In Brief
High Street in Cambridge, Maryland packs roughly a dozen hauntings into two short blocks — enough that a ghost-tour author calls it the most haunted street in Maryland. A yew in the churchyard hums over a grave its roots have swallowed.
The Full Story
High Street in Cambridge, Maryland is two short blocks long, and an Eastern Shore ghost-tour author named Mindie Burgoyne calls it "the most haunted street in Maryland." She isn't reaching. Roughly a dozen haunted stops sit packed between the Dorchester County courthouse and the Choptank River, close enough to walk in ten minutes.
Start in the Christ Episcopal churchyard, where a yew more than 200 years old grows over the 1817 headstone of Ann Weller. The roots have closed around the stone and swallowed it. Locals call it the Singing Tree, because when the wind moves through it the yew hums — a low buzz, not a melody — and they say it vibrates if you put a hand to the bark. "The description of the singing was not melodic singing but like a buzzing sound or like a hum," Burgoyne told a local TV crew.
The churchyard is one of Maryland's oldest, with burials running back to 1674 and five governors in the ground. But the street's worst story sits a few stops away, at the old courthouse.
In June 1831, an enslaved woman from Vienna named Henny Insley was hanged there, accused of killing the wife of the man who owned her. Afterward, children turned her death into a chant they repeated in the street: "What'd they hang you for, Bloody Henny? What'd they hang you for, Bloody Henny?" The gallows site is a park now, with a fountain. People standing there say they hear the rope scraping a tree branch, and the crowd that came to watch.
The rest of the street keeps pace. At the Cambridge House on number 112, two men once fought in the foyer with an umbrella and a fireplace poker until one of them was shot. For years after, owners noticed umbrellas and pokers going missing from the house, a pattern they only thought to connect to the killing once they heard how the man had died.
The oldest curse on the street is older than the houses. In 1659, a planter named Antoine LeCompte patented 700 acres of land the Choptank Indians had lived on, then drove them off. The story goes that they answered him with a curse: because he was "blind to the ways of peace," his sons and his descendants would suffer blindness. His son Moses went blind. So did nine of Moses's eleven children. By one count from 1819, nineteen of the living LeComptes were blind, and over 40 descendants down the male line lost their sight. The family's brick house still stands at the head of High Street, and over the course of about a year, several ghost-tour visitors photographed the same thing: a shadowy, person-shaped outline standing in the third-floor attic window.
A dozen stops, two blocks. The street holds 340 years, and almost none of it is quiet.
