Weird Western Maryland

  Among the many colorful raconteurs Alyce T. Weinberg visited in the 1970s for her classic Spirits of Frederick was 94-year-old Effie “Miss Effie” Spurrier, whose matter-of-fact recollections of her life’s many hauntings are highlights of the book. Miss Effie viewed ghosts as commonplaces of daily life, like crossroads and churches, or rocks and trees. Consider her memories of the general store at Yellow Springs, in the Catoctin foothills about five miles northwest of Frederick: A big, fat woman ran a store near us up there. She always wore the same shirtwaist and skirt. I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead. We all said she must have hid money somewhere and came back to protect it. The dog that hung around the store saw her, too, and was so scared he’d lay down and tremble. “I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead.” This chilling observation, so offhandedly presented, is a great example of what fiction writer Jeffrey Ford calls “the banal...

  One of the most intriguing stories in Alyce Weinberg’s classic Spirits of Frederick is consigned to two sentences on the last page, Page 97: A young man told me that something pulls the covers off his bed, and caresses his wife while he is asleep beside her; and that some invisible force crowded him off a bench in Baker Park after dusk. He believes a ghost is in love with his wife. I would love to know the wife’s side of this story. I would love to know many things. The history on the Friends of Baker Park website gives no indication of the place being haunted, but the implication in Weinberg is that the ghost in the park is also the ghost in the home, and that it’s the people who are haunted, not the place. This arguably is the case with all hauntings, including ones much better documented than this jealous husband’s. Still, this cryptic claim is probably a good excuse to visit Baker Park, which is bounded on the east by North Bentz Street and on the south by Carroll Par...

C onfederate Colonel Luke Tiernan Brien, whose ghost supposedly haunts his old home in Urbana, Frederick County, also has the distinction of showing up as a fictional character in a popular alternate-history novel. How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove, published in 1997, won that year’s Sidewise Award for alternate history. One of countless fictional speculations asking, “What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War?” – a speculation that entertains mostly White men – How Few Remain is the first novel in Turtledove’s 11-volume “Southern Victory” series. The not-yet-spectral Colonel Brien appears on Pages 77-78, still a loyal aide to Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart and fighting the Union once again, this time in the Second Mexican War of 1881: Most of two decades of garrison duty had laid a heavy patina of routine over the dashing young trooper he’d once been, but, like a lot of the other veteran officers in Stuart’s force, he was starting to shine up once more. … Colonel Brien...

Historic Landon House in Urbana, Frederick County, is allegedly haunted by a bewildering variety of ghosts, depending on the source consulted. To put it another way, many popular beliefs linked with ghosts have come to be associated with Landon House, for example: Anomalous sounds. At Landon, these include a little boy’s voice; adult screams, prayers and cries of anguish; and the barks, pants, whimpers and snuffles of dogs. Anomalous sensations. At Landon, these include cold spots, taps on the shoulder, and the feeling of being watched. Physical anomalies. At Landon, these include doors that close by themselves, rocking chairs that rock by themselves, and lights that move without a visible source. Apparitions. At Landon, these include a woman with a lantern, a woman (perhaps the same one) who haunts the rooms of children, various Civil War soldiers, and an old man in the basement who sometimes is visible as only a torso and head. Several of these are referenced, apparen...

The old Snyder farm on Legeer Road in Garrett County was haunted, according to Cynthia Snyder Beitzel (1885-1968), who grew up there. Moreover, the haunt manifested in at least three different ways. First, there was a mysterious sound that came and went, a sound described -- however stereotypically -- as chains rattling. In the days when cargo was hauled by teams of horses, people who heard the sound assumed a team was coming; in later years, when cargo was hauled by motor truck, the sound was assumed to be a truck laboring up the road. But there were no horses, and no trucks, just the rattling sound. Second, horses were said to get skittish on that stretch of Legeer Road, and have to be coaxed or compelled past the Snyder place. Most interestingly, a woman in a white flowing gown would be seen walking from the spring house up the hill toward the Snyder farmhouse. If you looked away, even for a moment, or tried to approach her, she'd be gone. And if you simply watched her from the ...

Here's another supernatural "token" described in Florence Harris Abel's entertaining book The Beitzel Family. To the old-time Beitzels, remember, a token was what others might call an omen: A token was the sign or signal of someone’s death, often occurring with the manifestation of the person’s image or a symbolic occurrence. Just as a ghost is often not recognized as a ghost until it is gone, so a token frequently is not recognized as a token until after the person has died. Some think that as the spirit begins to loosen itself from the earthly body, it enters the presence of persons it has known in this life. … The older generation frequently talked of seeing tokens. Abel titles this story "The Bee in the Cupboard." One night in April 1930, in Henry J. Beitzel and Cynthia Beitzel's kitchen at Keyser's Ridge, all the family members present heard a buzzing in the cupboard, like a bee trying to free itself. Abel continues: Upon inspection, the buzz...