Weird Western Maryland

Not so long ago, anti-vaxxers did not exist, because vaccines did not exist, and doctors and nurses were scarce in Western Maryland. Even the neighborhood healer or midwife might live across the mountain, hours away. Just about every family, therefore, had a go-to repository of home remedies.  The first line of defense would have been the time-honored remedy, the one Grandma swore by. Some of these, we now know, actually worked, for sound scientific reasons. Some others did no harm, and may have done some good, thanks to the still-mysterious powers of the placebo effect, especially when the placebo was administered by loving hands. A few, sadly, did more harm than good. And some were simply bizarre, like this Western Maryland remedy for whooping cough collected by Annie Weston Whitney and Caroline Canfield Bullock in their classic 1925 volume Folk-lore from Maryland. Today, this highly contagious respiratory ailment of childhood, so named because of the whooping sound made by patie...

In his 1943 book Coal Dust on the Fiddle, Pennsylvania folklorist George Korson passes on " a curious tale about a Rip Van Winkle-like bat" reported "some years ago" by a mine engineer exploring "an abandoned old working in the Georges Creek region of Maryland." Here, verbatim, is the engineer's story, as quoted by Korson. Photo by Ann Froschauer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service "The mines in which I was making surveys were abandoned for over fifty years. The roof had fallen; rooms had been clogged shut; and only by the most circuitous routes, often entailing a creeping on one’s hands and knees for over a half mile, could we get to the unsurveyed part. Arrow marks of chalk were necessary to find one’s way out, and a full supply of oil, sufficient to last a day or two, was taken along. Back in the recesses of this cavern we wandered and we found colonies of bats. At first we did not know what they were. Welsh miners with the party enlightened us. I...