href="#litres_trial_promo">CHAPTER 30 Schifferstadt (Frederick)
This oldest home in the city is believed to be haunted by its builder, German immigrant Joseph Bruner, as well as the ghosts of some of his descendents and many others who have lived, visited, or taken refuge there.
Information about more than fifty haunted sites not covered elsewhere in this book.
Web sites, radio shows and podcasts, and listings for several Maryland ghost tours.
Welcome to America’s Haunted Road Trip
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?
If you are like 52 percent of Americans (according to a recent Harris Poll), you do believe that ghosts walk among us. Perhaps you have heard your name called in a dark and empty house. It could be that you have awoken to the sound of footsteps outside your bedroom door, only to find no one there. It is possible that you saw your grandmother sitting in her favorite rocker chair, the same grandmother who had passed away several years before. Maybe you took a photo of a crumbling, deserted farmhouse and discovered strange mists and orbs in the photo, anomalies that were not visible to your naked eye.
If you have experienced similar paranormal events, then you know that ghosts exist. Even if you have not yet experienced these things, you are curious about the paranormal world, the spirit realm. If you weren’t, you would not now be reading this preface to the latest book in the America’s Haunted Road Trip series from Clerisy Press.
Over the last several years, I have investigated haunted locations across the country, and with each new site, I found myself becoming more fascinated with ghosts. What are they? How do they manifest themselves? Why are they here? These are just a few of the questions I have been asking. No doubt, you have been asking the same questions.
The books in the America’s Haunted Road Trip series can help you find the answers to your questions about ghosts. We’ve gathered together some of America’s top ghost writers (no pun intended) and researchers and asked them to write about their states’ favorite haunts. Each location that they write about is open to the public so that you can visit them for yourself and try out your ghosthunting skills. In addition to telling you about their often hair-raising adventures, the writers have included maps and travel directions so that you can take your own haunted road trip.
Mike Varhola’s new book Ghosthunting Maryland proves that the “Old Line State” contains a lot of old ghosts. The book is a spine-tingling trip through Maryland’s small towns, cities, and historic sites, from the shores of Chesapeake Bay to the Allegheny Mountains. Ride shotgun with Mike as he seeks out Civil War ghosts at the Antietam and Monocacy battlefields. Travel with him to Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore where a ghost—perhaps that of the macabre writer himself—taps visitors on the shoulder. Come aboard as he stalks the spirits of long-dead seamen on the eighteenth-century warship USS Constellation. And who belongs to the disembodied voice that whispers “I’m sitting right here” in Gabriel’s Inn? Hang on tight; Ghosthunting Maryland is a scary ride.
But once you’ve finished reading this book, don’t unbuckle your seatbelt. There are still forty-nine states left for your haunted road trip! See you on the road!
John Kachuba
Editor, America’s Haunted Road Trip
Introduction
“THERE ARE MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN and earth,” Shakespeare wrote in his play Hamlet, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” One of my guiding principles has long been that incisive phrase spoken by Hamlet to his friend Horatio (while holding a skull, no less). In short, there are countless things in this world that cannot be adequately explained by any single conventional system of beliefs. This book, and the America’s Haunted Road Trip series of travel guides in general, are devoted to exploring sites where inexplicable things of a haunted nature are believed to occur, and to helping people who are so inclined to visit them.
Ghosthunting Maryland is, in fact, a travel guide and the primary criterion for inclusion in it is whether or not a place is publicly accessible. This book is a collaboration between me and my father, Michael H. Varhola, who wrote five of the chapters—those about Ellicott City, Fells Point, Gabriel’s Inn, Historic Frederick, and the Schifferstadt—and contributed to a number of other sections in it.
While visiting the sites described in this book we conducted varying degrees of paranormal investigation, sometimes in conjunction with individual ghosthunters or groups of them and sometimes on our own. At no point, however, did we personally endeavor to perform a “full investigation” conforming to the standards of any particular organization. After all, the point of this book is to tell people about promising sites to visit, give them the information they need to do so, and then let them enjoy the sites as they see fit.
GHOSTHUNTING IN MARYLAND
Maryland is home to an absolutely amazing number of reputedly haunted places and, suffice it to say, is fertile ground for ghosthunters and contains no shortage of potential venues for investigation. To say that this book could have a hundred chapters devoted to publicly accessible haunted sites would be a marked understatement, and to say that it could have a thousand if private venues were also included would not be inaccurate. Distilling all of the possible choices into a mere thirty chapters was not the smallest challenge associated with this project. That was, of course, one of the incentives for including an appendix of Additional Haunted Sites for anyone who is interested.
Maryland is divided into six regions for purposes of this book: Baltimore, Central, D.C. Metro, Eastern Shore, Southern, and Western. Geographically, Maryland is not a large state. It is, however, among the oldest in the country, and has a rich, varied, and turbulent history that has contributed to an exceptionally high number of haunted sites. It also contains a variety of communities and landscapes, from some of the busiest metropolitan areas in the country to sparsely populated rural locales, and from mountainous terrain in the west to extensive areas of shoreline in the east and south.
Because it is relatively compact, Maryland is in many ways an ideal state for a haunted road trip—especially in an era of historically high gasoline prices—and many haunted sites within the same area can easily be reached on a single weekend-long trip by people visiting from other areas. For those living almost anywhere in Maryland itself, a great many sites, even more than one at a time, can be visited on day trips.
As with my previous book, Ghosthunting Virginia, my earliest research revealed a striking number of sites reputed by various sources to be haunted. With space in this volume for only a limited number of these, my co-author and I have carefully attempted to identify a representative selection that both emphasized variety and a struck a balance between “must include” sites—such as the graveyard where Edgar Allan Poe is buried—as well as lesser-known ones that do not appear in any other books.
