The Haunted Mid-Shore: Spirits of Caroline, Dorchester and Talbot Counties

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INTRODUCTION

Nothing is unimportant that belongs to the past; to the student of history, whether it be the grand epics of nations, or the simple story of a county or neighborhood, nothing is valueless that is illustrative of the varying conditions of society.

—Colonel Oswald Tilghman

The first Eastern Shore ghost story I ever heard was the story of Big Lizz, the African slave who was beheaded by her master just after she followed orders to bury his money. I heard the story on a bus ride through the marshes of lower Dorchester County. The bus driver, who was silent until we drove into the marsh, began the story as most of us were dozing off after a long day of touring seafood-processing plants. After he finished the story, he never said another word. It was a completely silent thirty-minute ride back to Cambridge. It was strange that he was only motivated to break his silence to tell us about Big Lizz. So after everyone exited the bus, I asked him why he told that particular story. He said that most people like to hear it. You always tell the story of Big Lizz when you’re driving near Greenbriar Swamp, he said. It’s the natural thing to do.

Perhaps bus drivers feel compelled to reverence the old spirits by telling their stories: a gesture of respect in hopes that the spirits will leave them alone. I’ve remembered that day often and have heard the Big Lizz story, which is featured in my book Haunted Eastern Shore, over and over. It seems that the story is married to the land. And through reading and listening, I’ve discovered many more stories linked to the land—some so deeply intertwined that the place becomes branded by spirit who haunts it, and the locals accept them as one.

Mt. Misery Road in Talbot County.

Nine of Maryland’s twenty-three counties are east of the Chesapeake Bay. And though these nine Eastern Shore counties compose one third of Maryland’s landmass, they hold only 7 percent of its population. The middle three Eastern Shore counties—Caroline, Dorchester and Talbot—have only 22 percent of the Eastern Shore’s population and only 1.7 percent of Maryland’s population. It is the state’s most undeveloped, uninhabited tri-county region.

The wide-open spaces of the Mid-Shore have changed little in the last three hundred years. Though the traffic through Cambridge, Easton and Denton would have a visitor thinking the region was overdeveloped, the same visitor would only have to traverse the back roads to see how open and unpopulated the land actually is. Places far removed like Blackwater, Tilghman Island and Bishops Head leave first-time visitors wondering if they’re still in Maryland.

Maybe it’s the vastness of the open land that keeps the spirits right at the edge of perception. There’s so much space. When the landscape is uninterrupted by development, our senses are keener. Our psychic abilities are magnified. The spirits are always with us no matter where we are, but on the Mid-Shore, it’s easier to cross into their world and they into ours because there are so few distractions, and the landscape has barely changed.

The open spaces are indeed beautiful, sometimes breathtaking. But they also leave a sense of isolation. Without the distraction of worldly things, the otherworld becomes uncomfortably near. That moment when the traveler feels an overwhelming sense of aloneness is when the old memories start to creep out of the land. The haunted past spreads across the fields like thick mist, and suddenly two worlds become one. Signs and omens appear: a bald eagle circles above, a deer races across a field, a great blue heron ascends over the marsh and all of the trees seem to have faces. The haunted landscape feeds the imagination, and if one is prone to listen, the spirits will speak.

It might be the anguished cry of a young girl coming from an attic room, or a vision of the lady in white wandering with her lantern near the Seven Gates of Hell or the long-dead Mr. Grymes tugging at the pant leg of a hotel employee who has dozed off in the lobby of the Tidewater Inn. It might be the muffled sound of the death chant sung by the Indians at Bachelor Point who strode arm-in-arm into the Choptank River in a mass suicide. It may be old Wish Sheppard, the last man to be executed in Caroline County, turning on the attic light in the Denton jail. And for those bold enough to walk past the Dorchester Courthouse between midnight and 1:00 a.m. (the witching hour), it might be the chilling, childlike whisper asking, What were you hung for, Bloody Henny? along with the rubbing and creaking of rope against branch—the branch that supported the dangling dead body of Henny Insley, an enslaved woman who hacked her pregnant mistress to death.

All of these stories are retold in this book, as are the stories of Marguerite, the murdered vaudeville actress who was dumped in the Avalon Theater elevator, the decapitated Maggie Bloxom coming out of the woods at Maggie’s Bridge and the lovers who hid in the Frenchman’s Oak. There are stories of sea captains and governors, soldiers and farmers, witches and ladies of the evening, and all of them once lived (and still live) somewhere on the Mid-Shore.

It’s a magical place and an eerie place, as rich in folklore and legends as it is in natural resources and generations of people tied to the land and water. These combined elements—place, story, landscape and characters—give us the setting for this book. Feel free to take it along with you as you explore the back roads of the Mid-Shore. But beware: the spirits prey on the traveler just as they prey on the non-believer. It’s always these who have the most terrifying experiences. My hope is that you will enjoy the stories, explore the land, respect the spirits and be as enchanted as I am by this mystical region.

Part I

Caroline County

Caroline County is the only county on the Eastern Shore that is landlocked. With the State of Delaware on one side and the counties that border the Chesapeake Bay on the other, Caroline is the only county of the thirteen on Delmarva that touches neither the Atlantic Ocean nor the Chesapeake Bay. It has some beautiful waterways in the Choptank River, Tuckahoe Creek and the Marshyhope. But it is far richer in farmland, and within Caroline’s landscape rests the agricultural imagination of the Eastern Shore. It is possible to grow almost anything in Caroline. Where most of the Delmarva Peninsula focuses on poultry houses and grain, Caroline reaches past that and adds alpaca and bison farms, dairies and vineyards, orchards and flower growers. It once attracted people from all over the mid-Atlantic region with newspaper advertisements naming Caroline County as the Garden of America.

Caroline County Courthouse in Denton.

But Caroline has its ghosts and haunted places. It claims one of the most haunted sites in all of Maryland: the Denton jail, haunted by the spirit of Wish Sheppard. The courthouse green in Denton has been the scene of three brutal lynchings and dismemberments. And Caroline also is home to many spirits of the Underground Railroad, spirits who were at the threshold of freedom when they made the crossing at Hunting Creek near Linchester Mill, and the woods behind the mill, just like the courthouse green and the jail, vibrate with a distant energy.

CHAPTER 1

THE TOWN DOG KILLER

The most beautiful house on Caroline County’s Courthouse Square in Denton sits on the corner of Gay and Second Streets. It’s a Second Empire Victorian style, and its hipped roof, center cupola, iron fence and ornate trim set it apart from every other house on the square. The ample corner lot runs straight down to the Choptank River, which is wide and placid at this northern end, some thirty-plus miles from where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay.

The house has been beautifully restored to look almost exactly as it did when it was built 130 years ago. But this beautiful jewel in Denton’s historic district has been a sad house. In the last 15 years, it’s changed owners four times and remained vacant for much of that time.

When a longtime owner of the property moved out in 2000, a real estate agent showed the property to a potential buyer who lived out of state. The owner wasn’t present during the viewing, and the potential buyers took several photographs of the house. About a month after they had looked at the house, they returned to Denton hoping to find the owner. When they knocked on the door, there was no answer, so they visited the town hall hoping to get help with locating the owner.

These potential buyers had decided not to buy the house. But when they reviewed the photographs they had taken, they noticed a strange anomaly in one of them. It was disturbing. It was a view of the house from the outside that showed the front with all of its beautiful features and ornate trim. But it also showed the image of a child looking out of the third-floor window. The owner wasn’t present when the couple viewed the house, and they’d been told that no children lived there. The couple had also gone through that third floor, and they saw no sign of a child—no toys, no clothes, nothing to indicate that a child even lived in the house. So naturally, the image of a child in that window caught them by surprise. The couple also observed that in their photograph, the child appeared to be a little girl dressed in old-time white clothing and wearing a large bonnet. They felt compelled to tell the owner. They wondered if a child spirit was trying to send a message. They drove to Denton with the picture in hand with the intent of showing it to the owner and seeing if the owner knew about the child or had experienced any kind of unexplained events. They wondered if a child might have died in the