the commanders of nearby Fort Meade placed the town off limits to soldiers. There seemed to be no end to the downward spiral—but the Patapsco intervened again.
In the early summer of 1972, Hurricane Agnes swept through the area. Ellicott City was ravaged—but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The town fathers, disgusted with what the town had degenerated into, decided they would use the federal disaster funds to rebuild Ellicott City into a town they could be proud of. The sleazy bars, the pool halls, and the slumlords were told to clean up their acts or do without any money to rebuild. They got the message.
Today, Ellicott City is a pleasant and vibrant town whose residents are justly proud of what they have accomplished. They are dedicated to the preservation of its historic character and to making it an inviting place to visit, which it most certainly is. Antique shops and other small businesses abound. It also has several good restaurants and many more coffee houses and pubs. The latter includes the Ellicott Mills Brewing Company, which has good beer and food, and which I enjoyed very much during one of our visits to the town. It is also haunted, of course, with the ghost of a young accountant who was let go at the outset of the Great Depression and ultimately hanged himself in desperation. He can still be seen from time to time on the second floor of what was then the Talbot Lumber Company, which had employed him. They say he is dressed for the office, in the stiff collar and cuffs that characterized men’s dress in 1929.
Being a Marylander, I had known of Ellicott City, and my wife and I had visited it several times to walk around, enjoy a good meal, and sometimes hike out on the trail that follows the old trolley line toward Baltimore. (The Trolley Stop Restaurant, located at the trail head, serves good meals and has a good nice selection of beer. It is also haunted—ghosts inhabit the second floor and are responsible for inexplicable footsteps and slamming of doors heard by the restaurant staff late at night. Ghosthunters have investigated the second floor and confirmed the ghostly presence.) It was not, however, until I took the ghost tours sponsored by Howard County Tourism that I came to understand the sheer volume of ghosts in Ellicott City, and the role that the local granite rock possibly plays. There are so many ghosts that they have had to offer the tour in two parts: Part One is on Friday night and Part Two on Saturday night.
But there is also another reason to take the ghost tours that many towns offer: the people you meet. Some are casual tourists, some are serious ghosthunters, and some are there for other reasons, like the young girl we met on one of the Ellicott City tours we took. After the tour was over, my son and I lingered to talk to Terry Trembeth, our tour guide. The rest of the group of about twenty had dispersed, but we noticed that a pretty little blonde girl of about ten years and her mother had also stayed behind. The girl seemed shy, but was also strangely intense. It was she who wanted to talk to the tour guide. As it turned out, she was seeking professional advice.
“Why do some spirits not move on?” she asked. “Why do they stay around?”
“Well,” Terry explained, “there are lots of reasons. Some just have unfinished business. Others can be so attached to a place or an object that they just don’t want to leave.”
“Oh,” said the little girl, who had clearly been hoping for more.
“You see,” her mother said, noting our interest and turning in our direction, “We have a ghost in our basement. Only she can see it—and we took this tour hoping we might learn more about what we’re dealing with.”
CHAPTER 7
St. Mary’s College
ILCHESTER
A flight of sixty-six crumbling steps leads up the hill to the overgrown ruins of St. Mary’s College, a former Roman Catholic seminary.
Ilchester is a small station on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and is situated on the right bank of the Patapsco River … Ellicott had erected a fine stone house four stories high, intending it as a small hotel for travelers. But few people stopped at Ilchester and his hopes were soon dampened … Ellicott abandoned it … He offered to sell the hotel and farm, but for many years no one could be found to buy it and the entire property was neglected and suffered considerable damage. The hotel remained closed and uninhabited; the stable and farmhouses were rapidly decaying; and the orchard and gardens were falling prey to brushwood and briars. This was the state of things when the place was purchased by the [Redemptorists].
—From a 1905 newspaper article
OVER THE YEARS, many people had high hopes for the spot on the bluffs overlooking the Patapsco River that became known as Ilchester and were drawn to it first for its suitability as a holiday spot and then as a spiritual retreat. It probably would have been inconceivable to any of them that the place would eventually be regarded as one of the most frightening and haunted spots in Howard County or that its most prominent structure would end up becoming known as Hell House.
In 1886, George Ellicott managed to sell the decaying handful of buildings that constituted the village of Ilchester to the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer—a Roman Catholic sect founded to minister to the poor, disenfranchised, and alienated that is more commonly known as the Redemptorists—and the things that had doomed it as a holiday site became assets.
“The qualities that made it unfit for trade made it fit for the purposes [they] had in mind—retirement, study, and prayer,” wrote Paul T. Stroh, a former seminarian at the school, in his book Ilchester Memories.
For a century, the place served the Redemptorist order as a seminary, and at its peak hundreds of people dwelled in the hilltop community. It must have seemed to many of them like a timeless place, with immense stone buildings that would last until the end of time, grottoes devoted to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and paths passing through wooded clearings and running along cliffs overlooking the river below.
Over the years, the Redemptorist fathers, students, and laity expanded the school into a sprawling complex of dormitories, classrooms, and refectories that included additions to Ellicott’s original inn and tavern, among them a small chapel; a huge, five-story brick building that ultimately had a large chapel attached to it; and numerous other structures like garages, greenhouses, and shrines. They turned the rest of their 110-acre campus into a garden, lining pathways with stone from the hill and cultivating roses in its dark earth.
Despite its isolated location atop the hill, the Redemptorist priests and seminarians were not monastic, and ministered to Catholics in the local area, many of whom were too poor to travel to Baltimore every week for services. They were eventually made their own congregation, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the aspect of the Virgin Mary venerated by the group (which continues to function in the area, albeit not under the Redemptorists, and is headquartered in a new complex about a mile south on Ilchester Road).
In the second half of the twentieth century, St. Mary’s College struggled to remain viable, and years before it finally had to shut its doors, people had already begun to remark how forlorn and overgrown the place was starting to look. There were only ten seminarians in its last graduating class, and the congregation shut down the school in 1972. And that is when its real troubles began.
Sometime after the Redemptorists left, the state of Maryland acquired approximately seventy-seven acres of the site and added it to adjacent Patapsco Valley State Park, while a developer named Michael Nibaldi acquired the college itself and the remaining thirty-three acres of land. Nibaldi had, in conjunction with a local architect, hoped to convert the college into apartments but was ultimately foiled by the opposition of county boards and area residents.
During this period, the place
