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Historic haunted places in Frederick, MD. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
4 listings shown.
MARYLAND / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
When this replica of the Civil War heroine's home was a museum, people reported her rocking chair moving by itself in an empty room. Staff also described finding the impression of …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
MARYLAND / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Hessian prisoners were held here during the Revolution, and Frederick folklore says cries and groans can still be heard near the grounds after dark. A more dramatic version adds a …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
MARYLAND / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The building once housed a Civil War embalming operation, and staff say the freight elevator opens and closes on its own. Workers also report strange noises, small objects that van…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
MARYLAND / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Staff blame a ghost named Jimmy, said to be a former projectionist, for faucets turned on, items moved and restroom stalls disturbed, especially when new employees start. Tradition…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Frederick is the county seat of Frederick County and, with a 2020 population of 78,171 in its Wikipedia article's account, the second-largest incorporated city in Maryland. It stands at a crossroads — an old north–south Native American trail meeting east–west routes to the Chesapeake — and its skyline of church towers earned it the name its article records, "The City of Clustered Spires," from John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Barbara Frietchie: "The clustered spires of Frederick stand / Green-walled by the hills of Maryland."
The Civil War made Frederick a hospital city, and that is the documented root of its haunted reputation. In September 1862 both armies marched through on the way to South Mountain and Antietam; between September 1862 and January 1863, nearly 10,000 wounded soldiers passed through Frederick's hospitals, in HistoryNet's account, with churches, schools, hotels and private homes converted into wards. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine's own history uses the phrase the period earned: the city became "one vast hospital." Two years later the war returned — the Battle of Monocacy was fought in Frederick County on July 9, 1864, a Confederate victory in its Wikipedia article's record.
Frederick's most famous resident is inseparable from the line between its history and its folklore. Barbara Fritchie (1766–1862) was a real Frederick Unionist who died on December 18, 1862, aged 96, three months after Confederate troops passed through the town, in her Wikipedia article's record. Whittier's 1863 poem made her a folk hero: an elderly woman defying an occupying general, pleading "Shoot if you must this old gray head, but spare your country's flag." The article is careful about the status of that scene — it describes the incident as alleged, and Fritchie as a woman who "became part of American folklore." Her remains were moved to Mount Olivet Cemetery in 1914, where her memorial stands; her house on West Patrick Street is a 1927 reconstruction of the original, in the accounts collected for this guide. Frederick's ghost tours walk exactly this ground: documented hospital wards, a documented folk hero, and a downtown that has been telling the difference — and blurring it — for 160 years.
This section is folklore — reported by tour operators and the venues themselves, and never asserted as fact here.
The Barbara Fritchie story is the city's founding legend, and it is labelled legend by its own sources: Whittier's poem is a poem, the flag-waving scene is alleged, and the reports that followed — Fritchie's figure said to keep watch over her reconstructed house, a rocking chair said to move — are later folklore collected in this guide's sources. She belongs in this section precisely because Frederick itself keeps her here: a documented woman inside an undocumented scene.
The National Museum of Civil War Medicine's haunting is reported by the museum itself, which is what makes it unusual. The museum calls its 1830s building "the most haunted building in Frederick" and runs tours on the strength of its own staff's accounts: it says the haunting sights, sounds and sensations in the building "have been reported for decades by the people who lived and worked in the building," that its third floor — not normally open to the public — is where numerous sightings have occurred, and that its Haunted History tours share staff and volunteers' first-hand accounts of paranormal activity alongside the building's documented embalming past. Reported by the venue, in the venue's own words — and still reported, not documented.
Downtown's walking tours carry the rest of the roster. The Tyler Spite House, on West Church Street, is said in both local operators' accounts to have been built in 1814 specifically to block a planned street extension — spite as a building motive — and visitors report a rocking chair's sound, sudden cold and a man seen in a rocking chair, in US Ghost Adventures' telling. Winchester Hall, a former girls' school that served as a Civil War hospital in the same operator's account, carries its reports of phantom bloodstains and disembodied footsteps. Court Square, where the old courthouse stood, is where the tours place Frederick's executions. These are operator stories told on the sidewalk at night; where a building in this guide has a Wikipedia anchor or a first-party record, the story below says so, and where it does not, that is said too.
Hountix lists 4 places in Frederick, MD. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The museum's own Wikipedia article and its own history page agree on the skeleton, and together they anchor this story. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine was incorporated in 1990, growing out of Dr. Gordon E. Dammann's collection of Civil War medical artifacts, begun with his wife Karen in 1971; it first opened to the public in 1996 and moved in October 2000 into its present home — a three-story 19th-century brick building at 48 East Patrick Street that, in the article's record, housed a furniture maker and undertaker operation during the Civil War. The museum's own history adds the building's other wartime trade: 48 East Patrick was built in the 1830s, was a furniture shop and a site of Civil War embalming, and was home to Frederick residents and businesses before it was a museum. Its galleries run to 7,000 square feet of immersion exhibits — camp life, evacuation of the wounded, a field dressing station, a field hospital and a hospital ward — in the article's account.
The museum's subject is why Frederick is in this guide at all. Its own history records that in 1993 historic Frederick was chosen as the museum's home because the wounded were sent here from the nearby battlefields: "the city became 'one vast hospital' as the churches, municipal buildings, and homes were transformed into makeshift hospitals." The medicine it interprets — the surgical kits, the surgeon's tent, the embalming trade that followed the armies — is documented. The embalmer Richard Burr, who worked in this building after Antietam in the museum's account, is documented. What the building did with that past afterward is the museum's other collection.
That collection is the Haunted History tour, and the museum tells it in the first person. Its own event pages call the building "the most haunted building in Frederick," say that on the tour "staff and volunteers will share stories of Civil War embalmers, the building's most infamous tenants, and their first-hand accounts of paranormal activity that have given the building its spooky reputation," and offer exclusive access to the third floor, "where numerous sightings have occurred." Its 2026 season, in its own published schedule, ran Haunted History tours on October 10, 17, 24 and 25, with two special extended tours on Halloween night, October 31. The museum invites visitors to bring their own cameras and ghost-finding apps. First-hand accounts, offered as accounts, by the institution that owns the building — that is the strongest form a haunting claim can take, and it is still, by the museum's own framing, a report. The documented building of the 1830s, the undertakers and the embalmers are the facts; the echoes the staff report in its halls are folklore the museum itself curates.