can still be elicited from people in the local area to this very day—their tormented ghosts now haunt the grounds of the ruined college, etc., etc. The weakest point in this wretched fabrication, of course, is that the site was a seminary and not a convent and would thus not likely have had any nuns present to be slaughtered, much less seven.
As is quite often the case, of course, it is possible to have a genuinely haunted site for which the actual origins of its haunting are unknown, and this would seem to be the case with St. Mary’s College. Indeed, numerous ghosthunting groups have claimed to have experienced paranormal phenomena at the site over the years. According to material posted on one such organization’s Web site, for example, “People from the area that have been able to go there have seen and heard many spirits while visiting.”
An extended body of urban legend has included tales of Satanic altars and drug labs hidden within the sprawling main building and the tunnels and chambers beneath the complex. If such things were indeed present in the decaying remains of St. Mary’s College, they were, in all likelihood, established by the very people who were going up to the place and wrecking it. Kids would, in any event, challenge each other to see how far they were willing to venture into the place, a foray onto just the second floor of the main building—where all forms of awfulness were rumored to reside—being regarded as a sign of especial bravery by the timorous and unimaginative young bumpkins.
In the early 1980s, the nonprofit Kamakoti & Tirupati Foundation began looking at the site with an eye toward converting it into an International Institute for Religious Studies, a nonsectarian spiritual center that could be used for research, discussion, and retreat. Initially the group rented the site, and between 1986 and 1988—sources vary—it was acquired on its behalf by Sateesh Kumar Singh, who purchased it for about four-hundred thousand dollars through BCS Limited Partnership, a corporation he formed with a number of other people around the country. Funding for the project never really came together, however, and while its organizers struggled to bring their dream to fruition, the property remained largely uninhabited and unmaintained.
In the meantime, the local police could not—or would not bother to—protect the site from the continuing depredations of local teenagers who, not content with merely visiting the place, routinely vandalized and stole from it. Vandals broke windows, ripped phones out of the walls, tore down fences and “No Trespassing” signs, smashed security lights, and even stole copper downspouts.
Nearby neighbors were also victimized as part of these rampages and reported incidents that included having their windows shot out. The almost depraved indifference of the local police to these violent acts was revealed in a contemporary newspaper article.
“Mischief is really the key word here,” said Howard County Police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn. “We’re not concerned that there are any serious crimes being committed.” Even when the local authorities caught a kid engaged in such vicious and destructive “mischief,” little or nothing came of it. But, as events would eventually demonstrate, considerably more concern was shown when the victims were not property owners with strange foreign names or hermetic groundskeepers, and when the perpetrators were not the scions of local families.
One person struggled to protect the place during this era, a resident caretaker named Allen Rufus Hudson, who came to be feared and resented by the local youth and vilified by them as “the Hillbilly.” Over the years he lived in the progressively decrepit site, he paid a heavy price for his efforts.
Between 1992 and 1997, the six foot, three inch, 225-pound Hudson was arrested a half dozen times at the site and charged with offenses that included assault, battery, false imprisonment, intent to injure with a deadly weapon, reckless endangerment, failure to confine a dangerous dog, and various weapons possession charges. In 1992, he was jailed for three weeks following an altercation with a couple of police officers, but the net effect in the other cases was that he was not convicted—often because the prosecutor declined to pursue the case or because mitigating circumstances, such as probable cause, were found to be present. During this time, Hudson was also the defendant in a number of civil lawsuits brought by trespassers who either he or his dogs had attacked and had settlements of up to five-thousand dollars brought against him.
When three young men menaced the forty-five-year-old caretaker with baseball bats one night in 1996 and he shot one, wounding him, Howard County police again arrested Hudson, charging him with assault, battery, and assault with attempt to murder. About seven weeks later, the assistant state’s attorney opted to not pursue the case and the charges against him were dropped.
In 1997, a year after Hudson used lethal force to defend himself, arsonists set fire to the main, five-story building and completely destroyed it. A year later on Halloween, a similar blaze claimed part of the original structure built by George Ellicott. Although the local fire authorities declared the acts deliberate, no one was ever charged in connection with them. And because the fire-damaged site had become unstable and was prone to collapse onto the caretaker’s residence, Hudson was forced to move. (In 1998, Hudson was finally convicted of something—of driving a motor vehicle with a revoked license—and sentenced to two years in prison, all but three months of which was ultimately suspended. He was the plaintiff in another case in 2002, but dropped out of public view after that.)
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