Ghosthunting Maryland. Michael J. Varhola
Leanna said the square is still a source of psychic activity.
Bertha’s, in any event, is one of the most psychically active places in Fells Point. It is actually composed of three buildings, each with its own unique history. Leanna pointed out the spot of the greatest spiritual activity, in the second building going back from Market Street. On the landing going up to the second floor, patrons sometimes encounter the lady in the gray cloak. She is mostly a skeleton with two eyeballs but, according to legend, is clad in a lovely gray cloak. She is reputed to follow patrons up the stairs and then suddenly disappear.
The ladies’ restroom on that floor is also filled with psychic energy, possibly emanating from the storeroom across the hall. There is so much ghostly activity associated with that storeroom, Leanna said, that employees are required to sign an agreement as a condition of employment that they will not enter it alone. Inevitably, of course, one did, Leanna said, and was promptly terrified by a ghost—and was then fired for having violated the prohibition against going into the problem area by himself.
The tour being over, we decided to have a beer in Bertha’s bar. Leanna was already there, seated at the bar and enjoying a plate of Bertha’s famous mussels. She introduced us to her husband, who plays the base fiddle there with a local group—and he was pretty darn good. My purpose, though, for going to Bertha’s was not music, or mussels, or even beer. What I wanted was to induce my wife into visiting the ladies’ room on the second floor. It took some convincing, ostensibly because there was one much closer on the first floor, but she finally did. She observed that there was also an upstairs restaurant, and it was full of patrons, but no lady in a gray cloak. Evidently, there was just too much activity for the spirit to make an appearance.
I hope to return to Fells Point this winter and visit Bertha’s again. Maybe on some gray winter evening, there will be fewer patrons. Of course, I want to try the mussels—but also, I hope, if conditions are right, the lady in the gray cloak will make her appearance as my wife makes her way up the back stairway en route to the ladies’ room on the second floor.
CHAPTER 3
Old Baltimore Shot Tower
BALTIMORE/JONESTOWN NEIGHBORHOOD
For many years, the Old Baltimore Shot Tower was the tallest structure in the United States.
On this site purchased in 1773 … The first permanent meeting house, a dwelling for the pastor and a school house were erected and a cemetery established for the First Baptist Church of Baltimore …
—Inscription on a plaque affixed to the Old Baltimore Shot Tower
IT IS NOT SURPRISING that many people who see the Old Baltimore Shot Tower from a distance and know nothing about it assume it is some sort of a monument, or perhaps even a lookout tower built as part of Baltimore’s early harbor defenses. It is, in actuality, the last remaining element of an innovative nineteenth-century factory that used the natural energy of gravity to fashion its products—ammunition.
Whether because of its unique architecture, events that happened within or around it, or whatever occupied its site prior to its construction—or all of these things—people have long reported all sorts of strange phenomena in the vicinity of the tower. The most prevalent incidents, which have scared unsuspecting passersby on numerous occasions, have involved voices and other sounds emanating from within the sealed tower.
Known first as the Phoenix Shot Tower, and then as the Merchant’s Shot Tower for the company that had originally owned it, the Merchant’s Shot Tower Company, the 234-foot-tall red brick structure was the tallest building in the United States and the tallest free-standing masonry structure in the world when it was built in 1828 by architect Jacob Wolfe (it held those records until 1846 and 1884, respectively).
The fourteen-story Old Baltimore Shot Tower—one of four shot towers that once graced the local skyline—is an impressive structure; the massive circular tower incorporates an estimated 1.1 million bricks, manufactured locally by the Burns and Russell Company. Its walls are about four-and-a-half feet thick up to a height of around fifty feet, after which they periodically narrow in increments of four inches, for a final thickness at the top of twenty-one inches. It has a diameter of forty feet at its base and of twenty feet at its top. Its foundation extends seventeen feet below the surface of the ground, and its interior areas reportedly contain a cast-iron spiral staircase, steel floors, and an elevator. This huge industrial edifice was, incredibly, built in just six months and without recourse to exterior scaffolding. The site also once contained a number of other affiliated factory buildings, hinted at today by the presence of an iron entryway about twenty feet off the ground that once corresponded with the upper level of an adjacent structure.
Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence whose mansion was located just a few blocks to the south and who at that point was about ninety-one, laid the cornerstone for the Old Baltimore Shot Tower.
Ammunition was produced at this tower and others like it through a process that involved pouring molten lead into a colander-like device at the top of the tower. These measured blobs of liquid metal would then drop toward the base of the tower like fiendish raindrops, forming into perfect spheres as they went, and then harden upon impact with the cold water in the vat at the bottom. This process was used to produce both “drop shot” for small arms like rifles and pistols and “molded shot” for larger weapons like cannons. The Old Baltimore Shot Tower typically produced 2.5 million pounds of drop shot a year, which was then dried, polished, and sorted into 25-pound bags. Its capacity could be doubled in time of war or other periods of high demand.
By 1892, a new method for producing shot had effectively made the tower obsolete and, after more than six decades, it ceased operations. It was reopened briefly a few years later but, in 1898, the Merchant’s Shot Tower Company shut down for good.
In 1921, the Union Oil Company purchased the tower with the intention of tearing it down and building a gas station on it location. Outcry from the community forestalled these plans, and by 1928 activists had raised enough money to buy the tower themselves, which they then turned over to the city of Baltimore. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972, then was restored and opened as a historic site in 1976.
I visited the Old Baltimore Shot Tower on a Saturday in June 2009, with my friend Brendan Cass and his mother, Susan Cass. We parked in one of the many public garages located on the streets running parallel to the Inner Harbor and then walked up Lombard Street, on which the tower is located, a few blocks north of the harbor and a bit west of the city’s Little Italy. As we approached the tower, it became apparent to us that, despite its proximity to downtown and numerous tourist attractions, it was located in a somewhat marginal area. Four or five middle-aged men who appeared to live at least part of the time in Shot Tower Plaza, the little park that surrounds the structure, sat, slept, or shambled around the area.
Ghostly lore we had heard about the Shot Tower included reports by passersby of strange noises coming from within the structure. So, the first thing Brendan and I did upon approaching it was to put our ears to one of the iron doors. We immediately heard a sharp “clang” from within the sealed-up building and jumped back! That was much more than we had expected.
Ghosthunter Susan Cass investigates claims that people have heard strange sounds coming from within the Old Baltimore Shot Tower.
Cautiously, we pressed our ears to the door again and listened. We could feel a low quivering in the door itself and, beyond it, hear all sorts of ominous groaning and rumbling noises. As far as we could tell, the vast interior of the tower was amplifying the sounds of nearby traffic, which was in turn causing the iron portals of the building to vibrate faintly. That did not, however, do anything to explain the metallic clang we had heard.
I decided to ask some of the local denizens if they had ever noticed anything odd and, approaching a pair sitting nearby, asked if they had ever heard any strange noises coming from