Blue Dog Phantom at Peddler's Rock

Not long ago, a reader forwarded the following anecdote. I have heard scant references to a phantom in related stories, but I didn't associate it as a particular entity. Here is her tale:

When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me the chilling story of Blue Dog Hill. The spine-tingling story has stuck in my memory and it is still circulating Southern Maryland's collection of ghostly legends to this day. Some middle and high schools even teach the legend to the students during Halloween-time.

In the late 1700s, there was a soldier and his beloved dog. The soldier and dog were the very best of companions and it was said that this particular soldier was fairly wealthy. He and his dog companion lived in the Port Tobacco area of Charles County. They were walking home from a local bar one night, when a couple of rugged thieves overtook them. They beat the soldier to death, killing his dog along with him. Legend has it that a rock known as "peddler's rock" can still be seen around the Rose Hill Manor. This is the rock that the poor soldier was thrown against...fatally wounding him. The dog was supposedly killed after his master, in order to stop the beast from attacking the thieves during their despicable act. They immediately fled the scene.

Later on, the two thieves returned to peddler's rock on Rose Hill, in search for the riches and the deed to a home and property that was said to have been in possession of the now-dead soldier. When they got close to peddler's rock, they noticed that the soldier's body was gone and there was a luminous ghostly dog standing at the site! The dog could have been black in life but in death he appeared to have a bluish coat and glowing eyes. The men froze in their steps...they couldn't do anything but stare at the ghostly dog in front of them. After the blue dog gave up returning their stares, it let out a 'hooooowwwwwwl' and suddenly charged towards them!

The two thieves fled in terror, never to return to the rock in search for the hidden or perhaps buried treasures.

The "peddler's rock" is a large rock that is said to still be present and located on the Rose Hill Manor property. It is said to have red stains and lies on a hill that is historically known as Rose Hill, but when keeping with the phantom blue dog legend, is more appropriately known as Blue Dog Hill.

The story began being told around the time of the American Civil War. Others say that the man was in fact a peddler who had stolen the treasures from someone else in the area and that is why he was killed for being a lowly thief himself. Whatever the true story, the legend started somehow and continues to this day.

Sightings of the blue dog have occurred since the legend started, with the more recent and well-known sightings taking place in the 1970's. Though it is very difficult to track these folks down, the locals of Port Tobacco claim that you can still hear the blue dog howling at night...sad howls that seem to emanate from Rose Hill. The story that is uttered to frightened children in the local schools commonly refers to the blue dog who "hovers over peddler's rock", waiting to guard his master's treasure and possibly his remains from whomever may come to desecrate or steal. Some have even said to be chased by the blue dog. Most people will not go near peddler's rock at night.

The Big Book of Maryland Ghost Stories (Big Book of Ghost Stories)

Maryland Ghosts: Paranormal Encounters in the Free State

The Real Story Behind the Exorcist: A Study of the Haunted Boy and Other True-Life Horror Legends from Around the Nation's Capital

Eastern Shore Bigfoot - Somerset County, Maryland

Somerset County, Maryland - The first encounter in the summer of 1968, my 10 year old cousin and I (I was 11) were riding our ponies on a fire road back in the woods. We had gone about a 1/4 mile in when we found scratches etched in the dirt of the road. It was like three fingers (or claws) had raked the dirt in the road approximately four feet long in three different places, some of which overlapped each other. Each "scratch" was about 4 1/2" to 5" apart, so whatever did it had to be BIG. We didn't see any tracks or prints around to give us a clue what may have done it. We had never heard of Bigfoot before and we didn't have any bears or cougars or the like on the Eastern Shore. We were not strangers to exploring in the woods, because as far as we knew there was nothing to fear there. I did notice that the woods was very quiet that afternoon, there wasn't a sound to be heard at the time. The ponies were dancing around and nickering every once in a while which was very unusual for them, but we were so engrossed in the tracks that we had found that we didn't notice their odd behavior at the time. After we were there for about five minutes we heard this really low pitched loud growl from about thirty feet away in the brush. As soon as the growl died away the bushes (10 -12 feet high) started shaking like crazy. We never did see what did it, but we didn't wait around to find out either.

The second incident was in August of 1976, I had just come home from work about 10:00 o'clock in the morning from my parent's convenience store. As I got out of my car I heard this loud moaning howl coming from the woods about 1/2 mile from our house. The Maryland State Fair was going on at the time and all of our neighbors had taken livestock up there to show, so there was no one in our neighborhood at the time except me. The moaning howl that I heard sounds EXACTLY like the moaning howl that was recorded in Ohio (although I was not aware of BF sounds at the time) and is listed on several BF web sites. It went on for an hour and I finally decided to walk down the road towards the woods and see if I could see what was making the noise. As soon as I got to a point that was even with the sound in the woods, the moaning stopped and whatever it was let out this screaming roar and some maple trees about 50 yards into the woods (trees about 40 -45 feet tall) started shaking and swaying back and forth and it sounded like limbs breaking. There was no wind that day and those trees were swaying so hard that I could hear them going "whoosh, whoosh" through the air. I realized then that I was in the presence of some P.O.'d creature that I couldn't see but that obviously could see me. I was a half mile from home with no gun or help available. I took off running as fast as I could for home. As soon as I started back down the road, the aggressive behavior stopped and the moaning started again. It continued until my mom came home at 2:00 that afternoon. She heard it when she got out of the car and asked me what it was. I told her I didn't know but whatever it was was big and mad. I told her it had been going on for at least four hours because I heard it as soon as I got home, it quit about fifteen minutes after my mom got home.

The third incident was in the summer of 1981, I had gotten married and built a house next to my mom and dad's house. My wife and I were sitting out on our front porch one evening about 11:00 pm and we heard the most god awful screams coming from the woods 1/4 mile directly across the road from our house. It sounded like a woman being murdered. As near as we could tell, it seemed to be at least three different "something's" making vocalizations. I had lived in the area all my life and I had never heard anything like it before, it went on for about two hours. Two weeks later we heard it again about the same time of night, this time it was only for about a half hour. The next day I talked to my neighbor about it and he wondered if maybe it was the calls of mating birds or something. He was from the city and had only been living there for about two years and I told him that I had never encountered that before. Then he proceeded to tell me that he had found a deer kill back by his pond which was only about 20 feet from the woods by a farm pond that he had. He also used to run muskrat traps in the big watershed ditches on his property and used to make his last round checking his traps about 10:00 pm. He said that he was checking one of his traps back on the southeast corner of his property approximately 60 feet from the wood line. He was bent over adjusting the trap when he said that something let out this horrific scream about thirty feet away from him in the ditch. He looked in that direction and said he saw something large and black charging at him down the ditch bank. It knocked him over and continued down the ditch and disappeared into the woods. He said it happened so fast he didn't know what it was. Unfortunately it rained that night so when he went back to look for tracks nothing was visible. He used to carry a .22 pistol when he checked his traps. He said he started carrying his .44 and didn't check them at night anymore.

Provided by the Gulf Coast BigFoot Research Organization / Delmarva Cryptids

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