as he filled her in on what made her new neighborhood interesting and unique. After about half an hour, the conversation died. Missy picked out a shirt, paid, got her change, and left, feeling really good as she exited the building and stepped back into the sunlight. Directly across the street she could see the old immigration building, which she now knew was where the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street had been filmed.
“Wow!” she thought to herself. “My neighborhood is so cool.”
In the two years after that, Missy encountered so many ghosts in her little house on Bethel Street that she decided to ask other people if they had experienced similar things.
“Do you have a ghost? Do you have a ghost?” she went around asking. “Because I have a ghost,” she explained. Well, everybody had ghosts. That’s when she got together with her friend, Amy, and they decided to do the research that resulted in the tour. In the process, she went back to the Cat’s Eye Pub, both because they had heard about the “junkie” ghosts there and because she had a contact there, the bartender who seemed to know everything and everybody in Fells Point. This time, however, there was a woman behind the bar. Missy asked her about the tall, thin bartender she had met there two years earlier, the one who looked like Abe Lincoln.
“You mean him?” the woman replied, pointing at a picture on the wall.
Missy nodded.
“That’s Jeff,” the woman replied. “He died about eight years ago.”
“But I talked to him,” Missy protested.
“He’s dead,” she insisted. “Now what would you like to drink?”
The spookiest thing, Missy explained later, was not that she had actually talked to a ghost, but that he had given her change. Who would think? A ghost that not only converses but also gives change!
Leanna recounted many such stories as she led our group from one haunted site to another. She threw herself into her role, and breathed life, so to speak, into the local ghosts. At Duda’s Tavern she told us about “Doc,” the polka-loving tenant, who, although long dead, still expects the jukebox to carry his favorite songs—and has caused it to play them even if they are not loaded into it! And at the Wharf Rat, we heard the sad story of John Rakowsky, its proud immigrant owner, who had been senselessly murdered on July 20, 1907, by an enraged patron. Even today, Rakowsky returns to his beloved pub to wipe the tables and watch over the establishment he loved so much in life.
She also took us to the site of William Fells’ grave. William had a grandson, also named William, whose life had been cut short in its prime, at the age of twenty-seven. Locals report that late at night the younger William, well-dressed and handsome, can still be seen walking along Shakespeare Street apparently coming from Market Street, where his favorite pub was located. As he approaches the grave site, he turns, walks through the cast iron fence, approaches the grave marker, and suddenly disappears.
Leanna also advised us on what may be an effective tactic for dealing with troublesome ghosts. At Leadbetter’s Tavern, there once lived a man who was quite abusive to his wife and teenage son—so abusive, in fact, that his son was ultimately driven to shoot him. His angry and confused spirit still haunts the apartment above Leadbetter’s, terrorizing the bartenders and their girlfriends who have lived there.
Interestingly, it was a witch who provided the solution to the situation. She explained to them that there is nothing that ghosts like better than presents, and that the present they like the most is, of all things, Brach’s peppermint candy, the red-and-white-striped confection often found in bowls at the check-out counters of family restaurants. Why this particular type of candy would be so desired by ghosts is unclear, but it worked. The bartenders set out several pieces in a small bowl where the ghost was sure to find it. After a few days, they found a piece that was pink, as if somebody had licked it. That somebody had to have been the ghost—because the candy was still in its cellophane wrapper!
The tour ended in the square in front of Bertha’s Restaurant & Bar. Beneath this plaza, we learned, there was once a mass grave, dug for the victims of the yellow fever outbreak that had devastated Baltimore some two hundred years earlier. While the remains of the victims have been mostly removed, Leanna said the square is still a source of psychic activity.
Bertha’s, in any event, is one of the most psychically active places in Fells Point. It is actually composed of three buildings, each with its own unique history. Leanna pointed out the spot of the greatest spiritual activity, in the second building going back from Market Street. On the landing going up to the second floor, patrons sometimes encounter the lady in the gray cloak. She is mostly a skeleton with two eyeballs but, according to legend, is clad in a lovely gray cloak. She is reputed to follow patrons up the stairs and then suddenly disappear.
The ladies’ restroom on that floor is also filled with psychic energy, possibly emanating from the storeroom across the hall. There is so much ghostly activity associated with that storeroom, Leanna said, that employees are required to sign an agreement as a condition of employment that they will not enter it alone. Inevitably, of course, one did, Leanna said, and was promptly terrified by a ghost—and was then fired for having violated the prohibition against going into the problem area by himself.
The tour being over, we decided to have a beer in Bertha’s bar. Leanna was already there, seated at the bar and enjoying a plate of Bertha’s famous mussels. She introduced us to her husband, who plays the base fiddle there with a local group—and he was pretty darn good. My purpose, though, for going to Bertha’s was not music, or mussels, or even beer. What I wanted was to induce my wife into visiting the ladies’ room on the second floor. It took some convincing, ostensibly because there was one much closer on the first floor, but she finally did. She observed that there was also an upstairs restaurant, and it was full of patrons, but no lady in a gray cloak. Evidently, there was just too much activity for the spirit to make an appearance.
I hope to return to Fells Point this winter and visit Bertha’s again. Maybe on some gray winter evening, there will be fewer patrons. Of course, I want to try the mussels—but also, I hope, if conditions are right, the lady in the gray cloak will make her appearance as my wife makes her way up the back stairway en route to the ladies’ room on the second floor.
CHAPTER 3
Old Baltimore Shot Tower
BALTIMORE/JONESTOWN NEIGHBORHOOD
For many years, the Old Baltimore Shot Tower was the tallest structure in the United States.
On this site purchased in 1773 … The first permanent meeting house, a dwelling for the pastor and a school house were erected and a cemetery established for the First Baptist Church of Baltimore …
—Inscription on a plaque affixed to the Old Baltimore Shot Tower
IT IS NOT SURPRISING that many people who see the Old Baltimore Shot Tower from a distance and know nothing about it assume it is some sort of a monument, or perhaps even a lookout tower built as part of Baltimore’s early harbor defenses. It is, in actuality, the last remaining element of an innovative nineteenth-century factory that used the natural energy of gravity to fashion its products—ammunition.
Whether because of its unique architecture, events that happened within or around it, or whatever occupied its site prior to its construction—or all of these things—people have long reported all sorts of strange phenomena in the vicinity of the tower. The most prevalent incidents, which
