Gather around Ron Angleberger and he’ll tell you a truth-based ghost story anywhere Frederick spirits haunt - on Second Street, Record Street and beyond.
But don’t let his colored contacts, top hat and lantern scare you – Angleberger is just playing the part on his weekly ‘‘Candlelight Ghost Tours of Frederick” that meets on Market Street and meanders through downtown streets as the sky darkens.
Angleberger, a Frederick resident and Civil War re-enactor, has amassed more than 75 eyewitness accounts of paranormal activity in Frederick. Each story is documented in audiotaped interviews and corroborated by others.
‘‘The stories we tell are ... based on actual people who have experienced them,” he said this week.
Angleberger’s Candlelight Ghost Tours of Frederick is a part of several guided tours that explore the paranormal year-round, not just around Halloween.
Angleberger said he has had his own experiences with the paranormal at Monocacy, Antietam and Gettysburg battlefields and started the Candlelight Ghost Tours of Frederick eight years ago. The tour also weaves in the history of Frederick, a place he calls ‘‘Maryland’s most haunted city.”
From June to November, Angleberger or another of the company’s five local guides, tells ghost stories in front of various homes, museums and buildings during the 90-minute walking tour. In the summer, the tour seems to be packed with tourists, Angleberger noted, while the cooler fall months attract more locals and bigger crowds.
On the other side of town, Christina Murphy, head gardener at Schifferstadt Architectural Museum, often hears visitors ask, ‘‘Have you seen a ghost?”
Schifferstadt, an 18th century stone farmhouse, has seen its fair share of history and ghostly activity since it was built more than 250 years ago by German immigrants.
Last year, Schifferstadt created a ‘‘Spirit Tour” to answer visitors’ perennial questions about ghosts at the museum. Since it started, attendance has increased consistently, Murphy said this week.
Every Friday, Murphy dons a 1750s German colonial costume and leads groups of families, college students or thrill-seekers and shares a collection of stories from former visitors and docents and mixes in historical facts.
One story says that in the 1980s, museum docents were working inside the house when they heard hammering and other construction sounds and people speaking German, Murphy said. Though she can’t entirely prove the story, ‘‘if it makes for an interesting tour, I’m not going to say no,” Murphy said.
On Sunday, Alexandra Windsong’s class, ‘‘Developing your Intuition” at The Healing Way, visited Schifferstadt Architectural Museum as an exercise in tuning into the energies, emotions and auras around them.
The class went from room to room in the museum, taking notice of the energy around them and then talking about it as a group. Several group members heard music or humming in the parlor room, she said.
‘‘When people are picking up on things ... they’re picking up on the energy of things that have happened in the past,” Windsong said.
When the group took the museum’s Spirit Tour after their exercise, they learned that music would have been a large part of family life in the parlor rooms.
For Angleberger, the lure of ghost or spirit tours is simply the combination of theater, escapism and adventure, though some may see it as macabre.
‘‘It lets people get away from their everyday routine and imagine things that had taken place in the past,” he said. ‘‘Overall, people have an interest in the unknown and in stuff that you can’t explain or have no scientific explanation for them.”
Spooky sights
Candlelight Ghost Tours of Frederick
8:15 p.m., Saturdays through September; 7:30 in October, November
Tours leave from 124 N. Market St., Frederick
$8 for adults, $4 for children
301-668-8922; www.marylandghosttours.com
Schifferstadt Architectural Museum spirit tours
7 p.m. & 8 p.m., every Friday
1110 Rosemont Ave., Frederick
$6 for adults, $4 for students, seniors; free for children younger than 12
