In Brief
At the Old Brick Inn in St. Michaels, Maryland, staff describe a blue ball of light that streaks up the Kemp House staircase. Each time it reaches the top, a door slams shut. They say they've watched it happen with the building empty.
The Full Story
The Kemp House, one of three buildings in the Old Brick Inn at 401 S Talbot Street in St. Michaels, Maryland, has a light that runs the stairs. Staff describe it the same way every time: a blue ball that streaks up the staircase, and a door at the top that slams shut the instant it arrives. They say they've stood and watched it happen with the building empty.
Colonel Joseph Kemp built the house in 1807, a Federal-period brick place on Talbot Street, and lived in it until he died around 1828. He was a shipbuilder who ran his own St. Michaels shipyard, and he commanded the Saint Michaels Patriotic Blues during the War of 1812, the militia company that served in the 26th Maryland Regiment when the British attacked the town in August 1813. His brother Thomas, a Baltimore shipbuilder, built the privateer Chasseur, launched in 1812, the fast ship Baltimore took to calling the Pride of Baltimore.
But the ghost most people come for isn't a Kemp. Staff and guests report two gentlemen heard arguing behind a closed downstairs door, their voices stopping the instant anyone opens it. A housekeeper alone in the empty house once heard faint conversation and watched two men step into a room. When she opened the door it was empty, and the voices kept going behind it. The front desk told her no guests were expected.
Some of the staff believe one of those men is Robert E. Lee. Local tradition holds that Lee spent two nights in the house during the Civil War, and people describe a uniformed figure at a second-floor window, gazing down at Talbot Street, solid enough to mistake for a living man before he vanishes. Things turn up moved or rearranged with no one to blame. No record confirms Lee was ever here. The story lives only in the telling.
In a second building, the 1816 Wrightson Jones House, built by a shipwright and the oldest two-story engaged gallery in town, the story goes that a former female owner roams the third floor and torments the male guests who take the upper rooms.
St. Michaels is the town that fooled the British, the legend says, for the lanterns residents supposedly hung in the trees to make the gunners overshoot. That tale, too, has no contemporary record. The earliest account traces to 1890, told in part by a Thomas Kemp who'd been a boy during the battle.
