in print that “Jim Crow” was a remarkably tasteless name for a pet on a former slave plantation...

  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...