Old White Marsh Church

Grave robbers tried to cut a wedding ring off Hannah Maynadier's finger in the 1720s and she sat up screaming, having been buried alive in a coma. She walked a mile to the rectory in her burial shroud. Visitors at Old White Marsh Church still see her ghost on moonlit nights, making that same walk.

Two grave robbers cut into Hannah Maynadier's finger to steal her wedding ring, and she sat up screaming. She wasn't dead. She had been in a coma.

The story goes like this. Hannah Martin married Reverend Daniel Maynadier, a Huguenot rector who had fled French persecution around 1690 and taken over St. Peter's Parish at Old White Marsh Episcopal Church in 1711. Sometime after their 1720 wedding, Hannah fell gravely ill and was declared dead. Per her dying wish, she was buried wearing her jewel-studded wedding ring.

That night, two men who had attended her funeral returned to the cemetery to dig her up. They pried open the coffin. The ring wouldn't come off her swollen finger, so one of them pulled a knife and started cutting. The blade broke skin, blood flowed, and Hannah woke up shrieking. The thieves ran.

Hannah climbed out of her coffin, still wrapped in her burial shroud, bleeding from her hand, and walked a full mile through the dark Maryland countryside to the rectory. Reverend Maynadier was sitting alone by his fireplace when something fell against his front door with a low moan. He opened it and found his wife, whom he had buried that day, faint and bloodied on his doorstep. Hannah recovered. She lived many more years after that, had several more children. Local tradition holds that the bloodstains on her wounded hand never fully faded.

The road passing the church still bears a version of the family name: Manadier Road.

Historian Dickson J. Preston has pointed out that parish records don't actually show Hannah dying once, let alone twice, which makes the story hard to verify through documents. But multiple sources across the Eastern Shore have told some version of this legend for over two centuries. Author Mindie Burgoyne, who wrote Haunted Eastern Shore: Ghostly Tales from East of the Chesapeake, describes the church grounds as "a thin place, where the veil between this world and the next is transparent."

Old White Marsh Episcopal Church was erected between 1662 and 1665 near Trappe, making it one of the oldest churches in Maryland. Only Christ Church on Kent Island was older, and that building is gone now. When the Maryland Assembly established the Church of England as the state church in 1692, St. Peter's Parish became one of thirty original parishes in the colony. The brick church burned in January 1897 when a farmer clearing brush nearby accidentally set it ablaze. Only the walls remain standing today, partially restored in 1977. An iron plaque inside the ruins commemorates the rector and his wife.

The cemetery is the main draw for ghost hunters. Visitors report seeing Hannah on moonlit nights moving down Manadier Road, clutching her burial shroud, still making that walk from cemetery to rectory. Both Reverend Daniel and Hannah have been spotted near their now-empty graves beneath the chancel or standing silently among the ruins. People describe whispers on the wind and strange music drifting through the graveyard. A few have seen a large bluish-white light near the treeline that vanishes the moment they step outside the cemetery grounds. Others report difficulty breathing the deeper they walk into the property.

The graveyard holds some notable company. Robert Morris Sr., the Liverpool merchant whose fortune bankrolled his son Robert Morris (signer of the Declaration of Independence and the "Financier of the American Revolution"), is buried here. The elder Morris died in 1750 after a cannon wadding struck his arm during a ship's salute, a wound that turned fatal from infection. Thomas John Claggett, the first Episcopal Bishop of Maryland and the first bishop consecrated on American soil, officiated a confirmation here in 1793. Another rector, Reverend Thomas Bacon (1764-1768), compiled Bacon's Laws, the authoritative compendium of Maryland's colonial statutes.

Nearly four centuries of Eastern Shore dead are buried in this cemetery. Hannah Maynadier is the only one who climbed back out.