One Man's Booty

                                              One Man’s Booty 

       On a sunny spring day on Maryland’s Eastern Shore cousins Jon and Megan hiked from their parents’ West Ocean City condo to a deserted section of the Assateague Island National Park.   

       The cousins had trotted along Route 611 at a decent pace for most of the morning, enjoying the fresh ocean air and recalling the many great times they had experienced at the condo during each of the 10 years their two families had rented the vacation home.  

      After walking around the perimeter outside the park and teasing each other for about two hours, they looked up with alarm.   A stream of black smoke billowed from the abandoned Victorian structure across 611 in South Point that had served for many years as the unofficial headquarters for many of their summer adventures.   

      The duo broke into an all-out run and breathlessly made a beeline for the front door of the former palatial home. Putting the full force of their college age muscles into it, they crashed into the living room and rushed to the ornate fireplace in the center of the room.

      Despite the fact that no one had lived in the home for at least 10 years a fire continued to burn in the firebox, apparently fed by a stack of ashen logs.  The cousins scratched their heads in amazement, wondering how the blaze had started. They then sprang into action: 

     “First, we have to put this fire out,” Jon said. “This place is falling apart as it is, and one spark could start a blaze that would burn the whole house down and maybe the fields surrounding it with it. Still, even though the winds blow through here pretty strongly, the temperature can drop by 20 degrees at night and we’ve had a pretty rainy spring. Can’t figure out how the fire keeps burning.”

       The cousins grabbed rusty shovels they found in an old shed in the back of the property and began to throw dirt from what remained of the living room on the blaze.  The water company long ago had cut off service to the home and the nearest neighbor was about a half mile away. They managed to get most of the fire out, but, for some reason, the fire kept reigniting.

     “This is getting really creepy,” Megan shouted. “What could make this fire start over again when there’s no one here to feed it?”

     “Come to think of it,” Jon said. “My dad often talks about the haunting of this place by pirates who used to plague the Chesapeake Bay.  Maybe they still use this mansion as an outpost and keep the fire lit to signal other members of their ghostly crew.  No matter what causes it we have to stop it before we find ourselves in the middle of a major blaze.”

     With that, bricks began to fall from the ancient chimney on top of the fireplace.

      The blaze suddenly went out, but it seemed like bricks were now being hurled from the chimney.

      Perhaps the cousins had angered the spirits of the pirates.     

      Megan and Jon refused to give in to silly superstitions. Spurred on by their college age curiosity, they dodged some of the flying  bricks as they continued to remove others. They knew that, if the chimney fell, it might destroy what remained of the living room and bury both of them. Yet they stubbornly refused to give up. Although the bricks nearest the fire burned the cousins’ hands at first, most of the remaining ones eventually came loose.

    Underneath the years and years of dirt and debris covering the bricks, the cousins spied something shiny beneath the surface. It actually looked like gold!

     After about an hour’s worth of hard labor, the cousins removed several of the gold bricks.

     They returned to the condo and recruited several family members to round up and organize their treasure and then notified the Worcester County Sheriff’s Office of their discovery.

      Turns out the mansion had stood abandoned for such a long time that county files showed no recorded owners of the home.  A week later, the cousins claimed the bricks. They then brought an area precious metals dealer to the mansion to determine the value of the treasure.

Each of the bricks amounted to a few hundred dollars worth of 24-carat gold.

     Jon and Megan carefully secured the site and loaded  most of their precious discovery into their SUV so they could transport it to the gold dealer in Salisbury for conversion into cash. 

      Since it would take several days to move all the gold bricks, the cousins decided to move them in stages. They, therefore, hired guards to patrol the site until the families moved all the bricks. 

      All stayed quiet around the area until the end of the week. At about midnight on Friday the guards heard what sounded like metal crashing inside the chimney. As they approached the chimney they found no sign of life and the gold bricks appeared to be undisturbed.

       However, after topping off meals ordered from a nearby restaurant with a few six packs of the local brew, the guards fell into a deep sleep. When they woke up with slight hangovers the next day, although they couldn’t recall a great deal from the night before, they were certain they had been alone all night and noone had disturbed the treasure.  Yet, they found that the gold bricks had disappeared. When Jon and Megan brought the sheriff’s office back they discovered a skull and crossbones flag draped across the site of the demolished chimney.

       Resigned to the inevitable, Jon and Megan said, “Easy come, easy go.” They found no sign of the pirate spirits or the gold bricks they had left behind.

      Every night around midnight neighbors from as much as a mile away did say they heard the sound of the pirate song “Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum”echoing through the area around the abandoned mansion for a half hour then suddenly stopping.