Ghosts of Chestertown and Kent County

By Alice Diane Saylor Daniels

Discover the haunting history and local lore of one of the oldest counties along the Chesapeake Bay’s Eastern Shore.

Strange encounters and ghostly presences haunt the historic streets of Chestertown and the backcountry roads of Kent County. In this fascinating volume, author and local historian D.S. Daniels explores the events behind the ghost lore of Chestertown and Kent County.

The centuries-old Kent County Courthouse may be home to the ghost of Esther Anderson, who was sentenced to burn at the stake in 1746. Strange lights float above Caulk's Field, where fallen British marines were buried during the War of 1812. The scent of lavender accompanies the ghost of Aunt Polly at the Geddes-Piper House, while the spectral Tall Man waits for passersby on a lonely country bridge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625854896

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INTRODUCTION

In writing this book, there were times that I wondered if I was writing a book about history or a book about ghosts. The simple answer to that question is that it is about both.

Even if I had wanted to write a book just about ghosts, I would find it difficult to talk about anything regarding Kent County without talking about its history. This lovely little county on the Chesapeake is unique in that an extraordinary portion of its landscape and built environment continues to reflect the centuries of history played out on its fields and shores and in its towns and villages.

Tucked on to a peninsula bordered by the Chesapeake, the Chester and the Sassafras Rivers, Kent County is the tiniest of Maryland counties both in geography and population, with only 413 square miles, 136 of that in water, and around twenty thousand residents, only seven thousand more than in the 1790 census. Yet it has ten Century Farms, three National Register Historic Districts and over seven hundred sites on the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties. Chestertown, the county seat, with only around 5,270 residents, boasts more eighteenth-century homes still in use than any Maryland community other than Annapolis. Its riverfront promenade of grand houses, some built by planter merchants whose enterprise and industry led Chestertown to become a center of colonial economic and cultural activity, has cast much the same reflection in the Chester River for over three centuries.

The wharf at Turner’s Creek has been used since the eighteenth century, and the Granary has stood since the nineteenth century.

Rock Hall, Galena and Millington began as villages that served as stopping points for travelers since English-speaking people first arrived. The first settlers of what is now Betterton were supposedly helped by Native Americans, and Captain John Smith embarked on its shores.

Colonial estate houses, some still lived in by the same families who settled there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, can be found throughout the county. Kent County has the highest percentage of acreage devoted to agriculture of any Maryland county, and soil tilled centuries ago still remains as farmland. The still active wharf at the public park of Turner’s Creek was a distribution point for grain to supply the Revolution.

The windswept marshes of Eastern Neck Wildlife Preserve look much as they might have when English settlers first took up land grants there in the 1650s. And at the churchyard of old St. Paul’s, perhaps the oldest remaining religious structure on the Eastern Shore, souls lie buried who died long before America became a country. Washington College is the tenth-oldest college in America and the first to be founded after we became a country. Caulk’s Field is still a cornfield, as it was two hundred years ago, and is among the most pristine battlefields in the United States. One of only two African American GAR Halls left in the country is a center of community activity today.

But history isn’t just about historic sites and structures. History tells us a story about the intertwining of people, land and events that shape us. And what makes a story better than a ghost?

Entertainment isn’t the only reason I share the ghost stories of Kent County along with its history, although I confess when I wrote a script for a ghost walk for the Historical Society of Kent County, it was. But in the search for ghostly tales related to historic properties, I began to accept that people were sharing experiences with me that were every bit as real as the fact that George Washington did, indeed, sleep in Kent County.

Certainly some of the tales contained here are simply the stuff of legend. Some are anecdotes of magical practices brought from across the seas, and some are just unusual incidents. But for most of the stories shared in this volume, there seems to be no explanation other than to say that some echos of the past can exist side by side with the present.

St. Paul’s Church, circa 1692, is among the oldest religious structures remaining on the Eastern Shore.

George Washington once said, Death is the great abyss from which no one can return. Could he have been wrong? This I can say with surety: if Kent County has more than its share of history, it also has more than its share of ghosts.

Contained herein, roughly divided by time period, is the story of Kent County, along with the encounters of its living residents with those who are not.

CHAPTER 1

THE GEDDES-PIPER HOUSE

The Geddes-Piper House, longtime home of the Historical Society of Kent County, is tucked away on Church Alley in Chestertown. It’s a stone’s throw from the main thoroughfare of High Street, yet visitors often have difficulty finding it or fail to recall on what street they’d been after they leave. From High Street down Court Street—more familiar as Lawyer’s Row to the locals, where tiny offices have housed attorneys for over a century—past the back entrance to the courthouse, turn down Church Alley, and you’ll find the Geddes-Piper House on the right where it has sat since it was built in the 1780s.

The lot itself had been purchased by James Moore in 1730 and from his daughters, by William Geddes, Collector of His Majesty’s Customs for the District of Chester, in 1771. The property was sold to James Piper and his wife, Tabitha, in 1784. There remains some question of whether Geddes or Piper built the house, but it was likely James Piper.

A Philadelphia-style town house, the first of its kind in Kent County, the Geddes-Piper House was built at a time when the industrious James Piper—a merchant and watch maker who also ran a packet boat on the Chester River—might have thought Chestertown could become a second Philadelphia. A bustling shipping port, the first area in Maryland to transition from tobacco to wheat production, and the shortest route between Virginia and points north, Kent County had realized tremendous economic activity during the 1700s.

The Geddes-Piper House when it was still a residence.

Present-day Emmanuel Church was originally Chester Parish. Its eighteenth-century rector William Smith was instrumental in forming the Episcopal Church in America, thereby breaking away from the English Anglican Church.

Culturally, with its theater, horse racing, a gentlemen’s club, parties and balls, colonial Chestertown was to the Eastern Shore what Annapolis was to the rest of Maryland.

Tonight there is another Concert and Ball I shall just go and hear the Music. Of the Races I say nothing. They are a burlesque upon that diversion, wrote Henrietta Tilghman, sister of General Washington’s aide-de-camp, Tench Tilghman, of Chestertown in 1783.

Washington College had been founded that same year by William Smith, rector of Chester Parish, now historic Emmanuel Church in the heart of Chestertown. (Smith had also been instrumental in establishing the Episcopal church in America, as he and his fellow Anglican priests had been bound to swear allegiance to the king.) Smith persuaded George Washington to sit on the college’s Board of Governors and Visitors; one of Washington’s eight trips to Chestertown was to attend a board of governors meeting in 1784.

But the glory days were coming to a close. As land opened up in the west in Pennsylvania and Ohio and the port of Baltimore rose to preeminence, the Eastern Shore would become isolated, and Chestertown, although continually prosperous, would never again see the activity that it had enjoyed during the colonial era.

Mr. Piper soon followed fortune across the bay to Baltimore, and the house passed through several owners until it was purchased by George Burgen Westcott in the 1830s. Westcott, an enterprising man from New Jersey, became one of the most successful businessmen in mid-nineteenth-century Kent County. The house would remain in the Westcott family until the early 1900s, when Polly Wickes Westcott moved to a smaller home after the death of her servant Charles, without whom she said she couldn’t handle the old brick house.

The house served briefly as a Moose Lodge and then a girls’ school. Church Alley became a small African   American   neighborhood for several decades; during that time, the Geddes-Piper House was an apartment building. The historical society purchased the building in 1958, and its refurbishment ushered in the significant restoration that would lead Chestertown to become a National Landmark Historic District.

George Burgin Westcott purchased the Geddes-Piper House in the 1830s. The Westcott family resided there until the early twentieth century.

Inside, the Geddes-Piper House is beautifully furnished with period pieces and artifacts in various decorated rooms, including the house’s original cellar kitchen. The society’s office is on the second floor, and the research library is on the third (at the time of this writing, plans are underway to move these to the Bordley History Center in the middle of town).

The Geddes-Piper House served as the headquarters of the Historical Society of Kent County following its purchase in 1956 and subsequent restoration.

The front parlor of the Geddes-Piper House.

When I became executive director of the society, I didn’t think about ghosts. I thought about history. History to me is all about stories—true ones, of course, but stories nonetheless. Many of the tales from Kent County history far surpass any work of fiction in excitement, adventure and human drama. So, instead of concentrating on materials culture and decorative arts, traditionally the emphasis of many house museums, we began to use each decorated room as a backdrop to tell the story of a particular time in local history, appealing to a much broader audience than Hepplewhites and Chinese Export.

In the process, we moved furniture around and changed things that had apparently been in the same position for many years. We had more visitors, more events and more researchers coming to the library.

As our activity increased, I started to get stories back from our visitors. Some, of course, were about various aspects of local history and genealogy, but many were very specific to the Geddes-Piper House itself.

It seemed that some people were seeing things that I certainly didn’t.

The first report came from a guest who arrived very late to one of our new events: First Friday History Happy Hour. As executive director, I was also the dishwasher and was cleaning up when two people who had misunderstood the hours of the event stepped into the darkened house. I invited them to wander through the house while I finished up. It was a winter’s night, and only a few electric candles glowing softly in the windows lit their way.

The couple came back to the working kitchen on the first floor, where I had just put away the last of the wine glasses.

Do you know you have a ghost? the lady asked.

No, I replied, not certain what to say.

I know it sounds strange, she said, but I see things. There’s a little girl looking out the window on the landing of the stairs leading up to the library. She described a child with blond ringlets and an old-fashioned dress peering out at the house’s backyard, darkened by the winter’s night.

I had long understood that some people seemed to be sensitive to things that I couldn’t see or hear. I’d also always been open to all possibilities; after all, life itself can be so strange, filled with the unexpected, so who was I to judge someone else’s experience? I thought little of it at the time.

But as it turned out, I would come to be familiar with the phrase I see things, most always prefaced with I know this sounds strange.

More than one visitor saw the little girl, always on the second floor or above, often looking out one of the windows. Soon it appeared that the little girl had company.

People started reporting the presence of a diminutive woman, also on the upper floors. We began to refer to her as Aunt Polly, for Polly Westcott, a very petite lady whom many of the old guard in town had identified with the house. On more than one occasion, we caught the scent of lavender on the first floor, so possibly Aunt Polly did wander down to check things out. We were a bit disrespectful by referring to it as the smelly ghost, even though it was a very pleasant scent.

Things got even stranger when a visitor came in with an old Polaroid camera. Can I take some pictures? he asked. I welcomed him to do so. We were not about roped off-areas and stanchions—one time I’d even talked a weary board member into using the front bedroom to take a nap.

The man came back to proudly show me his photographs. The most striking was of the stairs leading up to the third floor; in the middle was the ghostly image of a woman’s face and shoulders, floating above the steps.

I guess this sounds strange, the photographer said, "but I see things. That’s why I like