Washington County By Location
Antietam National Battlefield. Comparable in reported Civil War-era hauntings only to Gettysburg (44 miles to the northeast) and Harpers Ferry (16 miles to the south) is Antietam (https://www.nps.gov/anti/index.htm), site of the bloodiest day in the history of U.S. warfare. Here the first Confederate invasion of the North was repelled on 17 September 1862 at a total cost to both sides of 23,000 men killed, wounded or missing--the equivalent of 80 percent of the 2020 population of Garrett County. Claimed paranormal hot spots include Bloody Lane, Burnside Bridge and Pry House.
Antietam National Battlefield. Of all the posthumous adventures claimed for George Washington, among the least likely is his ghostly visitation to the dozing commander of Union forces in September 1862. "General McClellan, do you sleep at your post?" the famously succinct first president supposedly said. "Rouse you, or ere it can be prevented, the foe will be in Washington. Note what you see. Your time is short." George B. McClellan woke to find the Confederate army's invasion plans penciled onto the maps that covered his desk, which enabled him to turn back Robert E. Lee at Antietam--or so the story goes. This would be one of history's most fateful instances of automatic writing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing), if one could forget that Lee's famous Lost Orders actually were found by Union troops in Frederick County, thus giving McClellan a strategic advantage to add to his numerical advantage--which, in any case, he failed to capitalize on, instead allowing Lee's army to retreat across the Potomac, a blunder that enraged President Lincoln and cost McClellan his post. So much for the angelic aid of President Washington! See Overman, Laurel. "14 Predictions Made in Dreams." The Book of Predictions. David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace and Irving Wallace, eds. New York: Morrow, 1980. Pages 421-426. Accessed on loan via Ort Library.
Antietam National Battlefield. Making good on a 2016 campaign pledge, President Trump donated his White House salary each quarter to a different set of federal programs. One of his 2017 donations was earmarked to “restore the historic Newcomer House on the Antietam battlefield, and … underwrite the replacement of 5,000 linear feet of deteriorated rail fencing along the Hagerstown Turnpike where some of the most intense fighting of the battle occurred.” This genuine altruism led to an untrue viral claim that Trump had donated his entire salary to "rebuilding military cemeteries." See U.S. Department of the Interior. “President Trump’s Salary and Matching Funds to Restore Antietam National Battlefield.” 5 July 2017. https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/president-trumps-salary-and-matching-funds-restore-antietam-national-battlefield. See also MacGuill, Dan. “Did President Donald Trump Donate His Entire $400,000 Salary to Rebuild Military Cemeteries?” Snopes.com. 3 August 2018. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-salary-military-cemeteries/.
Charlton. A "cyclic alternation of limestone and dolomite" revealed by a nearby railroad cut, 35 cycles in all, was seized upon by anomalist William R. Corliss as a challenge to geology, as it demonstrated "significant cyclic changes in environmental conditions." The pioneer close-up examiner of these remarkable layers, Dev. D. Sarin, was from the University of Mandalay in Burma, more than 8,000 miles away. From Sarin's Kennedy-era description, the cut must be near where the CSX railroad crosses St. Paul's road, between old Route 40 and the Potomac. See Corliss, William R. Anomalies in Geology: Physical, Chemical, Biological. Glen Arm, Maryland: The Sourcebook Project, 1989. Pages 147-149. See also Sarin, Dev. D. "Cyclic Sedimentation of Primary Dolomite and Limestone." Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 32:3 (September 1962): 451-471. Article accessed via Ort Library.
Clear Spring. Stafford Hall, a slaveholders' mansion built circa 1835, has a longstanding legend of a secret, cursed room; even searching for it, people say, could prove fatal. The origin of this claim is unknown, but a 36-room house might contain any number of surprises, especially during slavery, and a stairless 3-foot vertical drop between rooms on the second floor might have discouraged anyone from opening that door for many years. See Duncan, Andy. "Seek Not the Secret Room of Stafford Hall." Weird Western Maryland. 9 Nov. 2021. https://weirdwesternmd.blogspot.com/2021/11/seek-not-secret-room-of-stafford-hall.html
Clear Spring. The V.L. Ebersoles of Stafford Hall had a pet crow that supposedly could say "Hell," "Hello" and "How are you," but the bird had no comment, alas, for the reporter who dutifully sought an interview in 1975. See Duncan, Andy. "Talking Crow Had No Comment for Press." Weird Western Maryland. 9 Nov. 2021. https://weirdwesternmd.blogspot.com/2021/11/talking-crow-had-no-comment-for-press.html
Downville. Dorothy Howard's students received a firsthand account, from the child's mother, of a friendly local witch accidentally hexing a baby, then apologizing and setting things right:
There was this woman around here--everybody knew about her--and she came to my house one time and she looked at my baby and talked to her and then she went back home. From that day on my baby had crying spasms from morning till night. She just wouldn't stop.
So about a week later, that woman came back to see my baby and she said she had to look it right in the eye because she had done something wrong and had to correct it. Then she gave the baby a penny and mumbled something to her. She told me to buy the baby a piece of candy with the penny and let her eat it. Then she went on home.
Well, I did like she said: I went down to the store and got the candy and the baby ate it and from that time on my baby hardly ever cried.
See Carey, George G. Maryland Folk Legends and Folk Songs. Cambridge, Maryland: Tidewater Publishers, 1971. Page 42. Accessed on loan via Ort Library.
Fort Ritchie. In the hours after midnight on 30 July 1976, multiple UFOs were reported by soldiers here and, 3 miles away, the "underground Pentagon" at Raven Rock Mountain in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. The one over the ammo dump was "about the size of a 2 1/2 ton truck." A National Military Command Center memo (https://www.nicap.org/760730ftritchiedocs.htm) explained these as "temperature inversions." See Duncan, Andy. "Truck-Sized UFOs Spook Backup War Room." 1 Nov. 2021. https://weirdwesternmd.blogspot.com/2021/11/truck-sized-ufos-spook-backup-war-room.html
Hagerstown. An old tale with British ancestry, but set in Hagerstown, involves the Devil, a church and a black dog:
One Sunday--it was really Monday, for it was early in the morning--just before sunrise, there was a great shouting and a hubbub and crying in the streets of the town. ... Everyone was babbling and jawing to beat bobtail, about how the Devil had got locked up in the brick church and was howling and yelping like the day of doom.
The sexton came on the run and slowly opened the big door with his big key.
Soon as the doors were open, there shot out a yelping, barking, big black dog, looking even bigger and blacker because it was still dark in the sky and people were mighty scared. That black critter flew out of the doors to beat creations and was gone like the wind. ...
The animal had come to the house of God during the day and fallen asleep under a pew and couldn't get out because the sexton had locked the doors tight.
But many in the crowd reported they had seen exactly what they expected to see, the Devil himself, complete with black wings and cloven hooves--and moreover, they swore he had leaped, or flown, over the heads of twenty people in his frenzy to escape the good Christian citizens of Hagerstown.
So each and every one flung language around about the Devil and witches high and wide like hail on a windy day. Soon near every mother's child was certain sure it was the Devil himself they had seen, when really it was only a big black dog.
In this telling, the tale takes a skeptical and secular turn, its moral being how easily people can fool themselves. One can imagine an alternate telling, however. Is this a story about the apparent Devil turning out to be just a black dog--or a story about an apparent black dog turning out to be the Devil incarnate? In any case, we'd like to know which Hagerstown house of worship once was known as "the brick church." See Jagendorf, M. Upstate Downstate: Folk Stories of the Middle Atlantic States. Illustrated by Howard Simon. New York: Vanguard, 1949. Pages 255-256. Accessed via Ort Library.
Hagerstown. The first bookmobile in the United States, indeed the world, is credited to the first Washington County public librarian, Mary Lemist Titcomb (1957-1931), whose great passion was getting books to the people where they were, rather than waiting for poor and working folks to come to the library. She already had established branch libraries by depositing boxes of books at general stores and post offices, and in April 1905, the county's first horse-drawn "book wagon" set off, with Joshua Thomas at the reins. That first wagon, sadly, was hit by a train in 1910; whether Mr. Thomas and the horses survived is unclear, but the wagon certainly didn't, and in 1912 it was replaced by a motorized wagon, i.e., an automobile. Titcomb's 1909 paper for the American Library Association spread the idea nationally, but not until 1941 did the famed Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore start its own book wagon--and in a retro move even then, it was horse-drawn, perhaps a nod to Charm City's Arabber tradition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabber). See Colbert, Judy. It Happened in Maryland: Remarkable Events That Shaped History. Guilford, Connecticut: Globe Pequot Press, 2012. Pages 47-51.
Hagerstown. In June 1947, The Daily Mail speculated that Lewis Heine's grocery store at 147 East Avenue might be jinxed. Mishaps included a front window blown out by a squall, daughter Beverly catching "pink-eye," and a series of staff accidents: a broken arm, a fall from a truck, a door closed on a thumb, and three separate incidents of people cutting themselves while slicing. By the time a visiting cousin's merry-go-round accident at a city park was likewise attributed to "all the wrath of the spirits," the newspaper clearly was stretching things. Today the address is a county-owned apartment house. See Duncan, Andy. "Grocery's Ill Luck Led Newspaper To Cry Jinx." Weird Western Maryland. 9 Nov. 2021. https://weirdwesternmd.blogspot.com/2021/11/grocerys-ill-luck-led-newspaper-to-cry.html
Hagerstown. In August 1952, the city's Civil Defense director, Edgar King, was alerted by the Baltimore office to watch for UFOs, as a group of them had been spotted twenty miles northeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and were headed for Hagerstown. King in turn alerted his spotters, but he reported to Baltimore a few hours later that the UFOs never showed. Whether he was relieved or disappointed is not recorded. See Gross, Loren E. The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFO's: A History: January 1, 1947-December 31, 1959. Page 69, citing the Era of Bradford, Pennsylvania, August 14, 1952.
Hagerstown. Author Amelia Cotter's "Uncle Bernie" Masino, a font of weird stories, reports that in fall 1996, as he drove westbound on I-70 past the I-81 interchange, he glanced down at the north-south railroad track below and was flabbergasted to see sitting on a grassy knoll "a man of child-like proportions" with an outsize head and nose, wearing "long-toed slippers, tights, a long shirt with a waist belt or rope," and a dark blue "Peter Pan" hat. Masimo registered all this because no traffic was behind, so he slowed to get a good look. "Our eyes made contact and he, the 'gnome,' was gone in a flash, completely vanished." See Cotter, Amelia. Maryland Ghosts: Paranormal Encounters in the Free State. Black Oak Media, 2012. Haunted Road Media, 2015. Kindle edition. Pages 129-130.
Leitersburg. Jacob Emrich Bell did daily weather observations for 28 years, 1852-1880—a record for nineteenth-century Washington County. Note that the Civil War did not deter him. See Abbe, Cleveland, O.L. Fassig and F.J. Walz. Report on the Meteorology of Maryland. Maryland Weather Service Special Publication Vol. I, Part III. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, July 1899, accessed in Ort Library’s Special Collections. Page 390. Bell was buried in the St. Paul’s Lutheran Cemetery; see Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/72947637/jacob-emrich-bell.
Sharpsburg. In September 1897, a 7 1/2-foot human skeleton was unearthed at the confluence of Antietam Creek and the Potomac River and claimed by John Widgeon, curator of the Maryland Academy of Sciences--which reportedly had two more giant skeletons from the same dig. Whether the skeletons would be considered remarkable today is doubtful, but Widgeon himself certainly should be better known as a pioneering Black scientist in a nearly all-white field; the academy, ancestor of today's Maryland Science Center on Baltimore's Inner Harbor, initially hired him as a janitor. See Duncan, Andy. "7-Foot Skeletons Claimed for Science." Weird Western Maryland. 1 Nov. 2021. https://weirdwesternmd.blogspot.com/2021/11/7-foot-skeletons-claimed-for-science.html
Williamsport. Noted without comment, until we learn more: "A Williamsport family turned their run of bad luck by refusing to lend a suspected witch an object she requested on three separate occasions." See Carey, George G. Maryland Folk Legends and Folk Songs. Cambridge, Maryland: Tidewater Publishers, 1971. Page 42. Accessed on loan via Ort Library.
Williamsport. For generations, Williamsport youngsters were scared by stories of the Veiled Lady, an enigmatic figure in mourning dress who roamed the streets at Halloween. Was this a living eccentric, or a ghost? If a ghost, who was she in life, and what was her agenda in death? One chronicler says the legend "eventually died out," but the Veiled Lady could be revived anytime, maybe by cosplayers or drag queens. See Okonowicz, Ed. The Big Book of Maryland Ghost Stories. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 2010. Pages 285-286.