Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne
no sense. Did she have no choice? If she didn’t go, would she reveal her betrayal? There’s more. After the war, he died broke, and he never revealed the location of the gold.12 If I was dirt poor during Reconstruction when everything had gone to hell,” I said, “and I knew the location of a fortune in buried gold, I would’ve dug it up, ghost field hand or not.”
“Why didn’t he dig it back up right after he killed her?” Debbie pointed out.
Something must have happened to stop him.
There’s something murky about a swamp ghost that’s scarier than a drier one. Something about being soaked in 140 years of swamp goo turns a spirit spookier. Big Liz’s headless specter is covered in slime, like the Ghost Story ghost who hid under the lake for fifty years, waiting, dripping, oozing.
Flowers tells a story in Shore Folklore of discovering Big Liz’s gold in Green Briar; he dug up a metal box in the southern section that she haunts. Like previous treasure hunters in what locals call “the devil’s woodyard”13, Flowers abruptly was very aware of being watched; he was surrounded by the eerie sense of not being alone. He was equally suddenly “transported to another part of the swamp.”14 He was somewhere else sans shovel and hoe. He experienced a time and space jump. I got goose bumps reading it. He ran until he found his way out.
Flowers put himself into a story or he was testing the story out; either way, it took guts.
“Anyone who goes into that swamp with a flashlight and a shovel is asking for trouble,” said Debbie. “I’m not too sure I want to go now,” she admitted.
“Ah, come on,” I whined. “Who else will I get to go with me? Certainly not Karl.”
“Certainly not. Maybe you shouldn’t go at all.”
“I have to.”
Besides exploring the marsh interior, Flowers’ recipe to summon the headless undead is to park on the bridge and blow the car horn once. Vernon Griffin, in The Veil and More Folklore of the Eastern Shore, recommends blinking the lights three times and hitting the horn two times to summon the ghoul. Folklore collector George Carey suggests lights three times and horn six times. Some versions name her Big Liz and some Big Lizz with an extra Z. This is how legend evolves and becomes localized. In sorting through volumes of Eastern Shore folklore, I discovered several versions of the same story. I suspect it’s community-specific. I wondered how people conjured Big Liz before the car was invented. Make the horse whinny?
Dorchester County ghost stories have endured hundreds of years wracked with transformation. While the world outside the marsh whirled through change since the Civil War, Big Liz’s phantom still haunts the Green Briar Swamp. A traditional narrative is stabilizing to an area, and we rely upon unstable oral tradition to keep it constant. The Big Liz ghost story is over 140 years old, and yet people still honk in the marsh and dream her headless shuffle.
Each generation revises story for its own needs. My childhood friend’s fifteen-year-old daughter Ysabel lives in Easton, north of Cambridge in Talbot County. She’s heard of Big Liz. “There’s some ghost in Cambridge,” she told me, “On a bridge or something.” Ysabel was born in Santa Cruz and is wise beyond her years. She holds energy inside her slight frame and bounces a lot.
“Yeah,” I replied, “the headless swamp slave girl. You blow the horn and she appears, holding her head, her eyes glowing. Then you can’t start the car.”
Ysabel’s brown eyes widened. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “I thought it was just a story.”
“And every year some accident happens to the kids who try to conjure her. They drive off the road or get into some kind of car accident or they find themselves suddenly in another part of the swamp. Transported.”
“I’m not going now,” Ysabel said, twisting her hair. “No matter who asks me.”
“I’d think not,” her mother said.
Cambridge wasn’t talking so I started asking my friends about their ghost experiences. My seemingly pragmatic designer friend John has one ghost story with a similar spatial displacement as Flowers’ swamp tale. John’s from Silver Spring, Maryland and most of his dramatic scenic designs have arches in the set somewhere. He’s boyish and sweetly shy with occasional blue hair. Bored in a darkened rehearsal, I asked him to tell me a ghost story.
“I don’t know what happened. I really don’t,” he said quietly. “I was walking with my girlfriend through her parents’ neighborhood in Glen Burnie. She wanted to show me a spooky, deserted house at the end of a lane. The neighborhood kids had feared this house for generations.”
A chain link fence surrounded the dilapidated house. John and his girlfriend slowly walked by the fence, towards the gate. It was summer.
“I don’t know what happened next,” he said, his forehead crinkling, still trying to solve the mystery of the memory. “I remember feeling pulled. Suddenly I was at the gate, with my hand on the latch, and something in the yard wanted me in there. The sound of my girlfriend’s flip flops woke me, the sound of her flip flops slapping on the cement sidewalk as she ran for help.”
“Wow,” I said, considering the diabolical pull of the dead house. “Woke you.”
“Yeah, it was like waking up and finding myself several yards away from where I remembered I had been.”
“Freaky.”
“It was years ago in college,” he said, smiling. “But I still don’t know what happened.” Like Flowers, he was transported through space and time through a worm hole of sorts.
I had heard tales of haunted, abandoned houses that trapped people, but John’s was the first live account. All buildings hold energy; there’s no doubt about that.
As she was leaving my neighborhood, my ex next door neighbor confided in me that “the old man across the street” once told her that at the turn of the 20th century the first three houses on the street, including mine, were illegal abortion clinics. A doctor had lived in my house and performed safe abortions in my basement. I stopped her story. “Whoa, I don’t know if I wanna know this,” I said, glancing at the back porch for a clue. “I may never do laundry down there again.”
You can title search your house but you can never know what is soaked in the soil underneath it. Talk to your older neighbors. They’re closer to death. Think of the stories they must know.
Read folklore.
May 23rd
Fictionalized Reality
Snug in my eighty-year-old, ex-abortion clinic of a house, I slogged through the nautical history of the Chesapeake Bay. I had read a line from the Oyster War book three times without understanding when my blonde, mermaid, mystic friend Korinne called from New Hampshire. She’s the one who saw the old man ghost in my living room. Her interruption was a relief. We discussed the tour and the origin of myth.
“What is a ghost story?” I asked her.
“It’s a story about a ghost,” she giggled.
“Thanks. The borders between history, myth, legend, folklore and ghost story seem so sketchy,” I said.
“It’s a scale difference,” said Korinne in her forthright New England vowels.
“I’ve read Edith Hamilton and Joseph Campbell,” I rationalized, “but I don’t want to study too much mythology before I write this ghost walk. They might color my conclusions. I wanna try to sort through the massive ideas on my own. The brain’s the final frontier. I should be able to figure out the answers.”
“It’ll take you longer,” she finally said. “Years even. No offense.”
“No offense taken. I guess.” I still struggled. “But if I figure it out on my own, won’t that be especially archetypal? As a member of the group, individual thought might actually be a collective metaphor or concept of the group.”
“Of