Old Princess Anne Jail

The Old Princess Anne Jail, known as the Grey Eagle, was the site of Maryland's last recorded lynching in 1933. During its 2003 renovation into a police station, construction crews refused to work alone after tools flew across rooms. A 2012 ghost walk photo captured a boy's face in a window with no floor behind it.

They used fifteen-foot timbers as battering rams. Over 2,000 people showed up on October 18, 1933, and when the 25 officers inside the Old Princess Anne Jail ran out of tear gas, the mob broke through the doors. Captain Edward McKim Johnson was knocked unconscious. Deputy Norman Dryden was forced to hand over his keys.

George Armwood was twenty-two years old, Black, and had cognitive disabilities. He was hiding under his mattress. The mob pulled him out, looped a noose around his neck, and dragged him down the steel stairway by his feet. Before hanging him, they cut off his ears and ripped out his gold teeth. His body was tied to a truck, driven through town, strung up from a tree in front of Judge Duer's house, and burned at the courthouse corner. Forty-two witnesses later testified before a grand jury. State police identified nine mob leaders by name. Nobody was convicted of anything. This was Maryland's last recorded lynching.

The jail that held Armwood, that the mob tore into, still stands on Williams Street. Locals call it the Grey Eagle. It's Somerset County's only nineteenth-century structure with three-foot-thick Port Deposit granite walls, built in 1857 specifically because prisoners had burned down the previous jail and escaped. The stone was meant to prevent another breakout. It held up fine against fire. It did not hold up against a battering ram and 2,000 people.

The building served as the county jail for 130 years until 1987. When it faced demolition in 1999, the Town of Princess Anne chose restoration instead, converting the Grey Eagle into the Princess Anne Police Department headquarters in 2003. That's when things started.

Construction workers reported tools flying across rooms on their own. Windows opened and shut without anyone near them. Footsteps echoed through empty corridors. Voices filled the air from nowhere. The activity became so constant that crews refused to work alone in the building. Almost nobody would stay past dark.

The police officers and dispatchers who moved in had their own experiences. Televisions switch on by themselves. Shadows appear on walls with nothing to cast them. During suspect interviews, phantom voices show up on the recordings, voices that were not in the room when the tape was rolling. One day, a dispatcher working alone brought her children to the station. Her son wandered upstairs, then came back down shaken. He told his mother he'd seen "a lady" who appeared to be "sick." Nobody else was in the building.

The most striking piece of evidence surfaced in 2012. A guest on the Princess Anne Ghost Walk, a woman named Desiree Wallace who had told tour guide Mindie Burgoyne she was a skeptic, photographed the jail with her smartphone. When she enlarged the image later, a face was visible in the window with startling clarity. Not an orb. Not a blur. A distinct face with a hairline, eyebrows, nose, cheeks, and mouth. It appeared to be a small boy, visible in the lower center pane of the center window. The impossible part: there is no floor behind that window. The second story opens to the first floor with only a steel staircase below. No living person could have been standing there. Burgoyne noted that of the roughly 30 people on that tour, only two were self-described non-believers. Wallace was one of them. Her mind appears to have changed.

Burgoyne, author of the Haunted Eastern Shore books, runs the Princess Anne tour and describes it as her most disturbing walk. The content is harsh enough that children aren't permitted to attend. That's unusual for a ghost tour, but the Grey Eagle earned it.

The building's history doesn't start with Armwood and doesn't end with him. It held some of the Eastern Shore's most dangerous criminals for over a century. People suffered in that building for decades, in cells behind granite walls designed to be impossible to leave. If ghosts were going to show up anywhere, you'd bet on a place like the Grey Eagle. And they did.