Maryland Legends

Folklore from the Old Line State

Trevor J. Blank, David J. Puglia

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781626194137
• eBook ISBN:
  9781625849519
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The stories, folklore, and history surrounding Maryland's most haunted places. A must-read for fans of the supernatural and Maryland history. The demon car of Seven Hills Road, the ominous Hell House above the Patapsco River, the mythical Snallygaster of western Maryland--these are the extraordinary tales and bizarre creatures that color Maryland's folklore. The Blue Dog of Port Tobacco faithfully guards his master's gold even in death, and in Cambridge, the headless ghost of Big Liz watches over the treasure of Greenbriar Swamp. The woods of Prince George's County are home to stories of the menacing Goatman, while on stormy nights at the nearby University of Maryland, the strains of a ghostly piano float from Marie Mount Hall. From the storied heroics of the First Maryland Regiment in the Revolutionary War to the mystery of the Poe Toaster, folklorists Trevor J. Blank and David J. Puglia unravel the legends of Maryland.

PART I

MARYLAND’S HAUNTED PLACES (OR, GHOSTS ACROSS MARYLAND)

CHAPTER 1

ABANDONMENT ISSUES

The Legend of Hell House (St. Mary’s College)

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

—Winston Churchill

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

—Henry David Thoreau

A top a granite cliff overlooking the Patapsco River in Ilchester, Maryland, sits a once grandiose cluster of buildings now abandoned and decayed. From 1866 to 1972, these buildings served as St. Mary’s College, a religious preparatory school for young men entering the priesthood. In the years to follow, as Father Time chipped away at the neglected site and folklore emerged to speculate on the reasons behind its desertion, the nicknames “Creepy College” and especially “Hell House” became synonymous with the place. Moreover, the ruins of St. Mary’s College became a hotbed for “legend tripping,” the ostensive action of trekking to the physical location associated with a legend to test its veracity and one’s own mettle, typically in group settings.¹⁷ The property’s long history in Howard County and with the Catholic Church helped to inspire its eventual repurposing by hordes of young thrill-seeking trespassers who collaboratively made Hell House a staple of Maryland legendry.

The opening of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad in 1830 marks the beginning of the story behind Hell House. George Ellicott, Jr., grandson of Andrew Ellicott—one of the founders of Ellicott Mills (later named Ellicott City)—maintained a homestead in Ilchester and thought its location ideal for a stop on the line. To attract passengers, he converted his stone home into a hotel and tavern, but B&O ultimately chose Ellicott Mills for its main stop in the area. As a result, train stops in Ilchester became exceedingly rare and even precarious since locomotives that did stop risked losing the momentum to complete their journey.¹⁸ George Ellicott, Jr.’s business venture failed; he struggled to sell his property for years until the brothers of the Most Holy Redeemer, a Roman Catholic congregation better known as the Redemptorists, purchased the 110-acre plot for $15,000 on June 12, 1866, with the intent of establishing a seminary.¹⁹ The Redemptorists had only arrived in America thirty-four years earlier in 1832, and the purchase paved the way for Baltimore to become one of the main provinces of the order. The first Mass was held on the third floor of Ellicott’s old stone house on August 28, 1866.

The crumbling façade of the “upper house” on the grounds of St. Mary’s College/Hell House. Photographs courtesy of Ann Tabor.

Work began on the main “upper house” (the largest of the school’s buildings) in March 1867. Based off the sketches of two Redemptorist brothers, the original building resembled American adaptations of French and Italian architecture of the Renaissance era. Stretching eighteen bay wide (with a central five-bay façade and cupola), five bay deep and four stories high (a fifth story was added between 1933 and 1934), and featuring English Garden Wall Brick Bond on a stone foundation, bricklayers laid over 672,000 bricks in eighteen months.²⁰ A beautiful sixty-six-step stone staircase ascended to the upper house, known by priests and students as “Jacob’s Ladder.” Classes began in September 1868. In 1872, the brothers added a frame to the old Ellicott tavern, known then as the “lower house,” and the property became the church and school for the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The building burned down on June 14, 1968. The college was originally named Mount St. Clemens after the Redemptorist saint, but in an effort to encourage devotion to St. Mary under the title of “Perpetual Help,” the brothers renamed the school St. Mary’s College in 1882, following the dedication of a new, ornate chapel in the upper house.²¹

Joining the priesthood demanded great personal sacrifice. The Redemptorist Order required four years of high school, two years of junior college and a year of noviciation in Annapolis,²² followed by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Before ordination, a candidate had to spend an additional six years in prayer and study at St. Mary’s College. The towering buildings of St. Mary’s College housed thousands of young men (as many as 100 to 150 at one time during its peak) on that journey until 1972, when it permanently closed its doors due to dwindling enrollment. For several years after St. Mary’s College closed, entrepreneurs, community groups and even state government officials sought to preserve the buildings. Alas, their efforts were fruitless, and the site fell into disrepair. But the story does not end there.

The remains of the Redemptorist chapel amid the decaying grounds of Hell House. Photograph by Mark Robinson; provided courtesy of Ann Tabor.

By the late 1980s and into the ’90s, graphic details about the reasons behind St. Mary’s abrupt closure in 1972 started to proliferate among teens and college students in the Greater Baltimore region.²³ Some claimed a student or priest cursed the grounds when he committed suicide following the discovery of an illicit affair or other questionable action. Others suggested that students had been murdered or died from a mysterious illness and were buried in the vast web of subterranean tunnels that ran beneath the college. The most enduring story involved a lustful rector who, despite efforts to reform, raped four nuns at the seminary.²⁴ Hesitant to report their superior, one sister finally spoke up after learning of a fifth victim. The archdiocese banished the old priest from the grounds, but he defiantly vowed to return. A short time later, a staff member stumbled upon a horrifying scene: five nuns facing one another, hanged, a pentagram drawn in their blood on the floor below; the old priest lay slumped beside them, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.²⁵ In other variations, the old priest flees the scene, evading capture, and the surviving nuns become possessed by demonic forces, leading them to massacre the remaining students and priests at the seminary. Instead of assaulting nuns, some versions alternatively explain that the old priest dabbled in the black arts, driving him to insanity and inspiring the murderous rampage. Sometimes female students replace the nuns in retellings, even though St. Mary’s College only enrolled men.

The theme of satanic homage informed many of the subsequent stories. In the absence of official residents, rumors of drug labs or satanic cults meeting at the abandoned upper house to sacrifice goats and praise the Dark Lord persisted, as did the contention that visitors to the building’s second floor would find satanic altars.²⁶ These stories began to fuel beliefs that satanists, witches, robed occultists and ghosts plagued the abandoned ruins of St. Mary’s College, prompting its folk rechristening as “Hell House.” In time, individuals and groups began crossing the “No Trespassing” signs to convene on the grounds to explore the ruins, to party and to vandalize.²⁷ Visitors reported seeing ghostly nuns and priests (especially one with bloody hands who apparently chased trespassers on occasion); feeling “cold spots” near particular parts of the site,²⁸ such as the top of the sixty-six-step staircase (sometimes referred to as the “ninety-nine steps to Hell”); experiencing strange weather events and shifting emotional states; seeing or hearing peculiar things, like flickering lights and faintly echoing voices; and spotting color distortions or spectral sights in developed photographs. However, the unifying experience shared most by legend trippers involved confronting or escaping the clutches of the property’s eccentric caretaker, Allen Rufus Hudson, an infamous part of the legend of Hell House by the 1990s.²⁹

Commonly called the “The Hermit” or “The Hillbilly” for his large frame and disheveled appearance, Hudson toted a shotgun and employed a pack of Rottweilers—and he was not afraid to use either on trespassers and vandals. Many accounts of unauthorized visits to Hell House report the sound of Hudson’s dogs barking in the distance or the sight of them roaming freely along the upper floors of the decrepit buildings, their ominous echoes ringing through the cavernous space. Avoiding detection by the caretaker and his dogs became part of the allure of visiting Hell House at night. Those who did not escape fueled the caretaker’s reputation as a madman living in the shadows of the abandoned St. Mary’s College. For instance, victims sued Hudson in 1991 and 1992, alleging they were viciously beaten, falsely imprisoned, threatened and attacked by his dogs while trespassing; one interloper fractured his pelvis while fleeing the scene.³⁰ On May 11, 1996, police arrested Hudson on the charges of assault, battery and assault with intent to murder after shooting a twenty-two-year-old Baltimore man. Earlier that evening, Hudson had caught the man and three friends trespassing and ordered them to leave. They returned around 6:30 a.m., armed with baseball bats, before meeting the caretaker and his shotgun.³¹ Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges against Hudson, but the message to teen daredevils was clear: visiting Hell House could be deadly. Late-night pilgrimages continued, albeit with elaborate precautionary measures in place. Fighting vandalism and property damage for years, the caretaker became the resident bogeyman.³²

The infamous “Jacob’s Ladder,” a sixty-six-step stone staircase where priests at St. Mary’s College ascended from the Ilchester train station to the seminary above. After the property fell into ruin and took on the name Hell House, the stairs became a site for legend tripping and ghost hunting. Photographs by Mark Robinson; provided courtesy of Ann Tabor.

On Halloween night 1997, a little over a year after Allen Rufus Hudson’s notorious brush with the law, the remains of the upper house went up in flames, gutting the majority of the building’s extant architecture and leaving a large pit at the center of the smoldering remains.³³ Arson investigators immediately labeled the fire suspicious, but police made no arrests. Because of the significant damage to the building, Hudson was forced to vacate his property out of fear that a wall could collapse onto his adjacent abode. Many residents believed that the caretaker had actually died in the fire (or of natural causes soon thereafter), and some even claim that his spirit, along with those of his dogs, continues to guard the ruins. Nevertheless, the charred remnants of Hell House persisted in attracting visitors hoping to witness paranormal activity and participate in a local rite of passage. In 2006, the crumbling remains of St. Mary’s College were razed, although parts of the old chapel and a decomposing stone structure (perhaps the remnants of the lower house) remain, as do the Jacob’s Ladder steps, some stone-lined pathways and old basement pits. The grounds still invite occasional traffic from curious residents and ghost hunters.³⁴

Popular culture scholar Marilyn Motz observes that the stories told about a place can override the visual impression the location presents, rendering it welcoming or foreboding in a given context, adding:

Legends about places humanize physical spaces and lay claim to territory regardless of legal ownership or official nomenclature. They alter the identity of a place and make it habitable, associating with it a history linking past with present and rejecting scientific knowledge and political authority.³⁵

A legend is etched with tradition, and its telling or enactment enlivens the nostalgia and wonder long associated with that tradition. In the ostensive action of legend tripping, participants collectively transform the meaning of a building, a place or an object into one of deeper significance by connecting their own activities with the larger tradition that the story and/or pilgrimage reflects.

Exterior shots of the upper house at the abandoned ruins of St. Mary’s College/Hell House, circa 2003. Photographs by...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Legend in Little America
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Maryland’s Haunted Places (Or, Ghosts Across Maryland)
• Part II: Maryland’s Legendary Creatures
• Part III: Historical Maryland Legends
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Authors