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...

  In June 1947, under the Page One headline "When It Rains It Pours Here," The Daily Mail of Hagerstown declared a local grocery was jinxed: Speaking of a jinx! All the wrath of the spirits has been cast in one little store, located at 147 East avenue, according to recent signs. Mrs. Lewis Heine, wife of the owner of the grocery store, fell and broke an arm two weeks ago, and to top it off, cut off the end of her thumb in a slicing machine. Last week, an employe, Charles Bailey, fell out the back of the store truck, suffering lacerations about the arm and face. That same week, the storm broke out the plate glass window on the store front. That same day another employe, John Miller, shut the door on his thumb and mashed it. That such a commonplace set of mishaps neither merits front-page news coverage nor warrants supernatural explanation – “all the wrath of the spirits,” indeed! – is indicated by some of the other headlines on the same front page: Floods Inundate Ohio...

In 1976, the Hagerstown Daily Mail profiled a ruined historic house, originally an 18 th century stone tavern, in the Washington County community of Huyett (pronounced "Hewitt"), a.k.a. Huyetts Crossroads. The most interesting thing about the property – “disclosed with much secrecy,” the reporter coyly noted – was mentioned only in the last sentence of the article: The amputated hand of one of the past residents lies buried in the family graveyard. That’s all I know; the rest is speculation. I don’t even know whether the house still exists, on the north side of Alternate U.S. 40 just west of Maryland Route 63. Its family graveyard is listed, however, on the Find a Grave website, which documents 16 burials there.   Of the adults buried in the cemetery, only one, Jacob H. Myers (1828-1909), would have been of fighting age during the Civil War. If Jacob lost a hand on the battlefield, preserving it for home burial would have been odd but not unheard-of, as any Civil War...