When the Ghost Screams(10)

In recent years, workers were installing an air conditioner in Morrill Hall when an overpowering burning odor pervaded the place. Firefighters were called to investigate and concluded that when the drills bored into the walls, they had released vestiges of fumes and ashes from the long-ago blaze.

Those who have experienced phenomena there wonder what else was released.

In October 2004 interviews with the student newspaper, the Diamond Back, university staff with offices in Morrill Hall offered varied perspectives on the ghost tales associated with the building. While Charles Cadwell told reporter Caitlin Evans that the odd noises heard there were only squirrels and the wind, June Tuman argued, “There were certain sounds upstairs that sounded like more than the wind and more than squirrels. …”

June Tuman admitted that she no longer heard the distinctive footsteps emanating from overhead, because she no longer stayed late. She did not, however, clarify if her schedule change was due to fear or convenience.

A popular Halloween subject among student reporters, Morrill Hall has been written about frequently. And many of the young writers point out a possible connection between the ghosts and a grisly discovery there. Nearly a century ago, the building was used by medical students who dissected cadavers. Everyone was shocked when, years later, someone found human remains there. Workers discovered the parts, long forgotten beneath a sink.

Do the ghosts on campus belong to those who were so carelessly discarded by sloppy medical students years ago?

Maybe.

This writer suspects at least one of the ghosts belongs to a troubled woman who ghost investigators have not yet named. They are likely not even aware of her, for her appalling story unfolded before most of our grandparents were born. She, too, has the roots of her torment planted in the old medical school.

Emily Brown was born around 1826 and grew up to be a genius with the sewing needle. The daughter of a hotel owner in Easton, Maryland, her young life was comfortable and probably happy. Somehow, the decades slipped by, and she did not fulfill the destiny of women in that era. She never married. She never had a child.

The middle-aged spinster sought comfort in opium and alcohol. She roomed with a family on Pig Alley in Baltimore and was known on the street as “Beggar Brown.”

On the morning of December 10, 1886, she ate breakfast with another boarder in the home. No one knows if Emily noticed Anderson Perry scrutinizing her from across the table. No one knows if she felt his eyes, summing her up, calculating the fortune he hoped she would bring him.

Anderson was a custodian at the nearby University of Maryland’s School of Medicine. He had a get-rich scheme. Students of the medical school needed cadavers to dissect. They needed them so badly that the school paid fifteen dollars for each body brought to them.

That sounded good to John Thomas Ross and Albert Hawkins. At Anderson’s urging, they slipped into the Pig Alley house and attacked sixty-year-old Emily Brown. They struck her over the head with a brick and stabbed her in the chest. She was packed into a sack, stuffed in a wheelbarrow, and taken straight to the door of the school’s dissection room. Anderson Perry was waiting there, and the three congratulated themselves as they split the cash.

Five dollars for a day’s work was good pay in 1886. Unfortunately for the killers, the brutal manner of their victim’s death raised suspicions, and the police were called.

Baltimore citizens were shocked by the headline in the Baltimore Sun, the next day: Burking in Baltimore. The article spoke of the practice, which originated with serial killer William Burke in the 1820s. The onetime Irish grave robber saw a chance for fast cash by murdering people instead of unearthing those who had died of natural causes. He killed approximately thirty people in Edinburgh, Scotland, and sold them for dissection.

Some folks in Baltimore were so rattled by the “Baltimore Burking” that they refused to go near the medical school for fear they would be killed for dissection. The case accelerated the passing of laws banning payment for cadavers.

As for the killers, Anderson Perry and Albert Hawkins escaped prosecution. John Thomas Ross was convicted. He was hanged in the summer of 1887.

In a kind of poetic justice, many years later, Anderson Perry’s body was found among the dissection cadavers after a campus fire. Though he had apparently died of natural causes, he was penniless.

It may be the ghost of Emily Brown who students have spied peeking from the windows of empty buildings at night. To Emily, it may still be 1886, and she could be baffled by the changing terrain. Her soul might seek refuge in the campus’s oldest structures, as she searches for something familiar.

Poor Emily will never find her way back to Pig Alley, for the old bumpy street is long gone, replaced by a smooth wide road that runs past the ballpark.