Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne

imitations of the Minnesotan branch drove my brothers crazy.

      “Tell her to stop talking like that,” my older brother would gripe, weeks after we had returned to the Eastern Seaboard.

      I missed the sound of my father’s youth. I liked wrapping my mouth around the middle-of-the-country vowels. As a child, I was maintaining oral family history; I was tracking my family’s lore.

      “Maryland, stop talking like that,” my mother said. My mother trained my brothers and me to speak in accent-less voice. She didn’t want us to sound as nasal and consonant-sloppy as the other Baltimoreans, so we ended up sounding like we’re from nowhere.

      My red-haired friend Harp says that the nasal Baltimore accent is southern but fast. “We’re city folks and don’t have time for all the syllables,” he says. Harp’s a native Baltimorean, he’s in three bands, and he sometimes refers to himself as the King of Peru. “The people on the Eastern Shore,” he said, playing a chord on his base. “Now, they have plenty of time for all those syllables.”

      “And I don’t have time to go to the Eastern Shore,” I joked in a heavy Southern accent.

      Maryland’s Eastern Shore found time for me. In November 2002, the Dorchester Arts Center of Cambridge in the xenophobic, vaguely-Confederate, rural Eastern Shore county of Dorchester commissioned me to write a ghost walking tour for High Street in its historic West End. Formed in 1970, the Arts Center “is dedicated to providing and supporting art activities in Dorchester” and offers to the community “gallery shows, classes, art guilds, lectures and offices.”1 The Arts Center promised to pay for my travel and provide the research, and I feel sure I underbid everyone on the Eastern Shore.

      My contact at the Center was its education and arts coordinator, Judy; she had a very slight Southern accent. She told me on the phone that she was “not from Cambridge but originally from the Eastern Shore.”

      I didn’t hear from Judy again until late March 2003 when the grant money arrived and she called me.

      “You have to meet the committee as soon as possible,” she said urgently.

      “Okay,” I said. “Tell me when.”

      I had never, as a Marylander, heard of any Cambridge ghosts, and, since I was a kid, I loved ghost stories.

      Thirty years ago, my mother organized the annual Hampton Harvest School fair, and the highlight of the Fair was its Spook House, a 1960s ghost tour. It wasn’t really a house; it was an underground crawl space the length of the building. Hampton Elementary School’s built into the side of a hill, and its crawl space is a narrow, concrete path next to a hip-high wall and, beyond that, tightly packed, cool earth, sloping slowly up to the low ceiling. Its smell of moldy damp and decay creeped me out as a child; it stank of crypt and confining earth. I’m sure that stench contributed to the experience of our customers who walked along the darkened path, past the graves of monsters and the open caskets of the undead. My father painted cardboard freaks so realistic, that when we suddenly lit the fiends from below with big flashlights, the first graders screamed. My brothers and our friends dressed as mummies and popped out from behind the flimsy gravestones. We wrapped ourselves in rags and rolled bandages; we used red food coloring mixed into Vaseline for shiny blood. We laid out a smorgasbord of ghostly delicacies for the patrons to finger: peeled grapes for eyes, limp spaghetti for guts, gloves filled with wet sand for armless hands and Jell-O for gore.

      Thirty years later, I was commissioned to write a ghost walking tour of one of the most prestigious streets in the state. I wanted to tell those stories. Bandaged like a mummy and crouched in the earthen dark, I wanted to be the story of the undead, to know the twisted history of the ghoul’s previous life. What deviant path led to the cursed fate of the mummy?

      Ghost tours have returned to popularity. Battle reenactments, haunted houses and ghost tours are all the American rage. We Americans occasionally grapple with our past and its inherent hyperbole, but, mostly, we’re a teenage culture and just like being scared.

      I took one of the Fells Point ghost walking tours to hear some Baltimore legend and to discover how much truth rippled through it. Fells Point is riddled with violent past; it was Baltimore’s rough and tumble port neighborhood for years. The Point harbors enough phantoms to sustain two ghost tours; the one I took gathers every Friday at a toy store on Thames Street.

      Fells Point has a carnival feel to it, even on non-festival weeknights. Its cobblestone streets are crowded with a brightly painted array of several hundred-year-old row houses and flocks of drunken locals and ambling tourists. Most of the narrow buildings house bars, so, despite its charming architecture, the stench of flat, grainy beer perfumes the sidewalks, even in the rain. It was raining that night but Baltimoreans didn’t care; it had been raining for weeks in March and we had become accustomed to the damp. I met my friend and fellow playwright, Kathleen, at Bertha’s Restaurant for dinner, and over wine and mussels we updated ourselves on our various writing projects.

      Kathleen was born in Baltimore, and we met in a playwriting class. She has sparkling eyes and is always impeccably dressed. Her curly, chestnut hair frames her pixie face. “Appropriate, you telling ghost stories,” she said, grinning.

      I wasn’t too sure how to react. “Actually,” I admitted, “I’ve never written ghost stories.” Had I told her about the Hampton Spook House?

      “How’d you get the Cambridge gig?” She asked.

      “Young Audiences of Maryland referred me,” I explained. Young Audiences of Maryland is a non-profit that supplies much-needed arts programs to the state’s schools. “They market my . . .”

      “The suffrage play, right. Cambridge. I don’t know if I’ve ever been. Have you ever been?” Kathleen asked.

      “Once or twice,” I said, absently stabbing at my lettuce, trying to remember if my family had stopped at Cambridge on a houseboat tour of the Chesapeake years ago. In high school, I had hiked through Blackwater Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County south of Cambridge. “Is it presumptuous of me to think I can write the ghost history of another town?” I wondered out loud. “I used to think that being a Marylander meant something.”

      “It does,” Kathleen said.

      “But what?”

      “That we were all born in the same place.”

      “But the land in the state is so different. What does that mean?” I drank some water and stared out the window at the tourists wandering down Broadway. “That some of us know the state song?” I asked. The Maryland state song has the same tune as Oh, ChristmasTree. Most of the collective story that Americans share are Christmas carols and commercial jingles. We all can sing about the first Noel, Oscar Mayer and Coca Cola.

      “Maryland, my Maryland,” Kathleen said. We both hummed.

      “This is my favorite verse,” I said, singing. “Avenge the patriotic gore That flecked the streets of Baltimore, And be the battle queen of yore, Maryland, my Maryland!”2

      Kathleen finished with me, laughing. The waiter gave us a funny look. “I don’t remember learning that verse in school,” Kathleen said, eating a bite of her omelet.

      “It might be the first verse,” I said, remembering. “I liked it as a kid because gore rhymed with Baltimore and yore.”

      “You would.”

      “Me and John Wilkes Booth. Apparently he liked quoting it too.”

      “Not my favorite Marylander,” Kathleen said darkly.

      “I heard that he plotted Lincoln’s assassination with the Catholic Church.”

      “Maryland! He was a Confederate spy and had nothing to do with the church.”

      “He was part of a conspiracy of Southern Maryland Confederate sympathizers that killed the best president in U.S. history. I like history.”

      “So, maybe you’re perfect for that Cambridge job. Where will people