In Brief
Schifferstadt in Frederick, Maryland is a German stone house built in the 1750s. When crews began restoring it in the 1970s, staff started hearing footsteps and voices in German moving through the empty rooms. The owners, it's said, were just glad someone came back.
The Full Story
The strange part about Schifferstadt, a German colonial stone house in Frederick, Maryland, is when the haunting started. Not when someone died there. When someone finally fixed the place up.
By 1972 the house had rotted so badly a gas-station company wanted to bulldoze it. It is one of the oldest standing structures in Frederick, built in the 1750s with sandstone walls two feet thick, hand-hewn beams pinned with wooden pegs, and a cast-iron jamb stove built into an upstairs bedroom — the only one of its kind anywhere still sitting in its original spot. Four women formed a foundation, raised the money, and bought the house in 1974 to save it. Then the repairs began, and the empty house started making noise.
Staff heard footsteps crossing both floors of a building they knew was empty. They heard voices, speaking in a mix of German and English. Mediums who later visited reported the original owners — Joseph and Elias Brunner, the German immigrants who raised the house and named it for their home town in the Rhineland-Palatinate — were, in one account, "happy and content, willing to share their home with the living." The Brunners, the story goes, hadn't come back because something went wrong. They came back because someone finally got it right.
The activity is reported strongest in the kitchen, where the house keeps an open hearth. Psychics name two of the more active spirits there: a young midwife called Wilhelmina, said to have died when her clothes caught fire at that hearth, and a boy, Christian, reported seen hiding in the shadows of the attic. One staff member said she was physically hugged by something unseen in the kitchen. Another docent checked every door was secure, heard one slam in the night, and found them all exactly as she'd left them the next morning.
In 2008 a paranormal society spent a night recording inside and came away with what they described as direct answers to their questions — some of the replies, they said, in German. The house has leaned into it since, running evening "Spirits" tours that walk through the events its docents and visitors have reported over the years.
The house is a National Historic Landmark now, the oldest thing in town, tended and locked and open to walk-in tours on weekend afternoons. The men who built it, by every account, never quite agreed to leave it.
