Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne

      Apprentice House

      Communication Department

      Loyola University in Maryland

      4501 N. Charles Street

      Baltimore, MD 21210

      410.617.5265 • 410.617.5040 (fax)

      www.ApprenticeHouse.com • [email protected]

      For my Grandmother,

      Marjorie Louise Johnson Schuck

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks to Michael Angelella, Deborah Donohue Amos, Megan Anderson, Kathleen Barber, Mark Blackmon, Tish Brown, Terri Ann Ciofalo, Norrie Epstein, Neal Fandek, Lou Gieszl, David Hunt, Joe Leatherman, Betty Ann Leesburg Lang, Donald Lynne, Jeffrey Lynne, Susan Lynne, Lisa Mion, Todd Mion, Noel Schively, and Joan Weber for their guidance.

      Thanks to John Benoit, Raine Bode, Shawn Brown, Andrew Ciofalo, Denise Cumor, Sid Curl, Cassandra Davis, Korinne Spence D’Amore, David Flury, Adrienne Cassara Gieszl, Thomas Hoen, Peggy Miller, Rebecca Monroe, David Orem, Shannon Parks, John Raley, B.Thomas Rinaldi, Anthony Scimonelli, Elaine Sfondias, Mr. Travis, and Dana Whipkey for their extraordinary stories.

      Thanks to Margot Adler, Karen Anderson, Joseph Campbell, Joan Didon, Edith Hamilton, Mark Harp, Arlene Hirschfelder, Bertha Johnson, Paulette Molin, Alice Ann Parker, Anthony Reda, Marjorie Schuck and Christopher Weeks for expanding my mind.

      Thanks to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Cambridge Library, Dorchester County Arts Center, and The Eastern Shore Tribal Council for protecting Dorchester County’s precious resources.

      Thanks to Lillian Jackson Braun, George Carey, Helen Chappell, Thomas A. Flowers, Trish Gallagher, Vernon O. Griffen, Dickson Preston, Brice Stump and Thames Toy Store for telling Maryland folklore and expanding my heart.

      Table of Content

      Haunted Hunting 11

      Walking with Ghosts 15

      A Chilled Wind 35

      Push Back 53

      Read Folklore 61

      Fictionalized Reality 71

      Black Shapes 89

      Show Me the Way 97

      Ghosts or No Ghosts 109

      Porch Puddles 157

      Bad Luck Blue Boats 173

      Worm Windows 193

      Human Here 213

      The What 219

      Fork-lore 241

      Pasta Paper 245

      The Devil Made Me Do It 257

      I Heard No Water 277

      Cancelled Czech 287

      Storm Coming 291

      A Human Head 301

      It Floods A Lot Here 307

      We Need a Carcass 339

      On My Way There 343

      Burial Records 355

      We Believe 381

      After April 2nd

      Haunted Hunting

      Once, in a place that seems outside time, I wrote a ghost walking tour for a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. As I collected local folklore, a Cambridge resident named Mr. Travis told me this ghost story that happened in his hunting lodge. Hunting’s popular on the Eastern Shore; it’s rural enough for its populace to still use weapons to catch dinner.

      “It wasn’t much,” Travis said of the lodge. “Just a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. Up on stilts because of all the flooding.” The house stood on its stilts on isolated Aisquith Island in the haunted, southern underbelly of Dorchester County. Aisquith hovers only a few feet above sea level, floating between miles of wet fen and the Honga River. Before the lodge was built, its low woodlands were the sacred ground of a Native American Indian graveyard. Before John Smith showed up in 1608, indigenous people had developed a millennia of civilization, and, in the history of this country, live conquering people plow dead people under.

      Travis says he regularly hears children laughing when there’s nothing but cattails and marsh holes for miles, and every time he returns to the lodge, the salt shaker has inexplicably spilled over. Things happen there.

      One of Travis’ friends stayed with his young son in the lodge. The son got up in the middle of night to get a glass of water in the kitchen. The mattress spring squeaked, and an owl hooted outside. In the living room, a strange man rocked in the rocker. He wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans and had a bl ack plait of braided hair. He was strange only because the boy didn’t know him. He thought perhaps the man was one of his father’s hunting buddies; the ways of the adult world were still a mystery to the boy.

      “Hello,” said the boy. The rocker creaked. The man seemed to have shape and weight, like a living man.

      The man nodded, and when the boy returned from the kitchen, the man was gone.

      The boy tapped his sleeping father. “Where did the man go, Dad?” He asked. “The man in the living room. He looked so real.”

      They searched the lodge house and found no one. They looked outside into the wavering, dark pitch of the Eastern Shore night. One lone green ball of light glided over the undulating marsh grass and then vanished. The son asked to leave.

      There’s no sanctuary from the past; not even our living rooms are safe. I’m scared to look into my Baltimore living room late at night for fear of seeing even briefly into another dimension. My friend Korinne once slept on my couch and awoke to see a man seated in my arts and craft era sliding rocker.

      “Didn’t that freak you out?” I asked the next morning, aghast.

      “No,” she said, smiling and sipping coffee. “He seemed very happy to be here.”

      “What’d he look like?” I stuttered.

      “Oh, I don’t know,” she said calmly. “Older guy, white, I think he was wearing a dinner jacket.”

      I realized that my ghost stories and Travis’ ghost stories match