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...

Looking toward Frostburg from the Brush Tunnel near Corriganville. A popular spot with 21 st -century ghost hunters is the Brush Tunnel, on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad near Corriganville, just west of the Great Allegheny Passage parking lot on Cash Valley Road. Built in 1912 to accommodate parallel tracks as part of the Western Maryland’s Cumberland-to-Pittsburgh extension, the Brush Tunnel likely had its share of the miseries and fatalities common to all old-time tunnel projects. But oral tradition sometimes associates the Brush Tunnel haunting with a pedestrian disaster after construction was over, when tourists stepped out of the path of one train only to be hit by another train going in the opposite direction. While she neither names the tunnel nor mentions a haunting, Betty Van Newkirk briefly summarizes the fatality in a 1995 article:   When trains began to travel through the tunnels, around the huge horseshoe curve below Frostburg, and down the long grade to...

Cumberland's Western Maryland Railway station, built in 1913 . You never know what you'll unearth in the Central Intelligence Agency's Electronic Reading Room. Click here , for example, to reach a PDF of a 30 November 1948 memo from the CIA general counsel's office authorizing payment for a "negotiated settlement of tort claim" filed by the Western Maryland Railway. The memo references an 8 November 1948 conversation between the counsel and a "Mr. Aaron" and says the payment was approved by the "EXEC for A&M," probably meaning -- if other memos in the Reading Room are any guide -- the Executive for Administration & Management. Totally not the spies, in other words, but the spies' accountants and admins. Their Moneypennys. Apparently on a need-to-know basis is the name of the memo's author (redacted), whether "Mr. Aaron" is a railway official or a CIA colleague, what dollar amount was agreed upon and, most intrigui...