Good evening. Do come in.
You have come to call on a house in mourning. The year is 1849, the street is Wolfe Street, and a few blocks south of where you stand the clipper ships are still coming in off the harbor.
Speak softly. The family has drawn the curtains and covered the mirrors, as a house does when death has come calling, and they would take it kindly if you did not stare too long at the one mirror they have left bare.
You may take the stairs or the lift to the third floor. Both get you there. Only one of them gets you there slowly enough for a story, so if you ride, read as you rise.
Look for a small brass card at each landing. Scan it, and the next chapter opens.
Mobtown, 1849
Baltimore liked to call itself the Monumental City. Everyone else had a less flattering name for it. Mobtown. The city earned that one the honest way, with street gangs and elections treated more as contact sport than civic duty.
Into this town, at the end of September 1849, stepped Edgar Allan Poe, off a steamer from Richmond and supposedly passing through on his way to New York. Then he disappeared for the better part of a week.
On the third of October a printer from the Baltimore Sun found him at a tavern that was doing double duty as a polling place. Poe was delirious, barely coherent, and wearing clothes that were not his own. He never managed to explain what had happened.
One theory, still argued over, is cooping: gangs would grab a stranger, ply him with drink, change his coat and hat, and march him from poll to poll to vote again and again. It fits the tavern. It fits the borrowed clothes. It fits Mobtown rather too well.
Onward: Chapter III, on the next landing
The hospital on the hill
They took Poe by carriage up Broadway to the Washington College Hospital, which still stands up Broadway, about a mile north of where you are climbing. He died there before dawn on Sunday, the seventh of October. His medical records did not survive. The newspapers settled on "congestion of the brain," which is the sort of phrase that means "we would rather not say."
The building kept a darker reputation of its own. Baltimore had around half a dozen medical schools in the nineteenth century, every one of them in need of bodies to study, and for decades taking a corpse from a fresh grave was not even a crime in Maryland. The men who did the digging called it resurrection.
Neighbours around the old hospital told stories of graves emptied overnight and people who went missing a little too conveniently. At least once, by local account, they tried to burn the place down.
A little further on, around the Hopkins medical school, East Baltimore children were told for generations to be home before the streetlamps came on, or the doctor man would catch them. Some of the old-timers still remember the warning.
Onward: Chapter IV, keep climbing
The water line
By 1761 Edward Fell had laid out the grid of streets you walked in on tonight, on a hook of land with deep water and plenty of timber close at hand. Fells Point built ships. Fast ones. The Baltimore clippers came off these slipways, and with them came sailors from everywhere, immigrants with one bag apiece, and taverns enough to keep them all.
It was crowded and it was not healthy. When cholera reached Baltimore in the summer of 1832, Poe's own family packed up and left the congested streets of Fells Point for a little house on Amity Street, then out among the pastures.
Not every story on this waterfront is a ghost story. Some are about the living who refused to stay where they were put. A teenager named Frederick Douglass, enslaved, was hired out to these shipyards as a caulker, sealing the seams of hulls with pitch and handing his wages to the man who claimed to own him. He lived on Philpot Street, on the other side of the neighbourhood. In 1838, dressed as a sailor and carrying papers borrowed from one, he boarded a northbound train and did not come back as anyone's property.
He did come back, though. In 1892 he bought land on Dallas Street and built houses there to rent to Black shipyard workers. And in 1866 Isaac Myers, another Fells Point caulker, organized a Black-owned shipyard and a union to go with it.
Onward: Chapter V, almost there
Thames Street after dark
Two and a half centuries of sailors, smugglers, privateers and hard living leave a residue. Fells Point is, depending on who is counting, the most haunted neighbourhood in Baltimore. A few of its long-term residents, as the local ghost-keepers tell it:
- Edgar, at The Horse You Came In OnThe staff name their mischievous tavern spirit after a certain poet. The poet has not objected.
- The girl on the stairs at Bertha'sA little girl seen on the staircase. She has no face, which is the detail people tend to remember.
- The nurse at the old Admiral Fell InnA long-dead nurse who, guests report, still checks on them. Now The William Fell, the building has changed its name. She has not changed her rounds.
- The ladies of the Cat's EyeThe pub is a live-music fixture on Thames Street. Some of its regulars, apparently, stopped paying for drinks a very long time ago.
- Doc, at Duda's TavernA ghost on familiar terms with the staff, who call him by his nickname.
None of them has ever left Fells Point. A few, the ghost-keepers say, are not above following a visitor up the stairs.
Onward: Chapter VI, through the door
Pull up a chair.
You have climbed out of Mobtown, past the hospital on the hill, down to the waterline and along Thames Street, and arrived, as everyone eventually does, at the fire.
Find a seat near the hearth. Silence your telephone. The dead have waited a long time to be heard and they have no patience whatsoever for ringtones.
The story begins shortly.
Open the Cabinet of Curiosities
When the host invites you. Nothing is recorded unless you choose to save it.
Open the Book of Encounters
Every ghost and every Candle Goblin you met tonight, tallied before you go home.
Something to carry home: in a Victorian house of mourning, every mirror was covered. Keep an eye on the one that isn’t.