Mysteries of the Eastern Shore
by Andy Nunez

Ghosts in the Past

 A curiosity about the unknown had been a part of my life since I was a child. I grew up in Mount Vernon, a small community about five miles from Princess Anne, the county seat of Somerset County, Maryland. People from other parts of the state considered Somerset County, and by extension most of what is called the Delmarva Peninsula, to be a quaint, backward place that they passed through on their way to Atlantic coastal resorts. Most business revolved around the water, farming, or raising chickens for Perdue Farms.

 It’s probably hard for most people reading this book to imagine Somerset County as it existed in the 1960’s, when I started elementary school. I was raised in a house with no running water and no telephone until I was 18 years old.

We did have electricity and had just purchased a television in 1955, the year before I was born. A lot of readers will think I lived a wretche existence, but it had its own strengths that carry me forward today. For all the backwardness about me, I never went hungry, always had decent clothes, and was part of a loving, caring family.

 Without a car, except when my father or some other relative was in town, we never strayed too far, and I walked everywhere except to school. Besides television and reading to pass the time, I had a curious mind, and would constantly question my mother and grandmother about things in the past, including ghosts.

My mother strenuously denied the existence of ghosts, but was otherwise very superstitious about things being “bad luck”, like breaking mirrors. She also thought that seeing a hearse was bad luck, and I always remember her when one goes by. Anyway, while she did not believe in ghosts, she did have a small collection of tales and strange occurrences that I’ll mention here and there.

 Two tales involved  harbingers of death. Upon the death of one relative, a huge shooting star passed over their house. On another time, a mysterious white horse was seen in a field by another relative’s house, and the relative was found dead. Whether the horse had come for him is hard to say.

My grandfather walked wherever he had to go, and while a hard worker, he did like to go into  Princess Anne and have a drink along with his brother in law. On such occasions he would be out late at night, and told my mother that he once met a man along the road with no head and once heard dogs pursuing him but turned and saw nothing.

 A late cousin of the family once told me that once, when returning from town, these two fellows saw a strange light glowing in the woods.

On closer inspection, the glow was coming from an old stump, giving off light, but no heat. She put it down to foxfire, what we now call bioluminescence, given off by the fungus on the decaying stump.

These stories, plus what are now referred to as urban legends, kept me just on the edge of whether to believe in the supernatural or not. Like a lot of rural people, I was easily impressionable, so reading or seeing something never failed to work on my imagination.

 In those days I read voraciously, mostly comics, until I entered junior high and started reading adventure and science fiction novels. I was a huge Tarzan fan, reading the comics, the books, and watching the old movies.

 However, I also had that yen for the unknown, and when not dreaming about lost civilizations and dinosaurs with the King of the Jungle, I was reading about flying saucers, vampires, werewolves, and other things that went bump in the night, courtesy of fellows like Edgar Allen  Poe and Howard Phillips  Lovecraft, not to mention watching a notorious soap opera called Dark Shadows.

 While I was in college, I ran into some books on some other creatures, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Based on the evidence of the time, I was ready to believe in it all. However, reality and maturity eventually caught up with me and I let all those books collect dust or disappear at yard sales and on Ebay.

The mysterious wouldn’t leave me entirely alone and had a minor resurgence in the mid-1980’s during the pre-internet days of dial-up bulletin board systems or BBS.

 I got hooked on personal computers around 1981 and joined a club for Atari home computer users, along with my cousin. I was trying my hand at fiction writing along with playing games on the computers, so I went to the meetings to learn new information and swap programs.

 It was at this club that I met my late friend Milford  Webster, whom I discuss in detail in my previous book. Milford was a jack-of-all-trades, a computer expert as well as a treasure hunter. Along with Tim  Pryor, another computer enthusiast, we would meet outside the club confines to eat pizza, have a few beers, and continue to swap software.

 As our friendships developed, we discovered that we found the supernatural interesting. Tim, was, and still is, a derisive skeptic of things extramundane. However, another acquaintance, the late Bill Witt, had started one of these BBS endeavors as a node of what was then known as Paranet, short for Paranormal Network.

Paranet was a haven for all things unusual, from UFO’s to reincarnation. Bill’s node was designated node Nu, so he called it  Nu Atlantis, heavily influenced by Atlantean lore. He ran the BBS from a local source, so we could dial into it and discuss matters, in the same way that Internet chat rooms and blogs work today, just not as fast.

 Bill got into the  paranormal stuff in a big way and decided to hold a semi-regular meeting at a now-defunct restaurant called the Hut. I came as an interested observer, but he and Milford were the two main proponents of the group. It consisted of a loose confederation of computer geeks and roleplaying addicts and was quite lively.

We discussed national events, which at the time was centered on  UFOs and the Majestic 12 documents, but branched off in all directions. I was more interested in local phenomena, as was Milford.

Our interests intersected with treasure hunting, as I discussed in my previous book, and occasionally they coincided.

 Bill always tried to have a guest speaker of some sort for the meetings. I related the story of the pistol that Milford found in my first book, Treasures of the Eastern Shore. He found the pistol prior to a  Nu Atlantis meeting.

The guest that night was a local hypnotherapist, and she held the rusty pistol to her forehead, attempting to gain a psychic impression from it.  Milford found the pistol at a 300-year-old house site, and believed it dated from the early 1800’s. Our guest pronounced that it belonged to a man in striped pantaloons that used it to defend his family.

Whether this was true or not, we never learned.

 Another guest was Dale  Kaczmarek, who at the time was a well-known ghost hunter. I’ll tell of our adventure with him later in this book. The only other meeting that I can recall had no guest, but  Bill dressed up as a Druid priest, proclaiming that he had joined the Wiccan religion as practiced by the ancient Celts.

His vestments were the objects of derision by some, one of which called: “Throw money!” which caused another to nearly fall in the floor with laughter. Nu Atlantis made one investigation, as will be mentioned below, and took one field trip to the Edgar  Cayce foundation.

 Four of us, Bill, myself, Tim, and his sister Julie, all ventured to Virginia Beach, Virginia to tour the legacy of Edgar Cayce, known during his lifetime as “the sleeping prophet.”

He was so called because he would unveil numerous predictions while under hiypnosis, or “asleep.”

 One of his more definite pronouncements concerned the discovery of Atlantis, something Bill was interested in. Alas, Nu Atlantis was short-lived, dying out when Bill left the Wicca to become a Ba’hai and turned his BBS into a Ba’hai BBS.

Life had moved on, and I slowly turned away from the supernatural and toward military history.

 I never completely discarded my curiosity, though, and it manifested itself in my writings. I developed stories about werewolves, vampires, aliens, and deals with the Devil.

None of them sold.

I got married, started a family, and put all those things away, converting my love for the unknown into a deepening relationship with God. However, I still tried to push my stories, and it was through this effort that started me on the path that led to me write this book.

 It started one day around the turn of the millennium  when I read an article in the local paper about a fellow named Jay. His appearance in this book is brief, so Jay is how I will refer to him.

The article mentioned that he was working on a film about vampires. My last unsold novel was about vampires, so I decided to get in touch with him to sell him my novel as a basis for a film. What did I know? Anyway, I knew the reporter, so I called her up and she put me in touch with Jay.

 To make a long story short, my novel never made it to film. Jay and I did some unprofitable work together and our final attempt was preliminary work on a documentary film to be titled Haunted Delmarva.

We did some taping, held some interviews, and made plans to find a venue, but I was running out of patience with the film idea in general and gave it up to try my hand at bookselling part time.

I lost touch with Jay some time after the spring of 2002. However, I still had a large pile of documentation from the work already done. What you hold in your hands is the sum of this work, with additional material based on a study of local legends that I had heard of and collected for this book.

A number of stories in this book are told for the first time. In some instances, I am not able to use the person’s name, because, quite frankly, they are afraid that others will think they’re crazy. However, all have told me that they seriously believe that what they experienced was real.

 I am not a professional investigator. I have no special equipment, just a sympathetic ear for people wanting to tell their stories.

Now, with the background out of the way, let’s dive in, starting with the more mundane mysteries and then deeper, into the supernatural and  unknowns.