Eerie Echoes of the Eastern Shore: Easton Ghost Tour starts at the Talbot County Free Library. When we arrived, we saw our guide coming toward us holding a lantern. The tour started by the library, which has a haunted item inside. Patty Cannon was an Eastern Shore resident in the late 1700s and early 1800s. She was also a serial killer. Her story was recorded, well, embellished in a book called The Entailed Hat, or Patty Cannon's Times. The library has copy 496 of the 500 printed in the initial run. The book is in an atmosphere-controlled room under glass. A librarian once touched the book and her fingernails blackened and fell off. Our tour guide had the opportunity to touch the book and was quite nervous about it. They didn't even offer her gloves! Her fingernails were okay, though.
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| Talbot County Free Library |
Back to Cannon's story. She ran a kind of anti-Underground Railroad. She had a home where she hosted travelers. She had a freed black man as a compatriot who would encourage escaped slaves to seek shelter in her home. But then she would chain them and threatened to sell them down south. She did not restrict her crimes to black people. If rich people came, like slave traders, she would often poison them or have them shot and then steal their money. She buried a lot of people in her basement and some in the yard as well. Once, a man was traveling by and his horse got stuck in a hole outside her house. He started digging to get the horse out and discovered human bones. He got the sheriff who arrested Cannon. She wound up in jail for two weeks and then died from poisoning before going to trial. Did someone try to take a short cut to achieve justice? Did she off herself to avoid the coming ordeal? No one really knows.
Across the street from the library is the old prison. Easton was originally called Courthouse Town, because it had the only courthouse on the Eastern Shore. It was inconvenient to take criminals across the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis or Baltimore, so this was a nice solution. The prison at one time housed Frederick Douglass, the famous freed slave who spoke about his experiences all over America and beyond. In the Easton jail, he was threatened with return to his owners. Slave traders would come and taunt him. The building was rebuilt in the late 1800s, including the installation of an elevator. The elevator is said to be haunted, traveling between floors on its own. A woman in a blue dress sometimes rides the elevator or walks the halls of the prison. The guide said it might be the wife of one of the jailers (who lived on the first floor of the jail), or it might be a prisoner.
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| The town's prison (at least it used to be) |
Across the street is a fine restaurant that used to be a hotel. The hotel was on the carriage route and not far from the railroad that came later. With its proximity to the jail, a lot of disreputable types stayed there. Those were the men who taunted Douglass. The building has the usual haunting problem--upstairs lights, the sounds of people walking around when no one is there, the sounds of chains.
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| Can't stay here anymore |
Further up the street is Tidewater Inn, a fine establishment that hosts events and has had many famous people stay there, including the likes of Elvis, Bing Crosby, and John F. Kennedy. The hotel, with so many patrons and such a long history, has its own ghosts. Staff don't linger long in the basement because they can often hear the sounds of a party--old-time jazz music and clinking glasses and the hubbub of the hoity-toity. They also have a haunted elevator, this one with a woman in a yellow dress who folds her hands in prayer and disappears when the elevator doors open.
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| Tidewater Inn |
Across the way is the Avalon Theater. The theater served as a movie theater but is now a performance venue. It too has a haunted elevator. A young actress sometimes gets off and vanishes. An actress was murdered in the theater with her body discovered in the elevator. The building owner once spotted the ghost. Later, he saw a picture of a line of actresses and recognized one of them as the ghost he had seen. The upstairs bar has also had some odd activity with knives. A bartender once brought his young daughter to work and left her by the bar while he went on an errand. He came back to find her terrified and a large knife plunged into the bar. She was ten or twelve and would not have had the strength to impale it so deeply. Another worker was surprised when a knife flew behind her head while she was working alone at the bar. Our guide speculated it might be the ghost of the fellow who murdered the actress.
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| Avalon Theater |
Our final stop was at Thompson Park. The guide told us about seven different fires that happened over the span of 150 years. Each fire burned down one or two blocks of the city with no fatalities. Another circumstance that holds the instances together is the presence of a woman in a red dress preceding each fire. In the 1900s, someone bought the property and happened to be walking along when a lady in red passed and said this would be a good area for a park. Not knowing the history of the fires, the owner considered the idea and went ahead with it. There have been no fires since.
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| The park in daylight the next day |
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| The tour guide took our photo |
So the moral of the story for this ghost tour is clear. Don't ride elevators in Easton and avoid women in anachronistic dresses, especially when they come out of an elevator (which you should have avoided in the first place).
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