Author Denver Michaels

Looking at the title of this blog post—Pig Lady—if you're old enough to remember Seinfeld , you might hear in your mind Kramer shout:  "It was a pigman, Jerry! Half man, half pig!" The Pig Lady, from Cecil County, Maryland, however, is no joke. She is not a "fat little mental patient" as Kramer's pigman turned out to be. In my book Detours Into the Paranormal: Atlantic City Road Trip , I discussed the legend. The following is an excerpt: ...According to the tale of the Pig Lady, she was horribly disfigured in a house fire. She escaped the burning structure with her life but suffered awful burns in the process. A nearby person came to help, but when he laid eyes on her, he became so frightened by her burnt, disfigured face that he took off running. The poor woman who had just lost her home had now lost her face—she was a freak, an outcast; she fled into the woods and became the Pig Lady. As with a lot of these urban legends , there are several variations of ...

There is a gravity hill, called "Spook Hill" just outside of Burkittsville, Maryland. If the name sounds familiar, you might remember it from the 1999 cult-classic, The Blair Witch Project . Unfortunately for Blair Witch enthusiasts, most of the movie was filmed about 25 miles away and the recognizable landmarks in the movie are not located in town or the area nearby. Local legend holds that the spirits of disembodied Confederate soldiers haunt the area. It is these spirits—thinking they are pushing artillery uphill into position—that will push your car up the gravity hill. For this to take place: bring your car to a complete stop at the bottom of the hill; put the vehicle in neutral; your car will then begin to move uphill and gain speed the further up the hill you go. I have personally reached speeds of 7–10 miles per hour.  As a side note, be very careful if you are in the area and attempt this. For a two-lane country road, there is more traffic than you might expect. O...

I spent a weekend in Calvert County, Maryland recently. I have been there many times and find it to be a fascinating area. I am especially drawn to the Calvert Cliffs which hold vast deposits of fossilized fauna from the Miocene epoch (about 23–5 million years ago). Well, that and Chessie, the Chesapeake Bay Monster. But more on Chessie later. Let's talk fossils first.  Calvert Cliffs Fossils According to the website fossilguy.com: The fossil bearing Calvert Cliffs of Maryland is part of a large collection of fossiliferous exposures, called the Chesapeake Group. The Chesapeake Group encompasses exposures around the Chesapeake Bay, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. These exposures were created by sediment accumulation in the Salisbury Embayment, an area encompassing the Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia coastal plains which is often covered by the ocean (Kent, 1994, p.111).  The Calvert Cliffs run for roughly 24 miles from near Chesapeake Beach to Drum Point on the western ...

What is 6 feet tall, has feet like a dog, a big bushy tail, and is black? George May asked this question in an article he wrote for  The News,  a Frederick, Maryland newspaper, on November 29, 1965. The answer to May’s question: a Dwayyo. The first mention of the Dwayyo seems to have taken place in the 1940s in Frederick County. The Dwayyo became a household name in November 1965 in what was more likely than not a hoax. John Becker contacted an area newspaper and claimed he was attacked by a Dwayyo in his backyard. Unfortunately, the story is full of holes. The paper sent the report to the police who tried to follow up with Becker. According to Sergeant Clyde B. Tucker, Becker could not be located for questioning. Furthermore, the address that he provided did not exist. 18 Though the Becker story had every indication of being a pure fabrication, that didn’t stop the Dwayyo from bursting onto the scene in Frederick County. Hunters were seeing it; people were hearing it; reports...