HEARD BUT NOT SEEN

Point Lookout State Park, in southern Maryland, is now a popular stop for tourists. During the Civil War, however, it was a scene of utter horror. Some say faint traces of this horror still linger.

The area was used by the government as a prisoner of war camp. It was officially known as Camp Hoffman. There were never any barracks. The prisoners lived in small tents. The land was low, marshy, and very unhealthy. There were regular outbreaks of smallpox, dysentery, scurvy, and other diseases. Between July 1863 and June 1865, over fifty thousand Confederate soldiers passed through the camp. Some four thousand of them died there.

Later some monuments to the Confederate dead were erected. In 1964 the land was purchased by the state of Maryland for a recreational area. It was then that the tales of strange and ghostly sounds began to circulate.

During the 1970s the park manager, Gerald Sword, lived in a large house on the park grounds. The building was called the Lighthouse. Sword swore the house was haunted. Doors opened and shut mysteriously; footsteps were heard in empty rooms and on deserted staircases. The sound of objects crashing to the ground would send people running to see what had happened. But nothing could be found.

Then Sword said he began hearing faint conversations. He could never pinpoint the source of the voices, nor could he hear what they were talking about. It was just the low and mysterious murmur of human voices. On other occasions he heard coughing and snoring. He felt invisible entities brush past him as he entered a room. And there was the constant feeling of being watched by unseen eyes.

Only once did Sword report actually seeing a ghost. He was sitting in the kitchen when he once again got that eerie feeling of being watched. He looked out the windows and saw the face of a young man wearing a floppy cap and a loose-fitting coat, looking back at him. He rushed to the window but the figure walked away and disappeared.

Sword thought that he could actually identify this particular ghost. It was not one of the Confederate prisoners. In 1878 a large steamer had broken up in a storm near Point Lookout. Thirty-one people were killed. The body of a young crewman named Joseph Haney was washed up on the beach at Point Lookout. He was buried near where his body had been found. Haney's description, printed in the newspapers of the time, matched exactly that of the young man Sword had seen at his window.

Another house on the property is located just across the road from the Confederate monument. It too has been troubled by strange and ghostly sounds.

A group of people interested in studying ghosts decided to try out the EVP procedure at Point Lookout. They figured that with so many reports of ghostly voices they had a chance at getting some on tape. Tape recorders were set up at places where the ghostly sounds had frequently been reported.

Though no voices were heard during the recording sessions, the group did believe they could detect faint voices and other sounds on their tapes when the tapes were replayed. One recording had what sounded exactly like the whistle of a steamboat. That would have been a common sound around Point Lookout many years ago, but steamboats have not operated in the area for a long time.

Men's voices on the tapes seem to use such phrases as "living in the Lighthouse" and "going home." Another interesting phrase heard on the tapes is "fire if they get too close." One woman's voice seemed to be using the word "vaccine" and another seemed to say, "Let us not take objections to what they are doing."

Do these tapes prove that there are ghosts at Point Lookout? They certainly do not. They are just another interesting bit of evidence about ghosts that has been collected. It's the sort of thing that keeps you wondering.