Washington County In General
A haunted mill and spring house. A Hagerstown informant told folklorists this story long ago:
Toward midnight the long disused water wheel of a mill, belonging to a country place in Washington Country [sic]. Md. begins to turn, slowly at first, and gradually it moves faster until it is going at a terrific rate. Then a White Lady appears, standing on a little platform above the wheel. Suddenly she utters a wail and casts herself upon the wheel. Then the wheel stops whirling and everything is quiet again. …
On the grounds of the same estate stands a spring house. It is no longer used and has but few visitors. A terrible tragedy is re-enacted there at night by ghostly actors long since dead.
There had been a strain of insanity in the family and it appeared in one of the daughters. During the day she would be very quiet and stay by herself, but at night, accompanied by a huge hound, she would walk around singing little snatches of song. One of her favorite spots was the spring house, and she would wander there each night.
A weary tramp, seeking refuge there one night, was found by the lady, and killed by her in a fit of insane rage.
She afterward hung herself from the limb of a tree near the house, and the present owner had to cut off that limb in order to keep any servants.
See Whitney, Annie Weston, and Caroline Canfield Bullock. “Folk-Lore from Maryland.” Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society Volume 18 (1925): 188-189.
A haunted staircase. A Hagerstown informant (perhaps the same one as above) told folklorists this story long ago:
If you were to pass by a certain old house in Washington Co., Md., exactly at midnight, you would hear a terrible scream; and if you could look into the house at the spot whence the cry came you would see a very narrow, crooked staircase at the bottom of which, according to some, lies the body of a man. But when the voice dies away the vision vanishes.
The cause of this outcry is as follows:
Many years ago the house was occupied by an old man and his daughter. One night a young man came to the house to transact a matter of business with the old man. The young man was unknown to the father, but he was the lover of the daughter.
As there was a bad storm approaching, the visitor was compelled to spend the night. As the evening wore on, however, the older man became very angry as the result of a serious quarrel with his guest. When it was time to retire, the father, candle in hand, mounted the stairs ahead of the young man. Almost at the top the guest fell, whether form [sic] a misstep or a push from above, no one could say, and dropped the entire length of the steps.
The girl, standing below, rushed forward in time to see her lover stretched on the floor with a broken neck. It is her shriek and his fall that are heard each night by the passers-by.
See Whitney, Annie Weston, and Caroline Canfield Bullock. “Folk-Lore from Maryland.” Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society Volume 18 (1925): 189.
Lightning leaves an image on a sheep. During a July 1851 thunderstorm, lightning struck an oak tree on a farm owned by "Captain Ressley" (otherwise unidentified), killing both a robin sitting on a limb and a sheep sheltering beneath. The dead bird was found atop the dead sheep; once the bird was removed and the sheep skinned, "we found on the inside of the skin of the sheep and also on the flesh of the body of it, a perfect picture of the robin, even to the fine fringes of the feathers of its wings"--or so witness Thomas Logan claimed in Scientific American 18 years later (21: 214). That lightning can, in rare instances, create natural photographs on exposed surfaces is a longstanding folk belief, but even the peerless anomalist William R. Corliss considered Logan's claim "rather unlikely." See Corliss, William R. Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena. Illus. John C. Holden. Glen Arm, Md.: Sourcebook Project, 1977. New York: Doubleday, 1983. New York: Arlington House, 1986. See Pages 52-53.