Ghosthunting Maryland. Michael J. Varhola
me very matter-of-factly. “Screamin’, and hollerin’, and someone yellin’ orders.” And, he added, pointing to a nearby historical building, “If you knock on that door, a man with a key will let you inside.”
The last we had heard, the tower was no longer ever open to the public, so I was both pleased and a bit surprised to hear this latest bit of information. I thanked our confidant and headed over to the house he had indicated. It bore a placard identifying it as “9 North Front Street,” an eighteenth-century home that had once been typical of the surrounding Jonestown neighborhood and in which had dwelled a number of professional types, including Thorowgood Smith, the second mayor of Baltimore. In later years, it had been used as a hotel, a restaurant, and an auto parts store, but now seemed to be run as a historical attraction. No one, however, answered the door for us.
Moving on to nearby Carroll Mansion, which together with the tower is managed by the same historical organization, we chatted with the docent, Matt. He told us that the tower really could be accessed by appointment on Sunday mornings at 10:30, and implied that we probably could have visited that day if he had not been the only on duty. Even better, he said, it was sometimes possible to ascend to the parapet of the tower, more than two hundred feet above the streets of the city.
Matt also mentioned an industrial accident that had occurred in one of the buildings affiliated with the Old Baltimore Shot Tower when it was operational, and said that one of the workers had been mangled to death in some machinery. He also mentioned that a number of injuries had occurred in or around the tower.
Why the place might be haunted was becoming increasingly clear, and some additional discussion and research revealed a few other interesting facts. One was that a military armory had once been near the site, perhaps accounting for the spectral shouted orders we had been told about (although it was not inconceivable orders might be shouted in a factory as well). Another was that the site had, in fact, prior to the construction of the tower been the site of a church and its cemetery!
The presence of an archaic, abandoned cemetery could, of course, go a long way toward explaining paranormal phenomena at the site—especially when one considers that unmarked graves were as common as marked ones in early cemeteries, and that any attempt to relocate the interred would thus necessarily be incomplete. And the voices of their spirits, amplified by the unique construction of the tower, might be those that people can still hear calling out from within the massive structure.
CHAPTER 4
Westminster Hall and Burying Ground
BALTIMORE
Westminster Burying Ground contains the remains of more than a thousand prominent Baltimoreans, including author Edgar Allan Poe.
Thy soul shall find itself alone
’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still… .
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Spirits of the Dead”
MORE THAN ONE THOUSAND SOULS, many of them luminaries from Baltimore’s storied past, lie buried within the brick walls of Westminster Burying Ground, and there is reason to think that the spirits of many of them haunt its grounds. For most people, however, the place is significant as the final resting place of writer Edgar Allan Poe—who, to his innumerable other distinctions, can add being buried three times and having his final resting place marked at two different spots in the eighteenth-century graveyard.
When it was established in 1786 by a prominent local Presbyterian congregation, the burying ground lay to the west of the Baltimore city limits and was located there due to fears of contagion that were not completely unfounded.
“Four of the city’s earliest mayors, including the first, James Calhoun, are buried here, as are a number of generals of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, eighty lesser officers, and more than two hundred other veterans,” a pamphlet published by the Westminster Preservation Trust says. “Hollins, Gilmore, Stricker, Ramsay, Stirling, McDonogh, Calhoun, Bentalou, Sterrett … all share the distinction of having Baltimore streets named in their honor.”
A church was not originally built on the site and was not added until six decades after the first bodies were laid to rest there, both to meet the needs of the growing congregation and to help protect and maintain the burial ground. Completed in 1852, Westminster Presbyterian Church was a Gothic Revival structure that had a number of interesting architectural characteristics that make it exceptional if not unique.
Foremost among these is that the church was constructed on brick piers over many of the tombs, giving the impression that they are located in underground catacombs. Numerous large family sepulchers and individual grave markers, many of them crumbling, darkened with age, and ivy-covered, fill the walled yard surrounding the building as well, creating a compact and somewhat confined little necropolis. While “Gothic Revival” will undoubtedly spring to mind for a small proportion of visitors, “Gothic Novel” will resonate for many more, and those are by no means the most interesting or eerie attributes of the place.
When Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849 at the age of just forty—under mysterious and somewhat suspicious circumstances that are disputed to this day—he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Poe family plot near the back of the Westminster Burying Ground. Today, a gravestone near a number of other Poe graves—including that of his grandfather, General David Poe Sr. and his brother, Henry Leonard Poe—bears his name and is thought by many to be where he was buried prior to being relocated to the ground beneath the more impressive marker near the front of the graveyard.
Baltimore school children raised the money needed to erect this prominent monument to Edgar Allan Poe near the entrance to Westminster Burying Ground.
“That is not his original burial place. He was actually moved twice,” Luann Marshall, tour director for the site, explained to me. Poe’s fame and the affection admirers of his work felt for him grew posthumously, and when these sentiments were matched with sufficient funds, a large monument to him was purchased. It was too large, however, to fit on the plot in which he was buried, and the author had to be disinterred and was reburied elsewhere in the family plot in April 1875.
“People would come in to pay their respects and would search for his gravesite but couldn’t find it, even after his fans went to all the trouble to put the monument on his grave,” Marshall told me. “So, in November of 1875, they purchased the plot just inside the cemetery gates from the family that owned it and moved him there so that people would be able to see him as they went by.” This monument, which cost six hundred dollars at the time, was paid for by Baltimore schoolchildren collecting “pennies for Poe,” and today it is customary for visitors to leave one-cent coins on the white stone marker. Another interesting fact associated with this monument is that the inset bronze medallion bearing Poe’s likeness is a replacement for a marble original, which was stolen and eventually turned up in a flea market in Charleston, West Virginia, and was subsequently donated to the Poe House in Baltimore, where it is periodically on display. (See the separate chapter in this book on the Poe House.)
A much smaller gravestone—bearing the image of a raven, which has become both the symbol of Poe and the city of his death—now marks the second spot where he was buried. One can only imagine that Poe would probably have profoundly appreciated not just the fame his work eventually enjoyed but also the morbid details, so reminiscent of scenes from his own stories, associated with the disposition of his