Salisbury’s Pemberton Park in the Dark Since I come from the Eastern Shore of this state, I was surprised to hear a ghost story I was previously unaware of. The story takes place in a park in Salisbury. The person who told me the story is a 19-year-old sophomore at the University, and we spoke about it one evening after dinner. He believes it to be true, because one of his friend’s siblings has apparently experienced the ghost firsthand. I tape-recorded his narrative: In Pemberton Park, about 30 years ago…exactly 30 years ago in a few weeks, actually, a young student got his heart broken. His girlfriend had loved him, or so it seemed, but…she found another guy. And the girl he had loved so much told him that their love was now dead. So he decided that he would be dead also. He walked to Pemberton Park and took a stroll along the lake, far away from everyone else, especially the girl who had hurt him. He was happy there, alone. But he dragged a heavy rope behind him anyway. He found a perfect tree above the bridge on the river. That night he hung himself out of hurt and hatred. But just as he jumped, he realized that he didn’t hate it there. He awoke the next day and saw a strange sight—his own body! He soon realized that he had died of sadness in a place of happiness, and he was destined to remain there the rest of his life, alone. But then something happened—Pemberton Park became popular. Especially among couples. Lovers would walk holding hands and the young man would sit silently, jealous and mad that they were invading his space. It happened more and more, but he did nothing. Nothing…nothing…until one night, almost twenty-five years ago, when his old girlfriend came to Pemberton Park with her new lover. When he saw her, he was filled with rage. He could not take it any more. Night fell, and his old girlfriend kissed her new boyfriend. It was her last kiss. After a huge manhunt, the police found her body, with her boyfriend’s, hanging over the river by the bridge. That’s why you aren’t supposed to wander deep into Pemberton Park this time of the year…and especially not with someone you love.
“We have travelled from Florida to Radford, Virginia on four different occasions to investigate St. Albans,” said Terri. During that time they have experienced a plethora of paranormal activity, including the sounds of disembodied voices, the vision of a full-body apparition, having an investigator slapped by an unseen hand, disembodied growling, and a disappearing door, among others.
When one usually thinks of a hearing a ghost story, the setting is dark with flickering light (such as around a campfire or in a basement with bad lighting) and, of course, it is nighttime. Needless to say, when I heard this story during the middle of the day on a Friday, I was a little taken aback. When prompted for any urban legends or ghost stories a white, female friend of mine immediately responded with, “Have you ever heard of de Sales Academy?” With my negative response, the nineteen year old student jumped into her story:
I was told a story about one of Cloudcroft's more famous ghosts when casually lounging in the undergraduate student physics lounge at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a group of students during a lunch break before class. This occurred during early April, 2005. I inquired whether anyone knew any ghost stories or folklore. A friend of mine volunteered that she knew several ghost stories from her travels. The storyteller was a 23-year-old Caucasian female from an upper-middle class family in Baltimore. She currently lives in Crofton, MD, and is a physics and astronomy major.
In April I sat down with a friend at my house and asked about any urban legends or ghost stories he had encountered. After a couple legends he had seen in movies, he mentioned a haunted bridge about ten minutes away from downtown. He is a twenty-one year-old White male; his father owns an appliance store and his mother helps out with the books. He first heard this story in the ninth grade from a couple of friends. Supposedly, they had heard from kids who had actually been to the bridge and heard strange things at night. The bridge is located off of Uniontown road, between a couple old farms. He has not encountered the bridge first hand but still remembers the story surrounding it:
After April and Roger search desperately for Cheryl, they look for several weeks, and have no idea where she has gone. One night Cheryl’s friend Nancy calls April, and explains that she was leaving with her, but she had left suddenly and believes she is going to do something bad. April remembers that Cheryl told her how their mother committed suicide, by jumping off the Louis Bridge. When they arrive at the bridge a group of people say they saw a women jumped off and commit suicide about five minutes before they arrived.
The book, What’s So Super About the Supernatural tells of well known stories about poltergeists. A poltergeist is a noisy or high energy ghost who might perform violent activity. A young girl by the name of Tina Resch lived in Ohio and is known to be a poltergeist. “No ghost was ever seen or heard on camera; however when the camera was inadvertently left running, the tape showed Tina surreptitiously pulling over a lamp” (Gardner). The evidence was found after people were reporting the activity. Newspaper reporters went to the scene to check out the action only to find evidence of Tina throwing objects violently around the house. Another example of proof that ghosts exist goes back to a case involving a poltergeist in England. An eleven-year-old boy by the name of Matthew Manning performed several violent actions that his dad had noticed and reported. Gardner writes, “ On one occasion, Matthew’s bed was thrown about and left leaning at an angle against the wall” (Gardner). These examples are not the only reported cases regarding ghosts and paranormal activity. Many stories about the supernatural have been told and passed down for several generations. Spirits are even mentioned in well known religious books that have been passed down for hundreds of
The University of Maryland has a rich history dating back to its founding in 1856 as the Maryland Agricultural College. Built between 1804 and 1812, The Rossborough Inn is the oldest building on campus today (Ghost Tour, 2). With its history, it is no surprise that the Inn has been a hotspot for ghost activity. Knowing that there have been numerous reports of ghosts at Rossborough, I visited the Inn to ask current employees at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, located in Rossborough Inn, if they themselves had experienced anything bizarre or if they had known others who had. I entered the small office where three women were talking and with their permission asked about their experiences with ghosts at Rossborough. Upon asking my question, all three smiled, although shaking their head, they indicated they had not. However, they all had heard of the stories, and one of the women replied and told me to speak with the University Archivist. She told me that she has spoken with the archivist, and upon learning the stories, she said that she “got freaked out and really wanted to go home.”
As I sat down with the narrator in his dorm on a Sunday afternoon—not the most appropriate time for ghost stories—he told me this well known ghost story from New Mexico. The storyteller is an 18-year-old male freshman majoring in international relations who is from Bethesda, Maryland. He is biracial with an American father and a Taiwanese mother. Born in California and raised in Colorado, the storyteller is a converted Christian. The teller was in the Boy Scouts, which is where this story comes from:
Karr-Morse, R., & Wiley, M. S. (1997). Ghost from the Nursery. New York : The Atlantic Monthly Press.
www.theatcoghost.com--A site detailing directions on how to see the ghost with an accompanying message board in which individuals recount their own experiences of attempting to witness the ghost.
There’s a haunted house in Dover, Delaware called the Governor’s Mansion, where all of the Governors of Delaware have lived. If you go to the house yourself, you might see or experience a couple different ghosts. One evening, a guest to the house passed an old man dressed in old-fashioned clothes while going down the stairs for dinner. Once at the table the guest asked the owners who the person was. The curious owners asked for a description of the man. The description that the visitor sent chills down the spines of the owners, as it was an exact description of the owner’s father who had been dead for many years, and nobody else was in the house. The father had also been known for getting drunk a lot, so to this day he can still be seen drinking any liquor left out in the open. The mansion is also known for being a part of the Underground Railroad, so lots of slaves were always coming and going through the house at night. One night the house got busted and one of the runaway slaves ran and hid in a big tree in the yard. The slave was up there for a while and was already tired from his journey to the house.
friend that his ghost usually appeared when there were tourists in the building. She wasn’t sure
A 19-year old female from Harford County, Maryland, narrated the story of Black Aggie, the urban legend of an overnight stay in a cemetery. She grew up Christian, and still lives in one of the more rural areas of Maryland with her younger sister and parents, who own and work at an electrical contracting business. Accustomed to hearing many ghost stories and urban legends, she first heard the story of Black Aggie during a middle school slumber party. Late one Saturday night over pizza in our Hagerstown dorm, she was more than willing to share her favorite urban legend with me.
In his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet contemplates death and existence. To him, death is full of unknowns and existence is full of suffering and pain. Eventually, he decides to endure “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/that flesh is heir to…” (Shakespeare 62-3) rather than face the possible horrors that might be revealed in death. Kumin’s “In the Park” agrees with Hamlet in the aspect that death and the afterlife is mysterious. Through the exploration of Buddhist and Jewish beliefs on death and the near death experience of Roscoe Black with a grizzly bear in Glacier Park, Kumin comes to a conclusion that death is inevitable and non-discriminatory. Her nonchalant acceptance of death contrasts with Hamlet’s fear of death. The attitude of both poems towards life further sets them apart. Hamlet is tormented and intimidated by the suffering and pains of existence while Kumin subtly appreciates the complexity of life and the possibilities it offers.
Savannah is supposedly one of the most haunted cities in America, and later in the week on the same trip, we decided to go on one of Savannah's biggest tourist traps. A ghost tour. We walked around the city on a Wednesday night at ten PM for about two hours. We walked outside of buildings that may have had many deaths in and was supposed to be filled with paranormal activity, but we never went inside. We just got stories of people allegedly seeing ghosts through the window. It was terribly at the time but it was worth it to be