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    Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales from East of the Chesapeake
    Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales from East of the Chesapeake
    Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales from East of the Chesapeake
    Ebook172 pages1 hour

    Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales from East of the Chesapeake

    By Mindie Burgoyne

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Terrifying tales of the ghosts that roam the marshes, swamps, and waterways of the nine counties on Maryland’s eastern shore.
     
    They walk beside the murky waters of the Chesapeake Bay, linger among the fetid swamps and roam the manor halls. These are the tormented souls who refuse to leave the sites of their demise. From pitiless smugglers to reluctant brides, the ghostly figures of the Eastern Shore are at once terrifying and tragic. Mindie Burgoyne takes readers on a spine-tingling journey as she recounts the grisly events at the Cosden Murder Farm and the infamous legend of Patty Cannon. Tread the foggy lanes of Kent Manor Inn and linger among Revolutionary War dead to discover the otherworldly occupants of Maryland’s most haunted shore.
     
    Includes photos!
     
    “A compilation of tales of hauntings and mysteries in the Eastern Shore area . . .The response to the book was so overwhelming, Burgoyne began organizing bus tours that travel to the sites, allowing her fans to see firsthand the location of the hauntings.” —Cumberland Times-News
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 25, 2009
    ISBN9781625852854
    Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales from East of the Chesapeake
    Author

    Mindie Burgoyne

    Mindie Burgoyne is a travel writer and tour operator. She owns Chesapeake Ghost Walks, on the Eastern Shore, and Thin Places Mystical Tours focused on spiritual travel to Ireland. She is also the author of Haunted Eastern Shore and Haunted Ocean City and Berlin. Her work has been featured in many media platforms including the Baltimore Sun, CBS News and the National Geographic Television Network.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      It's a fun read, especially if you have ties to the neighborhood, so to speak. Burgoyne attempts to add credibility by using folk takes collected by students' oral interviews with old-time residents. Unfortunately, at least for this reader, not much enhanced credibility was the result. But still, although I remain a non-believer, I enjoyed reading some of Eastern Shore's folklore.
    • 3/5
      Not bad--a lot of the places near me I did not know were haunted! Never knew of the Folklore Project at SSC even though I went there.... A bit dry at times....
    • 4/5
      For those interested in Eastern Shore folklore and ghost stories, 'Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales From East Of The Chesapeake' will be a fascinating read. Author Mindie Burgoyne, of Marion Station, takes readers on a journey beginning in Cecil County, travelling south through Queen Anne’s, Talbot, Caroline, Dorcester, Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset Counties, stopping at historic churches, cemeteries, colonial mansions, bridges, and other haunted sites.Historical fact accompanies anecdotal folklore, educating while entertaining. From Elkton’s Holly Hall, the Cosden Murder Farm, and the Kent Manor Inn, to Whitemarsh “Hole-in-the-Wall” Cemetery and the lost town of Dover, to the Snow Hill Inn and Holland’s Island, we are taken on a grand tour of the Shore’s spookiest locations. Interviews from a 1970s Salisbury State University project documenting Delmarva folklore and traditions lend authenticity to the tales, with historic photographs to aid the mind’s eye in imagining these places of old.Nearly forty books are referenced, providing plenty of resources for interested parties to dive deeper into Eastern Shore history; as locals know, for every story contained in this book, there are at least ten more that are known and told regularly in towns across the peninsula.Residents of Delaware and Virginia will enjoy this book just as much as Marylanders, despite its exclusive focus on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It can be found at Barnes & Noble in Salisbury, other local bookstores, and on Amazon.com. For more information, visit writingthevision.com, where you will find books by the same author about the towns of Easton and Snow Hill.

    Book preview

    Haunted Eastern Shore - Mindie Burgoyne

    INTRODUCTION

    After the last ice age, the Susquehanna River, with its headwaters in western New York, swelled and surged. It moved south and found its way to the Atlantic Ocean. In that process, the Susquehanna drowned a valley that was 195 miles long. This created the most studied estuary in the world and the largest in the United States: the Chesapeake Bay. It also divided the land, creating a peninsula some 200 miles long that is barely joined to the mainland. Today, this peninsula is known as Delmarva because it comprises three states: Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. It is also known as the Eastern Shore, as it is the land east of the Chesapeake.

    Maryland’s Eastern Shore is a world apart from the rest of the state. Connected in two places to the mainland—one connection being a small shred of Cecil County and the second a five-lane hyphen known as the Bay Bridge—the Eastern Shore accounts for one-third of Maryland’s land mass yet contains only one-tenth of her people. The landscape on the Shore, as it is called by locals, has little in common with its sister landscape to the west. Dense populations, cosmopolitan neighborhoods and the hubs of commerce like Baltimore crowd the mainland. The Eastern Shore has no big cities, only small historic towns, rolling farmland and thousands of miles of shoreline. Residents and visitors alike feel the difference instantly as soon as their cars leave the Bay Bridge and land on the shores of Queen Anne’s County. The pace slows. The land spreads out in front of you. The sky gets bigger, and tidal water is never very far away.

    This peninsula is the largest contiguous piece of agricultural land between Maine and Florida. Agriculture has been the mainstay of the economy since the seventeenth century, starting first with tobacco, followed by seafood, fruits, vegetables and, most recently, chicken. It was agriculture that generated the wealth and built the small towns on the Shore. But it was the Chesapeake Bay and the chasm it created dividing the peninsula from the mainland that has kept development to a minimum.

    Oh, the beauty birthed from the marriage consummating farmland and the tides—this is the Eastern Shore charism! The bones of the old plantations still creep up through the landscape, some still supporting the historic homes that have stood watch through social changes. Even the marshes, the swamps and the winding waterways have been left largely untouched, and the phantom spirits of those long gone are comfortable to linger here.

    The wide-open spaces and expansive vistas, uncluttered by modern development, have left room for the ghosts of the past to wander. There are still places where spirits feel at home in the land where they walked, laughed, suffered, loved and died. Some of the souls lived as heroes and some as villains; others are unremembered or nameless; and some are known only by their quirky methods of reaching into the living world. Some spirits are unrestful and some are at peace, but their presence is felt by those willing to listen or look for them. Here you will find some of their stories, and perhaps you will seek out some of these haunts on your own. The spirits of government leaders, military men, movie stars, pirates and murderers will be mentioned in this book. Tales of George Washington, Tench Tilghman and the murderous Patty Cannon will be recounted, some with actual oral commentary taken from citizens long gone who told their stories before they joined the very ghosts they chronicled in the world of the dead. As I take you through the nine counties of the Eastern Shore—Cecil, Kent, Queen Anne’s, Talbot, Caroline, Dorchester, Wicomico, Worcester and Somerset—I will share the stories I have uncovered through research gathered from over fifty books, scores of personal interviews and thousands of pages of transcribed oral commentary. In addition, I will add my own commentary in some places, recounting a few spooky experiences I had when I visited these sites. And, hopefully, I will weave for you, the reader, a vivid account of past and present spiritual phenomena, giving you a more personal introduction to the ghosts that haunt houses, swamps, bridges, plantations, forests and the wide-open spaces of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

    HOLLY HALL

    Elkton, Cecil County

    The northernmost county on the Eastern Shore is also the only one joined to Maryland’s mainland. Cecil County has high ground, rolling hills and endless agricultural land clipped and cut by tidal water. Elkton, formerly known as Head of Elk, is the central town. Holly Hall figures prominently in its history.

    James Sewell, the builder of Holly Hall, was the descendant of Charles Calvert, Third Lord Baltimore. Sewell’s wife, Anne Marie Rudulph, inherited land near Elkton from her father. It was on some of this farmland that the Sewells built Holly Hall about 1810. Shortly after, the town of Elkton sprang up, and James Sewell became a prominent member of both the local community and the American colonies. He served as brigadier major of the Maryland Militia from 1805 to 1841 and commanded the Second Battalion at Fort Defiance in 1813, preventing the British from reaching Elkton. Additionally, he served as clerk of the court in Elkton and was one of the founders of the Trinity Episcopal Church (1832).

    We know that Mr. James Sewell was a member of the Whig party and that he entertained many visitors at Holly Hall, some of whom were quite prominent in political circles. Holly Hall became a symbol of the elite class in the Upper Shore region. It was considered a mansion in its day, designed in the Federal style with many extras and set amid beautifully landscaped gardens dotted with holly trees. It was the holly trees that compelled the owners to call the estate Holly Hall. Some of those holly trees and some of the old boxwoods still stand today in the shadow of the now vacant and derelict Holly Hall.

    Holly Hall in Elkton. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Cecil County.

    Everyone with whom I spoke in Elkton who knew about Holly Hall knew that it was haunted. The stories vary, but most refer to Mr. Sewell rejecting his son because of political differences and that same son cursing his father and the house with his dying breath. James Sewell built a brick burial vault into a slope west of Holly Hall some years after the house was finished. It had an iron door and a stone inscribed with James A. Sewell’s Family Vault—1838. Mr. Sewell died in 1842.

    The following is an account of the haunting of Holly Hall as told by Mrs. Ralph Gray Davis to a Salisbury University folklore student on March 13, 1974:

    In Elkton, the quiet little capital of Cecil County, there’s an old family residence, now unattended…called Holly Hall, once the home of several of the most prominent families of the country but now fast…fast falling into decay. Now this was in a Baltimore newspaper dated 1894, so that’s 79 years ago. The old house which still retains evidence of former grandeur, a stately appearance, is the subject of a peculiar superstition and many tales are told of the curious chains of happenings which gave rise to the belief in the unnatural influences supposed to hang over the mansion and those who lived in it.

    Holly Hall was built about a quarter of a mile from the village that is now Elkton. It was built on big Elk Creek. The builder could not have selected a more gloomy site for a dwelling—in front of a dense wood (which you don’t see now…it’s all gone) that gradually sloped down to the marsh that edged the creek and shut out all of the view of the house on the water side. On the side towards the village, a bleak and barren area of marshland, inexpressibly dreary, stretched to the margin of the creek that separated it from the Head of Elk. The house was built on a slight rise of ground. At the back door, the ground descended suddenly into a dense, tangled swamp whose sinking vegetation concealed the hidden pools and treacherous mud upon which even a dog was afraid to walk. The only approach to the dwelling was over a narrow road which in a roundabout way made the village accessible by connecting with the country road which crossed the creek to the north east of Head of Elk.

    The Sewell family was the first to live at Holly Hall, and there were rumors of stormy scenes between the father and a son—for there was at least one son and one daughter in the family. During a grave disagreement the father told his son that he (the son) should never enter the doors of Holly Hall again saying, even if you die, your body shall not lay in a room of this house. The sister pleaded in vain for her father to recant, but he would not and the son left Holly Hall forever. The father then pronounced, He is no longer my son…not even a picture shall remain to gloom the walls of my house. There were several pictures of the young fellow in the house and with his own hands, the father destroyed them all. But the daughter concealed one picture from him. It was a portrait of her brother when he was at school at William and Mary College in Virginia. The young fellow had dressed himself in a military costume, much affected by young gallants in those days. His head was covered with a three corner hat, from which hung a sweeping ostrich plume. His shoulders were covered with a long Spanish cape descending to the waist and looped at the side to give a glimpse of a handle of a handsome sword and knee breeches, long shoes with toes turned up completed the rather fanciful costume.

    This portrait, the loving sister concealed in the garret—a spot to which her father’s aged stiffened limbs seldom attempted to climb. There the girl, faithful to the memory of her playmate and brother would go and gain many a stolen glance at the portrait. Through a fence, she received an occasional letter from the absent one. At last, a longer interval than usual elapsed between these communications. The sister grew alarmed and wrote along to an officer of her acquaintance in the company in the Continental Army. The answer almost set her wild with grief. Her brother was alive but in a hospital in Philadelphia, suffering from

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