I.
September 19, 2013 was a slow day at work. I had been doing some research on the first people to live in my current house back in the 1930s, and decided to look up a Kent County News story of an incident concerning the builder’s father. I was following a trail whose steps I no longer remember, gathering facts that seem trivial now, which gave my mind some mild entertainment in the form of eavesdropping on the past. I found the article I was looking for, detailing an incident of the builder’s father as a teenager, getting into a fistfight with a former teacher on the street, back in the spring of 1883. Typical Kent County stuff, maybe. I dropped a dime into the machine and printed out the page, as my eyes scanned the other headlines on the page, headed with the date of publication May 17, 1883. “The strawberry season is not far off.” “The Sale of Bellevue.” And then:
A MADMAN’S TRAGIC ACT.
KILLING HIS INTIMATE FRIEND.
REVOLVER AND KNIFE BOTH EMPLOYED.
Charles R. White Shot Down by Charles E. Hanson while the Former was Making a Call on the Latter at His Home.
[Reported for the Baltimore Sun.]
Interesting. I read on: “Mr. Charles R. White, of Howard Co., was shot and instantly killed on Wednesday by Mr. Charles Edward Hanson, an intimate friend and neighbor.” Howard County, my home county on the western shore. Wait. I know these people!
II.
Elkridge, Maryland is my hometown. Twenty or more years ago, you may never have heard of it, but that has changed as its popularity has risen as a convenient commuter town. Located directly on the US Route 1 corridor between Baltimore and Washington, DC, the face it shows to most people is one composed of strip shopping centers, convenience stores, car dealerships, and the occasional vintage motel with antique signage. On the southeastern side of this main artery are undulating streets lined with homes built during the last one hundred years or so, leading down to some of the oldest established railroad line in the country, and the Patapsco River. On the west, another winding road leads up into what used to be farmland, later became threaded with neighborhoods tucked off into the woods and hills, from which other, newer branches now extend with smaller, more expensive, densely-packed, tree-deprived properties.
Growing up, I lived in one of the older of these wooded neighborhoods. At my high school, Elkridge was falsely stereotyped as the domain of rednecks and working-class families, typified by the auto-shop boys with Confederate flag stickers adorning their muscle cars, its string of Route 1 motels and trailer parks, and the only outdoor motorcycle bar in the state. It was, in fact, a regular small town filled with all kinds of people and families, many of whom had roots in the town going back for generations.
Although the Elkridge of my youth was an unpretentious place, looking on the surface like a thousand other pass-through towns in the crowded mid-Atlantic, it is in fact the oldest settlement in what is now Howard County, dating to about 1700. Once part of Anne Arundel County, which at that time extended from the Chesapeake Bay to the fall line, Elkridge was once an international port, with ocean-going vessels docking regularly just below the spot where US Route 1 crosses the Patapsco into Baltimore County. Its main exports were tobacco and iron, the latter from a series of mines, forges, and furnaces established in the area by the Dorsey family, the first family to settle and spread their properties out upon the Ridge between the Patapsco and Patuxent Rivers.
Those of us who grew up in Elkridge, especially thirty or more years ago when it was a much smaller and more intimate community, were taught the details of its history before we left elementary school. We also knew about the secret treasures hidden away in the woods and lanes of the area: the Thomas Viaduct, the oldest and largest curved multi-arched railroad bridge in the country, still in use; the Russian cemetery; the ruins of one of the Dorsey furnaces in Patapsco State Park; and the isolated foundations of the home of Colonel Charles Marshall, Robert E. Lee’s traveling secretary throughout the Civil War. This last landmark was far up in the woods behind my house, and a favorite destination of my sisters and me, where we collected evergreens at Christmastime and daffodils in the spring, in the buried remnants of the old formal gardens, nearly a mile from the nearest house but close to the noise of traffic from Interstate 95. And then, there was the most special place of all. Belmont, the hidden heart of the community, in the most isolated spot of all, tucked away in the green jewel box of its 80 acres, nestled far from the nearest road, in the protective arms of the State Park. Belmont had been the home of the Dorsey family, the massive landholders and proprietors of the iron furnaces and forges, first founders of this community on the Ridge, and later, the Hanson family, of which Charles Edward “Ned” Hanson, who murdered his intimate friend and neighbor on May 16, 1883, was a member.
Belmont was built in the 1730s, and was owned and lived in by Dorseys and their descendants, including the Hansons, for more than two hundred years. In 1965, it ended its days as a privately-owned estate, and began a new life as a small, exclusive conference center. Whole families of high school-aged sisters and brothers in Elkridge, including mine, became part of the Belmont family, securing coveted jobs as waitresses and house boys. I spent nearly ten years working there, from high school until several years after college, in food service, housekeeping, and finally in the offices, sharing the position of Marketing Coordinator with a childhood friend and wife of Belmont’s former executive chef. People outside of our community knew little to nothing of the existence of this place, with the exception of the lucky groups who came to stay, a large proportion of them connected with Federal and local governments, including foreign dignitaries and even sometimes people important enough to require Secret Service detail. Belmont’s isolation was one of its chief marketing points.
When you first came to work at Belmont, you were scrupulously trained by the senior generation of staff members in how to deliver the highest quality of service. These were the motherly women from town who cooked breakfast and lunch every day; the executive chefs, always from “elsewhere,” who had special and entertaining personalities; the gruff, businesslike housekeepers, tending to be past middle age and firmly entrenched in the community; and the grounds and maintenance men who seemed to know everything about the place…and did, since they lived in houses right on the property. Precision, perfection, discretion, and courtesy, doing things “the Belmont way” were required in all aspects of food and beverage service and housekeeping.
Fortunately, it was not only an interesting place to work, but a companionable place, with coworkers feeling like family members and, after a while, the house feeling like home. Very soon after you completed your first shift, as you relaxed in the staff room after dinner with your coworkers, you began to hear the stories, legends, and rumors about the house, and the people who had lived and visited there.
As new employees in the 1980s, my friends and I all heard about the Dorseys during those staff room storytelling sessions. Caleb Dorsey, the builder, met his wife Priscilla while fox hunting in the area, and their initials are still carved in stone beside the front door. Another Priscilla Dorsey, their granddaughter, eloped with Alexander Contee Hanson, a congressman and later a senator who was nearly killed in a Baltimore riot at the beginning of the war of 1812. Guests to the home during this time included Henry Clay, statesman and Speaker of the House, who had a favorite chair beside the fireplace in the drawing room. It was after Alexander Hanson’s untimely death from his lasting injuries in 1819 that the estate fell upon hard times.
If you were to consult local history sources or books containing descriptions of colonial homes in the region, you might notice that in most histories of Belmont, the years between 1819 and 1913 are barely mentioned, or condensed into one or two lines: “Hanson’s son Grosvenor enjoyed gambling, and the estate was nearly lost. In 1913, two of Grosvenor’s nine children, now both old ladies, resided at the decrepit mansion on the hill,” or something along those lines. Yet, every member of the Hanson family--- Priscilla and the Senator, their son Grosvenor and his wife Annie Maria, the latters’ nine children who had lived to adulthood, as well as four more children who died in infancy, or young--- is buried in the old cemetery at the edge of the woods beyond the formal gardens, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence.
The tales and rumors told in the staff room of this part of the house’s history were darker, and began to intersect with the countless stories of employees and guests who claim to have experienced strange events and even seen uncanny things while staying or working at the house. It was rumored that one of the families who lived in the house had a son who was either crazy, monstrous, or had severe developmental disabilities, and he was often locked in the room in the cellar where the extra chairs are kept. This is the same room in the basement where two employees from the phone company were servicing the telephone connections in the early 1990s, when they suddenly left without completing the job, telling the manager on duty that they wouldn’t be returning. There was something very wrong down there, they said, and it didn’t involve the phone lines. None of Belmont’s employees liked going into the basement, which was built of local stone and multichambered, running the length of the five sections of the house.
We were told that somebody was once shot on the front porch because he had borrowed his cousin’s horse without permission. This is the same area of the house that is featured in Belmont’s “official” ghost story, published in several places, of a phantom coach which drives up the circular drive and stops at the front door, horses stamping, while an invisible person stomps up the porch steps, enters the house, and marches toward the kitchen wing. I’ve never met a person who has experienced this official phenomenon, although a friend of a friend’s mother heard it one night many decades ago. Instead, kitchen employees were plagued with trays of glasses that smashed while safely stored in glass-fronted cupboards, carefully counted silverware and plates which disappear and reappear in a few minutes’ time, mysteriously exploding wine containers, a strange ‘mist’ which hovers about the dining room chandelier after the lights are extinguished, and other frustrating events which seem to escalate when especially important guests are in residence. Objects have even been seen flying across the dining room by employees working alone (me,) with both doors to the room closed.
A woman wearing white has often been seen, usually appearing as a real, solid woman clad in Victorian clothing, in a particular bedroom by more than one guest, or setting quietly in the corner of an adjoining bedroom by an employee who was checking the rooms one evening before the arrival of an important group. She may be the same person whose misty, white-clad form was seen on several occasions standing at a small bridge over a stream in the early morning hours.
III.
September 26, 2013, a week after my discovery in the Kent County News, I took the time to contact several of my fellow former Belmont friends, with whom I’ve never lost touch. I couldn’t wait to tell them that by pure chance, I had stumbled upon an incredible story that filled in many of the lost details of the scraps of history we had heard about the troubled years of our former workplace. After finding the article about the May 1883 murder in the Kent County News, I consulted the Baltimore Sun from the same time period, where I found a series of articles describing, in true Victorian fashion, full details of the murder, inquest, funeral of the deceased, testimonies of both families, and Ned Hanson’s trial. Along with census records of the decades leading up to and following the murder, these articles helped me piece together a strange, sad story of this family who had lived at the heart of our community a hundred years before any of us had been born, in the very house that, in retrospect, had played a huge part in our coming of age, early adulthoods, and for some of us, even in the formation of our own families. What’s more, the story oddly lined up in certain places with some of the strange, unexplained phenomena for which the house had become known.
The murder was not the result of an argument about a horse, as we had always been told. The truth was much less comfortable.
At the time of the murder, several Hanson siblings, all adults, were living at Belmont. Mrs. Hanson had died ten years earlier. Her husband, in the years following her death, had allowed the property to fall into disrepair. What’s more, he had altogether ceased maintaining the family cemetery, superstitiously believing that doing so would hasten his own death. This seemed to work for him for a few years only; he had passed away three years earlier. Living at the house in 1883 were Priscilla Hanson, age 37; Charles Edward “Ned” Hanson, age 35; Grosvenor Hanson, age 27; Annie “Nannie” Hanson, age 25; and Florence Hanson, age 23. Three other brothers lived and did business in Baltimore.
According to Ned Hanson’s own testimony at court proceedings, the spirit of his sister Mary, who had died when he was fifteen years old, had appeared to him. She warned him to be on his guard against Charles Ridgely White, who was prepared, she said, to shoot him on sight. Furthermore, he testified that ten years earlier, he had received similar instructions from his mother at her death, although she had revealed that Mr. White was responsible for the death of this same sister, and she instructed him to take revenge. Oddly, though, Ned had not even been present at his mother’s deathbed. It seems that 20th century employees were not the first to be treated to ghostly visitations at Belmont.
Reports of the court proceedings state that at a little before noon on May 16, 1883, Charles Ridgely White drove to Belmont to see Ned in order to get some seed corn. With him in his carriage were one of his daughters and a female cousin who was visiting from Washington. White was then living on one of his properties, Tutbury, adjacent to the Belmont property and only a mile distant. Their families had been great friends for a long time and were, in fact, related. When Mr. White arrived at Belmont on May 16, only Priscilla and Annie were at home. Shortly thereafter, Ned Hanson entered the house from another entrance, and learned that Mr. White had come to call. He then walked into the dining room and picked up a bread knife which was lying on the sideboard. He crossed the room and walked out onto the front porch, stepping down to where Mr. White stood talking to his sisters. As he did so, he pulled out a pistol and fired three shots at Mr. White, all of which found their mark. He then rushed at the body, cutting a 4-inch gash in the throat with the bread knife, partially severing the windpipe. He then walked calmly back into the house, through the dining room and into the kitchen, where he washed the blood from the knife, returning it to its place on the sideboard. He then retired to his room, and waited for his brothers John and Grosvenor to return from Baltimore.
Mr. White’s body was carried into the house. A jury of local lawyers and physicians was assembled, and an inquest and post-mortem examination were held at the house that evening.
Ned’s family had been uneasy about his mental state ever since he had returned from California in the 1870s. After a subsequent attack of sunstroke, he had suffered occasional hallucinations and paranoid delusions that he was being followed by a party of men determined to kill him. Testimony given at the courthouse said that he was generally an intelligent person, friendly and personable, fond of a joke and a great storyteller. Prior to this incident, he had never been violent, although he had been known to have explosive fits of temper during discussions of politics. It was also noted during the investigation that Ned’s sister Priscilla, a little over a year older than him and one of the witnesses of the murder, had long suffered from periods of “madness.” Because his behavior at the time of the murder was uncharacteristic, and because of the lack of a solid, earthly motive for the deed, it was determined at the inquest and at the formal trial in Ellicott City that although Ned had killed Charles R. White, he was not responsible by reason of insanity.
Charles Edward “Ned” Hanson, in June, 1883, was committed to the Maryland Hospital for the Insane, now Spring Grove, in Catonsville. He remained there until his death in 1931 at the age of 83.
A few years later, sometime prior to 1900, his sister Priscilla was also committed to the Maryland Hospital for the Insane. As noted earlier, Ned and Priscilla, along with their parents, grandparents, and ten brothers and sisters, are now laid to rest in the Hanson family burial ground at Belmont. Every last one of the siblings had died unmarried, with no descendants to mourn them.
IV.
When I think of Ned’s reported movements on the afternoon of May 16, 1883, I can’t help but notice that his footsteps crossed and recrossed the dining room and kitchen, as he retrieved, washed, and replaced the bread knife he employed as one of his murder weapons. This is the same area of the house prone to unexplainable disturbances involving glasses, dishes, and silverware. Could Ned be the disturbed person who had spent so much time in that basement room, and still made everyone who visited the cellar uncomfortable? I can’t help but wonder, if there is such a thing as a spiritual manifestation, whether the woman in white who was sometimes seen and felt on the upper floor is Mary Hanson, Ned’s sister. Or perhaps she is their mother, Annie Maria, the mother of a dozen children who either died young, died insane, or merely witnessed the downfall of their family’s fortune as they grew old.
And I can’t help but wonder if there is some kind of link between insanity and paranormal phenomena, whether a fragile psyche is more permeable to other layers of time, more susceptible to glimpses of what has gone on before, or is just less guarded against these perceptions. I wonder, then, what it means when some of us are witnesses to what appear to be attempts by deceased people to communicate. I wonder if some locations are inherently more ‘thin’ than others, existing independent of linear time, with layers of time blending and intersecting in a way that sometimes becomes perceptible to those who visit. My Belmont friends wonder, too.
V.
Belmont is now owned by the County, and after a thorough restoration effort, has once again opened its doors to the public as a nature preserve and conference center, hosting parties and weddings in its graciously appointed rooms and formal gardens. There are more places like Belmont that haven’t yet been paved over, where the layers of time and history are sometimes made visible to those who visit. Their histories are still known by those acquainted with old Elkridge, who grow older and fewer as time passes and more houses and roads are built, and more and more new people move in. Beneath the surface, the old Elkridge is still there. Underneath the known histories, beyond the bits of “official” lore, are the remains of flesh-and-blood people whose real stories have been all but forgotten. The layers of time are just waiting to be peeled back, their secrets to reveal, for those willing to stop and look, before all traces are gone.
Author's note: This piece was written for a writing class I took in the summer of 2015, based on a project I had been working on for a couple of years. For me, this is still an "open case...", an unfinished story of events not entirely known or understood. "The Howard County Tragedy," also in this blog, is a later version of this piece. I think I prefer this one.
In 2020, I shared this piece, its postscript, and some photos and research notes with someone working on a book of Howard County ghost stories, published in the summer of 2022. She used it as a source and this blog is noted in her bibliography. (Shelley Davies Wygant.)
