In Brief
At Reynolds Tavern on Church Circle in Annapolis, Maryland, a woman's voice sings Christmas carols from an upstairs bedroom — in July as readily as December. The story says it's Mary Reynolds, who ran the tavern until she died in 1785 and never left.
The Full Story
At Reynolds Tavern on Church Circle in Annapolis, Maryland, the story goes that a woman's voice sings Christmas carols from one of the upstairs bedrooms. Not only in December. People have reported the caroling in July, in March, at any hour, drifting down from a room where nobody is standing. The song is the same in any season.
They say it's Mary Reynolds. Her husband, William, a hatter and dry-goods seller, leased the land from St. Anne's Church in 1747 and built the tavern, calling it "The Beaver and Lac'd Hat." When William died in 1777, Mary took over and ran the place until her own death in 1785. By the lore, she never gave it up. The phenomena pinned to her are quiet and domestic: the off-season singing, objects that vanish and turn up days later in a different room, and human-shaped indentations pressed into one of the upstairs beds, as if someone had just sat down on a mattress no guest had touched.
The building went on without her for two centuries. Her daughter Magrette ran the tavern next, selling it in 1796. Later it became a bank. In 1935, the bank tried to sell it off for demolition to make room for a gas station, and Annapolis residents bought it instead and turned it into the public library, with the children's section down in the stone cellar. The library outgrew the place in the 1970s, and it sat vacant for years before Jill and Andrew Petit bought it in 2000 and restored it, roughly an $800,000 purchase, reopening it as a tavern and inn.
It was during that restoration that the stories got loud. Workers reported a power drill that switched on by itself, dishes that floated off tables to the floor, objects gone one day and back the next in another room. None of it appears in any newspaper account of the renovation. It lives in the retelling, tied to a building that was finally full of people again after years of standing empty.
In 2004, the Maryland Ghost and Spirit Society spent a night inside, led by a sensitive named Beverly Litsinger. Everyone had assumed there was just the one ghost, Mary in her bedroom. The investigators came out saying there were five spirits in the building. During the night, a dish broke in the kitchen with no one near it. The owners stopped publicizing the paranormal after that. The other four were never named.
