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	Staff file photo by Sam Yu With a pair of especially scary eyes, Ron Angleberger of Candlelight Ghost Tours of Frederick prepares to start a tour in downtown Frederick.

Do stories like these make a case for ghosts, or are they the works of vivid imaginations? Some reports of unusual phenomena can be logically explained; other accounts leave the listener's eyes wide.

George Wunderlich is the executive director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine at 48 E. Patrick St. in Frederick . The building, which once housed furniture makers, coffin makers and, during the Civil War, undertakers, is believed to be the most haunted building in town.

"Absolutely. The building is full of (ghosts)," said Wunderlich, who has had his own ghostly encounters there. "Some of the stories go back well before my time here." Some can be explained, he thinks, like the tales of books falling off shelves in the gift shop. He attributes that to the slick-covered books on glass shelves being vibrated off by the truck traffic on Patrick Street. Other stories seem to defy logical explanation.

Often, when he's opening the museum, phantom footsteps follow his own up a ramp on the first floor. "You can hear someone walking behind you, step for step," Wunderlich said. "I talk to them all the time. I'll turn around and say 'Still back there, eh?'"

Wunderlich said he doesn't call on the ghosts, but admits they are part of the world we live in and have always been here. As a Civil War re-enactor, he's encountered chilling apparitions and unexplainable happenings on the Gettysburg battlefield.

"I don't question that they are here. It's too imprinted in human existence to deny them," Wunderlich said.

He recalled a few nights working alone at the museum when he was interrupted by the sound of children laughing and running in the hallway outside his office. "I walked out (in the hall) and said, 'That's enough!'" The noise ended and he went on with his work.

The museum is one of the stops on the Candlelight Ghost Tours of Frederick , held on Friday and Saturday nights downtown. Ron Angleberger, owner and a ghost tour docent, said the paranormal activity presented is based upon factual events and eyewitness encounters. New stories are added each year and Angleberger hopes to compile the information into a book.

"Lots of stories are connected to the Civil War," he said, noting all the battles and troop activity in the area.

"A lot of war dead were taken there to be embalmed," Angleberger said of the museum building. "There are a lot of different things going on there. It's a very active site, to be sure."

On three separate tours in recent years, Angleberger said participants have seen a man with dark hair and wearing a white shirt in a third-story window. The image quickly disappears. "I have no idea who it is but he looks like he's from the Civil War."

People have reported seeing the shadowy figure of a woman in a long dress in a third-floor hallway. Wunderlich said that shadowy figure has actually shown herself fully to at least one person.

A chance ghost encounter is not why people come to the museum, Wunderlich said, "but they're not disappointed when they hear it is haunted."

Phantom footsteps

and crying tombstones

Angleberger's 90-minute tour stops at several sites, including one on Second Street that housed British sympathizers during the Revolutionary War. "A number of them were executed for their loyalty to King George of England," he said. A business complex is now on the site and workers claim to hear phantom footsteps and voices.

He tells of a woman he interviewed who witnessed a man dressed head to toe in black crossing the street. As the man passed close to her, she saw his eyes were empty, black sockets. "The man could be a prisoner, the constable or the executioner," Angleberger said. The figure continued walking on through a brick wall.

Three British sympathizers were executed on the site of the old courthouse, now City Hall. "One Frederick old-timer called it 'the devil's playground,'" Angleberger said. Workers there late at night have reported strange goings-on -- doors slamming shut, shadowy figures on the staircase, muffled voices in hallways and items hung on walls repositioning themselves -- which are attributed to the executed sympathizers, he said.

Angleberger noted other historic sites not included on the tour that are said to have resident ghosts. Strange figures peering out windows have been seen at the Hessian Barracks, on the campus of the Maryland School for the Deaf on South Market Street. Voices speaking in English and German have been reported at Schifferstadt Architectural Museum on Rosemont Avenue.

Sherry Cheung of Frederick has been a volunteer at Schifferstadt since May. "It's a very interesting house with a warm feeling and things happen when you least expect it." She said she's heard a man's and a woman's voice in an upstairs room and using EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recorders, has "picked up the voice of a small child."

In Emmitsburg , some old dorm rooms at Mount St. Mary's University are said to be haunted by a former priest, Angleberger said. And outside Burkittsville is Spook Hill, aka Gravity Hill, where some say that if you put your car in neutral at the bottom of the hill, the car will move up the hill supposedly pushed by the spirits of Civil War soldiers who passed through the area and had to push artillery up the hill.

Each story has different versions of exactly what happens and who or what is behind it.

One of the most important haunted sites is Prospect Hall, Angleberger said. The son of the aristocratic owner of the estate fell in love with a servant girl, he recounts. The young man was sent to boarding school in Europe and the young girl was sealed alive in a manor wall. Supposedly, her voice can be heard on the staircase.

Chad Dorsey, executive chef and co-owner of Old South Mountain Inn, near Boonsboro, said the 18th-century stone building is definitely haunted. He's owned the restaurant for nine years and has worked there a total of 18 years.

He recalled a day when he was at his desk on the second floor. "We just took over (ownership). It was the middle of the day. Sonny (his late dog) was laying on the floor in front of my desk and he's looking over my right shoulder, with the fur raised up on his neck and his tail wagging," Dorsey said.

Sonny suddenly ran to Dorsey and jumped in his lap. "I felt a presence behind me," Dorsey said. "I just sensed someone was behind me." No one else was there.

About three months ago, a patron asked a server about the woman who kept pacing back and forth at the top of the stairs in the front dining room. "The woman was wearing a velvet dress," Dorsey said. "Supposedly, in every photo we have of Madeline Dahlgren (a former owner) from the 1800s she's wearing a blue velvet dress.

"Prior to owning the (restaurant) and working here, I was a skeptic about the paranormal," Dorsey said, adding that he's very comfortable with the ghostly activity. He believes it was Dahlgren's ghost that saved the inn from a tragic fire one night by opening a door that was usually locked shut. That allowed a late-night maintenance worker to smell the smoke from the fire outside.

"I honestly think she is protecting her house," Dorsey said.

Thirty years ago, Timothy L. Cannon and Nancy Whitmore co-authored "Ghosts and Legends of Frederick County." The book has sold about 15,000 copies, Cannon said. The authors recount some ghostly activity, including that of a house that belonged to a co-worker. One night at a party, guests heard what sounded like a child sobbing upstairs. No one was there, Cannon said.

There are also reports of tombstones that cry in Woodsboro and Thurmont cemeteries. At Catoctin Furnace, people have reported seeing the apparition of a Union Civil War soldier, who was shot by Confederate soldiers and thrown still alive into the furnace.

And at Rose Hill Manor Park and Museum in Frederick , ghost tour docents tell of a little girl who once lived there. She fell out a window and died. Her hoop toy is said to be seen in the yard sometimes, according to Kari Saavedra, museum manager.

Stories of wild dogs and other beasts also fill the region's spooky legends. The snallygaster, a winged creature said to have terrorized the Middletown Valley in the early 1900s, is the subject of a book by Patrick Boyton, called "Snallygaster: The Lost Legend of Frederick County." Though the creature was believed to have been chased into the woods of Carroll County, it was reportedly killed several years later in a vat of moonshine. The story doesn't end there, as the creature was resurrected in various forms over the years.

One of them may have been Dwayyo, a hairy Bigfoot-like creature roaming the Gambrill State Park area in the mid 1960s. No sightings were ever documented, Cannon writes in his book, "and it was suggested that the Dwayyo had moved to another area," leaving the door open for its return someday.