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Montgomery County residents seem to love a good ghost story.
Whether they believe them or not, few can resist haunted tales this time of year.
An unwelcome visitor
Emily Correll, school programs coordinator for the Rockville-based Montgomery County Historical Society, does not believe in things that go bump in the night, but she can't resist a good ghost story.
Seated behind a desk on a recent rainy afternoon, her voice took on an air of mystery as she recalled the tale of Revolutionary War Col. Richard Brooke.
As the story goes, Brooke, a Quaker, angered the Society of Friends when he joined the colonists to fight in the war. Quakers are pacifists, so he was subsequently expelled from the community and his body was not allowed to be buried in what is now the Sandy Spring Friends Meetinghouse graveyard when he died. Instead, his body was laid to rest at Fair Hill, his estate in Olney.
"Over the years, people seemed to hear a man on a horse riding around the property, sometimes at night and sometimes in the day time," Correll said. "You'd be entertaining friends and you'd hear clop, clop, clop. It would go away for a while and then it would come back — clop, clop, clop — as if he were circling the property."
But no one seemed to mind too much until his ghost got in the way of the wrong woman.
One nice autumn day, the lady of the house was sweeping her steps when the door to the manse flew open "and a man on horseback rode through the front hall and started riding up the steps," Correll said.
"She took a broom and started sweeping him out the door, ‘Shoo, go, go away!' He went out the door and she kept chasing after him until finally he and his horse disappeared into Richard Brooke's grave."
Correll leaned back in the chair and declared she does not believe the story for one second, but enjoys hearing it and other spooky tales.
"People do like to hear stories of the old days and if it has a little bit of the supernatural element in it, makes it even more fun," she said.
A friendly spirit
James Ricciuti knew he was getting a historic building when he purchased the 200-year-old Olney House in 1997, but he may have also gotten more than he bargained for.
Strange happenings and even a sighting or two have led Ricciuti and others to believe the mansion he converted into a restaurant in the heart of Olney is inhabited by the spirit of Nancy, a young girl who may have lived in the house 200 years ago.
"The story behind the ghost at the Olney House is, there's a little girl named Nancy, probably 10 or 12 years old, who was the illegitimate child of one of the owners of the house back in the early 1800s," he said.
The story goes that she was accidentally killed in a hunting incident in the fields around the house, he said.
Aside from all the faucets in the kitchen being on when Ricciutti opens up in the morning or things sometimes being out of place with no explanation, Nancy's presence is rarely felt, he said.
But occasionally he is reminded of her presence.
"Most recently the alarm went off in the restaurant and the police came in, the door was open and they sent in a canine unit," he said.
The dog tracked someone, or something, to the attic, but there was no one there, he said.
Once a customer was leaving with her daughter when the daughter turned and pointed at one of the dormer windows that line the roof and said she saw a little girl.
The mother saw nothing, Ricciutti said.
While he himself is a skeptic, Ricciuti said Nancy seems like a friendly spirit, so he does not mind her hanging around.
Still in charge
Raymon Zeender's family owns historic Blair Mansion in Silver Spring, a property that sits nestled on the border with the District of Columbia among brick apartments and fast-food restaurants.
But when Abner Shoemaker gave the mansion to his daughter Abigail as a wedding present in the early 1890s, it sat on more than 100 acres of land valued at more than $21 million.
Abigail's husband gambled away the land and value of the mansion in just 10 years, and the estate had to be sold at tax auction, Zeender said.
But Abigail wants visitors to know she is still the lady of the house and is purported to still roam the halls, he said.
Lights are turned on or off and items are found out of place frequently in the house, he said. Recently a Zeender family crest hung on the wall was found on the ground, which Zeender said is just Abigail letting the family know she is still in charge.
But the only sighting of Abigail's apparition was by a musician who came to play at the mansion a few months ago.
"He was here with me one night and I asked him to turn the lights off upstairs and he said he did, except for where the cleaning lady was cleaning," Zeender said. "He said he saw a lady with a bucket and a broom. On a Sunday night at 6 o'clock we don't have cleaning ladies in here. He went bananas when I said there was nobody cleaning the place."
Who ya gonna call?
While some people may run away from ghosts, paranormal investigators Bill Hartley and Jim Stoner are more than happy to visit a haunted house. And they'll do it free of charge.
Hartley, a Curtis Bay resident who sports a Ghostbusters tattoo on his arm, founded the Baltimore-based Greater Maryland Paranormal Society (GMPS) about three years ago with one goal in mind: to come to the rescue of anybody who might need help with the paranormal.
Growing up, the self-proclaimed skeptic says he was convinced there were odd things going on in his home, but also feared he might be crazy.
"And then when I found out that in fact what I was seeing in the house matched the description of a person that hung himself in the basement of the house in the 1960s, I kind of got a little bit of relief from that," Hartley said. "So my main goal is to make it so people don't have to wait 17 years to find out if there's something going on and try to give them peace of mind in any way we can."
If a story sounds credible, Hartley said a team will investigate the property's history. Then come the tape recorders, cameras, Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors and other gadgets.
Investigators first try to disprove there is a haunting.
Hartley and his team were once asked to check out a house in Germantown, but nothing – or no one – showed up.
But sometimes they capture a disembodied voice on a tape recorder or a strange occurrence.
"I mean, we've gotten recordings in rooms where no one's been there and we've gotten noises, so that's something," Stoner said.
