Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne
the graveyard has ghost promise,” she replied.
“That’s what I’m hoping,” I said.
Later, as Kathleen and I walked through the light drizzle, I wondered at my literary arrogance. “The Eastern Shore’s so different than Baltimore,” I said to the back of her umbrella. “Almost like another country, another world. It’s not just the Confederate Eastern Shore vs. the Yankee Western Shore but also the difference between country and city communities. How can I write it?”
“Really, Maryland, you’re overreacting. They’re people, aren’t they?”
I shouldered against the crowd. Eastern Shore Tribal Council leader Chief Winter Fox once asked me about living in Baltimore, “Do you like living in the middle of all those people?” He lives in a thirty-person village deep within the southern swamps of Dorchester County.
“The store should be right on Thames Street,” Kathleen said, forging ahead through the crowd and drawing me out of my thoughts.
“Do you find it vaguely creepy that a ghost tour starts in a toy store?” I muttered inside my windbreaker. “I mean, do toys bring ghosts? And vice versa?”
As we passed a knitting store close to the corner of Thames and Broadway, I saw a hard-looking man in black period dress with a long cape, seemingly out of place amongst the skeins of wool.
“That must be it,” I called out to Kathleen, since this guy screamed ghost tour to me.
The man turned suddenly and threw me a very knowing glare, as if he was reading the lining of my xenophobic brain. His rugged face looked in its forties; his deep wrinkles burned into my skin. I froze under the fine rain, my bloated secrets spilt on the wet cobblestones, naked, wriggling and glistening. With a dizzying effort, I pulled away and reeled back. I looked up and saw the toy store sign further down the street. I swung back and the man was gone from the tiny shop. I blinked against the rain.
“Did you see that man, that man in the knitting store?” I asked Kathleen.
She had stopped under a dripping tree. “Man? Are you flirting again? You write too much romance. Ah, there’s the store,” she said, pointing down the street.
Kathleen’s much more pragmatic than I am. I didn’t want to tell her that I thought I had seen an apparition. I was embarrassed and my shame clammed me up. Before this April, I would’ve needed a drink before I spilled my ghost stories to my friends. For the most part, they’d believe with me, but sometimes not.
When I told my friend Todd a ghost story, he tilted his salt and pepper curls and said, “Yeah, but you see things.” Todd was born in Bel Air, Maryland and climbs a ladder faster than anyone I’ve ever met. I didn’t quite know how to process his statement. It wasn’t exactly positive reinforcement for ghost storytelling. Or maybe it was.
“Do I let myself see things that are already there?” I mumbled to myself as Kathleen shook her umbrella outside the toy store. “Or do I convince myself I see them?” My friend Laura says that she doesn’t see ghosts because they don’t believe in her. Laura was born in Baltimore and is smart and blonde and loves shoes. Her family’s ancestral home was built on land deeded from Lord Baltimore.
I hoped to see the hard man later on the ghost walk, perhaps as a different tour guide. I hoped he was just another Fells Point freak in a cloak, yet the tingling fear of his chilling glance planted doubt. We eventually crossed paths with the other tour, but the dark, caped man wasn’t guiding it. I was mystified why a grown man, such a hard man, would be skulking in period dress in a knitting store.
In the ghost tour toy store, Kathleen and I shopped for nieces and nephews until the damp tourists gathered to hear phantom folklore. One family had traveled from Australia. Our guides were in their mid-twenties, winsome and dressed in black. They told this profitable tour to over 600 clients during the summer of 2002 for $12 a pop with a little research and no overhead.
Our two young guides collected the group outside the store, and the stories began.
The tour moved as a loose pack, under scattered raindrops, hiking two blocks north to Friends Bar. As we passed an open bar door on Lancaster Street, the bouncer on his stool said something sotto and a male voice inside called out the stereotypical, wavering wail of a mournful ghost. The bouncer grinned and waved. The tour members giggled self-consciously, feeling sheepish about paying to hear spiritual folklore. The guides rolled their eyes and staunchly continued, shaking water and derision from their wet capes.
Many Fells Point ghost stories happen around last call in bars; you gotta like that in a neighborhood. Friends Bar regulars speculate that their ghost was a madam because of the midnight click of her high heels and her moans of bodiless passion. One tenant said she tried to pull him into his rumpled bed at 2 A.M., but I question his alcoholic state at that time.
The tour looped back to our dinner site. Bertha’s Restaurant and Bar is a green-painted brick cornerstone of the wide square at the base of Broadway in Fells Point. The guide with the striped stockings and the fringed cloak of memory closed her eyes as she re-told a Bertha’s ghost story. “The waiter opened the locked door and found himself face to face with a little girl in Victorian clothes sitting there, skipping rope,” she said.
I frowned, trying to visualize that one. Raindrops rolled down my nose. I felt especially human and damp.
As our guides led us to the next stop at the Whistling Oyster, a bar across the wet square, Kathleen muttered to me, “How could the little girl ghost sit and skip rope at the same time?”
“I wondered that too,” I said. “And how could the manager see ghosts on the video camera?”
Later, my friend Joan debunked the tour’s phantom story of two spirit sailors in Bertha’s bar, ostensibly viewed via surveillance camera by an invalid manager in the office. Joan tended Bertha’s bar in the 1990s, and she and I met during a play. She’s a Scorpio with beautiful hands. She can drive a tractor and write an elegant grant.
“There’re no managers,” she said, “It’s just Tony and Laura, and there’s no way that Tony would pay for a video surveillance camera of the bar. And even if the invalid was the manager, she couldn’t get to the office with a broken leg; it’s on the third floor.”
The Fells Point tour guides used a little hyperbole.
Hyperbole builds tall tales. The legend of King Arthur evolved for five centuries before Sir Thomas Mallory wrote it down in 1469. In Arthur’s early iterations, he’s not a king. The growth of his story matches the evolution of the British Isles; his story grew bigger as its country developed.
We daily fall into hyperbolic traps. Each time a story is told, it morphs. My friend Adrienne said of a story that her husband tells of the night actor Bill Pullman checked her out, “Each time he tells it, Pullman does another double take. Eventually, he’ll break his neck.” Adrienne is a lighting designer from Long Island who taught herself to knit. She has creamy skin, and her hair and eyes are the color of warm mahogany. Each time her husband Lou elaborates his Pullman Tale that newly embellished version cements in his head until he begins to believe it himself. That’s how legend evolves. We all perpetuate myth.
I am pretty regularly accused of exaggerating, but I’m a storyteller. I’m a flawed human source, and therefore muddied, muddy like a meandering river carving up an ancient marsh. Sunlight can’t reach the bottom through all the suspended sediment of local and personal history. Maybe story can.
I had heard the story of the Friends Bar ghoul, and I’ve seen first-hand the phantom drink at the end of the bar that the bartenders nightly leave out for their spectral madam. I’ve heard that the liquor vanishes each night, but it’s an untended shot of whiskey in the wilds of Fells Point. Joan and I have heard stories about the upstairs Bertha’s ghost and have felt an odd, cold, vibrating energy in the storage room where the waiter saw the skipping girl, a nearly palpable thickness in the air and the sense of being watched.
The tour’s a mix of local legend and complete