Weird Maryland: Your Travel Guide to Maryland's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets

by Matt Lake

Book Overview

Call it the Free State or the Old Line State, but after reading this guide to the odd, bizarre, and unexplainable, Maryland will be officially titled the Weird State. Follow a transplanted Englishman... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1402739060
• ISBN13: 9781402739064
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Sterling Publishing (NY)
• Length: 251 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 9.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good gift

Gave this as a gift to a very close friend. She loved it. Has lots of interesting little known facts about Maryland.

Interesting Book

The book was a gift for my husband. He enjoyed it so much that he lent it to our 21 year old son and his fiancee. They had a great time reading about the topics. They searched for things they knew about the state and sure enough, those stories were in the book. They learned a lot about their home state.

Maryland Rocks!

As a lifelong resident of the Washington, DC area, I thought I knew how weird the state of Maryland was, but this volume has been a real eye opener! Maryland, my friends, turns out to be one of the weirder places in the known universe. Case in point: Our very own Count Gore De Vol launched his award winning horror host program , Creature Feature, from the hallowed halls Channel 20, a UHF television station that beamed its signal from Bethesda, Maryland to horror movie fans located in and around DC Metro for more than a decade. You'll find Count Gore's superbly crafted and cannily concise biography opposite a full-page color photo of Count Gore (with a gorgeous blonde on his lap) on Page 100! I'm very proud to say that this enthralling account of Count Gore's fabulous and flamboyant rise to horror host fame was written by none other than Creature Feature's own High Priestess of Weirdness, LadyBoneYard, also known as Donna Mucha! Kudos to LadyB for a truly magnificent article! Of course, you'll find other weird folks lurking in these pages, some more renowned than others. For instance, we all know of Count Gore De Vol, but have you ever heard of the Snallygaster? Or the Goat Man? If you haven't, you'd better watch out, because they stalk Maryland's back roads, just waiting for naïve travelers. Also included is information about the region's infamous Bunnyman, a hatchet-wielding maniac whose authenticity I can vouch for, having myself encountered that particular nut-job way back in the seventies. And then there's that demon-possessed kid who William Peter Blatty made famous in his novel, The Exorcist, which was followed by the blockbuster movie that scared the bejeezus out of all of us. Yep, Maryland's got its share of weird folks and bizarre creatures, but there are also a number of haunted houses, haunted cemeteries and my personal favorite Maryland locale, the abandoned and horrifically haunted Glenn Dale Hospital, a former mental asylum filled with miles of corridors that used to be home to patients who were rumored to have been tortured, experimented upon and murdered. I've been there, and it's a truly harrowing experience, I can tell you. On the lighter side, you'll meet strange denizens of the state who drive cars shaped like spaceships and other unusual objects, find odd, whimsical museums that cater to unusual tastes, see photos of tiny houses built for little people and a tavern with a shark's head sticking right out of the front façade. It's no wonder that Baltimore was home to Edgar Alan Poe, because even the Baltimore bar district is said to be haunted (and believe me, I've seen some strange things there after about 2AM!). And the very best thing about Maryland, I'm sure you'll agree, is that Count Gore De Vol is our own local hero--and to prove it, he's been given another full-page frontispiece photo that heads up the chapter entitled, "Local Heroes and Villains"! This book is packed with enjoyable weirdness and bizar

Weird

This is a great book. Everyyone in the family is fighting to read it at once.

Fun and interesting to read

Being from Maryland, I loved reading about the 'weird' things there. Although I had heard about a lot of them all my life, I found the book contained many other stories from different areas that were very interesting. This book is a must for any Marylander's library if you like to read and know trivia about your state! I love it!