A Haunting of My Own

This Halloween, I will be the guest speaker of the Myersville-Wolfsville Area Historical Society, presenting on local ghosts and paranormal phenomenon. Whilst this part of Maryland is rich in folkloric creatures such as a flying monster called the Snallygaster, or the Veiled Lady—a sort of banshee who plagued the environs of South Mountain—neither these nor other similar tales are particularly believable or verifiable.

I will stretch as far afield as Antietam and Gettysburg for parts of my lecture, but one paranormal story, at least, will be from Myersville, and it is my own. I share it now knowing it could be as figmental as the ghostly forms that once circled above Frederick’s Rose Hill Manor, or the Christmas Eve Phantom Flutist of Emmitsburg, who purportedly plays, as he did in life, over his dead father’s grave.

The setting for this tale is the cemetery of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, directly across Main Street from my home.

My young family moved to Myersville in autumn 1995. Our house occupies a corner of two bustling roads that offer no on-street parking. Happily, across Main Street is the carpark of St. Paul’s, the use of which is kindly permitted for Myersvillians and town visitors. This is where I park.

The burying ground is at the rear of the church—a sunny slope oriented east to west. (For weeks in 1997, the Comet Hale-Bopp hung beautifully above that field.)  Approximately 800 past congregants are buried there. On Sundays, I leave my car at the rear of the lot by the cemetery to not inconvenience elderly churchgoers. Often my vehicle remains there on Monday mornings. Until recently, I left for work before dawn, with my car first glimpsed as a dark lump beside a field of silhouetted memorials.

Soon after moving in, I became uncomfortable during my pre-dawn trudge, as well as whenever I parked in the evenings. At first, I chided myself for irrational fear. However, I eventually understood that it was not merely the combination of the cemetery and the dark that frightened me. There was someone in the cemetery who didn’t want me there. Over time, I deduced it was an old man connected to a particular area of the graveyard. The feeling of targeted hostility grew until I was quite afraid to be alone in the lot between twilight and sunrise. In an effort to self-trivialize my terror, I joked with my family and friends about “Mr. Grumpy” who haunted the cemetery, always telling me to “Get out!”

One winter day, circa 2000, I picked my son up from his after-school care provider, pulled into the lot, and parked. Attached to my keychain was a 30-second micro-recorder that I used for spoken notes. As my son and I walked toward Main Street, I jovially said, “Let’s see if Mr. Grumpy wants to talk to us,” and switched on the recorder.

On playback, we heard my question followed by a loud male voice—most definitely not of my eight-year-old boy—quite close to the microphone, who shouted, “No!” My little daughter later recorded over it but neither my son nor I ever forgot about the afternoon when Mr. Grumpy spoke.

Electronic voice phenomenon (EVPs) are recorded human or animal utterances—the meow of a cat, for instance—that appear with no explanation across the spectrum of audiovisual technologies. The messages are often evidential, personal, and thought-provoking. As EVP research advances, communication continues to improve. Current results in both EVP and Instrumental Transcommunicion (ITC), which includes instantaneous two-way and visual communication, are being obtained by thousands of independent researchers and affiliated groups, including the University of Arizona’s VERITAS Research Program of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health.

Among the early EVP investigators were Raymond Bayless, a well-known writer, and a photographer and psychic named Attila Von Szalay. In the 1930s, Von Szalay claimed to hear disembodied utterances in the air around him. He had some success capturing them using a 78-RPM record cutter; he had better luck later with a wire recorder. In the 1950s, Von Szalay joined up with Bayless, who constructed a cabinet with an interior microphone resting inside a speaking trumpet. The microphone cord led out of the cabinet and was patched into a reel-to-reel recorder and loudspeaker. Almost immediately, they claimed to hear whispers originating from inside the cabinet and duly recorded them, but on 5 December, 1956, they taped the first voice which had not been audible over the loudspeaker. It was a male voice saying simply, “This is G.” The pair documented their results in a 1959 article in the journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

The first EVP experimenter to really make headlines was Friedrich Jurgenson, a Swedish film producer, who claimed he accidentally taped his dead mother calling his name whilst he was recording wild bird songs. From that day on, he was able to regularly capture EVPs. Jurgenson held a 1964 press conference during which he played his recordings for a skeptical press. He went on to author several books on EVP.

In 1970, a Latvian-born psychologist, Konstantin Raudive, who was a protege of Jurgenson, released the book Breakthrough, detailing his own EVP research. It became an international bestseller. In the book, Raudive revealed that he had recorded thousands of discarnate voices, many of whom, but not all, communicated in a polyglot of languages. Raudive was the first to find that the voices gained in strength and number when he generated white noise. For this, he used a diode—a broad-band, crystal radio detector with a short antenna and a second wire directly connected into the microphone input of the recorder. (A recording of EVPs obtained by Raudive can be heard here.)

Sarah Wilson Estep of Severna Park, Maryland, also noticed the benefits of white noise. She detailed the results of her own EVP research in 1988’s Voices of Eternity. Before the book’s release, she had founded the American Association Electronic Voice Phenomena, a loose collective of experimenters in survival research. After her book, the organization grew to include hundreds of members in countries around the world. (Examples of her work can be heard here.)

Estep made it her goal to glean from her non-corporeal guest speakers information about life in their post-mortem dimension. She was also the first researcher to publicly admit receiving EVPs from communicators in alternate universes, including extraterrestrials. Sarah was not alone in receiving “space” voices. The ITC researcher Frank Sumption, who invented the “ghost box” in wide use today, also heard from these types of entities, as have many others. (Warning: The link leads to an ITC recording session with a Frank’s Box that includes profane and racist language.)

My Mr. Grumpy, however, was all too formerly human. After receiving his angry EVP message, I knew I must forge a detente. When I walked to my car each morning, I repeated aloud that I was no threat to him. I was not there to evict him from his ground of mortal rest. All I wanted to do was drive to my job. As time passed, Mr. Grumpy’s seething was replaced with grudging tolerance. He was still watching me, but if I played it cool, he would, too.

Ezra Routzahn lived in the Middletown Valley his entire life. He was born on the farm of his father, Enos S. Routzahn, Sr. (1800-1850) on 25 March, 1836. Ezra was the fourth infant born to Emos’s wife, Lydia Schlosser Routzahn (1805-1882), and the third boy. Another three daughters and three sons would follow.

On 17 November 1858, Ezra Routzahn married Sarah Catherine Harp (1839–1926), daughter of farmer George Silas Harp (1808-1847) and Catherine Poffenberger (1812-1889).  They had three children, Laura Virginia (1859-1942); Franklin (1861-1943), and Mary Elizabeth (1865-1926). There are still Routzahn descendants in the valley today.

Routzahn’s time on Earth was spent like that of his forefathers, farming the rich soil of the Middletown Valley. In 1870, he purchased from Josiah Harp, his wife’s relative, a 146-acre, well-established agricultural operation at 10412 Church Hill Road. Known as the Doub-Routzahn Farm, it has been surveyed by the Maryland Historical Trust, who reported it “exemplifies the transition of a mid-19th-Century farmstead from agricultural to private residential use in the mid-20th Century. It retains features from its possible establishment as a typical farm of the period of about 1840-1870 in the brick dwelling with domestic outbuildings and the frame and stone bank barn, with the additions of late 19th century outbuildings that reflect changes in agricultural technology such as the wagon shed/corn crib, the garage, and the proliferation of various sheds in the agricultural grouping.”

Routzahn may have been interested in banking and financing from early in life. If so, as a local farmer of means, he was in a position to act on inclination. In January 1899, Routzahn helped found the Myersville Savings Bank, which by 1904 reported deposits of more than $120,000 and surplus and undivided profits of more than $5,000.

In 1902, a brick bank building was constructed on Main Street “with a chrome-steel lined brick vault, a Miller fire and burglar-proof safe with a timelock and other modern fixtures,” noted the 1905 History of Myersville. “The officers and directors of the institution are careful and sociable men.” Routzahn was preeminent amongst them—the bank’s president. The only known photo of Routzahn shows him in his 60s, confident and competent, dressed for his important local position.

Frederick News, Monday, 18 October, 1915

After helping with placing memorial windows in the in the Myersville Lutheran church and while looking at the window which was just completed in memory of himself and his wife, Ezra Routzhan, president of the Myersville Savings Bank and prominent resident of that town, fell to the floor of the church about 10 o’clock this morning … and died instantly. He had been in good health and was feeling well…. Death was due to apoplexy, it is thought. Mr. Routzahn was in his 80th year.

Being a prominent member of the church, Mr. Routzahn had taken much interest in the extensive improvements now being made, including the placing of a dozen memorial windows…. [He] had just completed the Routzahn window when he was stricken and fell over backwards. H. F. Shipley, who was working on the same window, was closest to Mr. Routzahn when he fell. Others in the church were G. W. Wachtel, Rev. James Willis, the pastor, and Carlton Smith of Polo, Ill.

Dr. Ralph Browning was hurriedly summoned, but Mr. Routzahn expired almost as soon as he fell. The news of the sudden death was a shock to the Community…. The memorial window on which Mr. Routzahn had just finished work contains this inscription: “A Living Tribute to Ezra Routzahn and Sarah C. Routzahn by Their Children.”

In 2016, I stumbled across the above article whilst engaged in other research. It took only a fast walk across Main Street and into the cemetery to confirm the potential epiphany I had just experienced: Ezra Routzahn’s impressive monument stood in the area I associated with Mr. Grumpy—an area I had frequently pointed out to family and friends. Could Ezra Routzahn still be tied to the church where he worshipped, in which he died whilst gazing on his own memorial window? Was he Mr. Grumpy?

The accumulated evidence of EVP, ITC, and other paranormal research indicates that some of the deceased remain in the place where they died. They may do this because they are in a muddled post-death state, or for their own reasons, such as anger with the Cruel Hand of Fate, or fear of eternal punishment for their sins.

If Mr. Grumpy is Ezra Routzahn, he might indeed be angry at the last hand dealt him, or is possessive of his fine memorials both in and outside the church. Also possible is that he may not be angry but protecting the graveyard—his aggression no more than the warning barks of a dog at a stranger. Maybe there are others from Myersville’s past with him and they don’t want to be disturbed. They want their life in the Middletown Valley to go on unimpeded. Who can blame them? Ω