David Schlossman of the University of Maryland includes yet another example of a story that was never associated with Westminster, Maryland until the first week of 1999 when it was purposely “seeded” on various Internet sites. I’m talking, of course, about Crybaby Bridge. Schlossman’s gem is dated (of course!) 2005, and is taken from an anonymous UM student’s version told (of course!) by an anonymous friend with appropriate hand motions noted. The account is even foot-noted using the very same websites where the Maryland Crybaby bridge stories were first hotly debated, c. 2003–2004. (I questioned the stories when they first appeared on the Net in messages to the the Alt. Ghosts Uselist—archived now on Google groups, then later announced my objections to these stories on the Maryland Ghosts website, now called Eastghost.) Why am I opposed to this story and its variants, connected to slavery and the KKK, etc? First, I was actively collecting ghost stories in and around Westminster, Maryland “about 30 years ago” when that so-called ghost is said to have appeared on the bridge in question with a noose around its neck, accoridng to this version of the story. Had it happened right in my back yard, I would have been right there finding out about it, as that was the very time that I was collecting stories for my book Ghosts and Legends of Carroll County, Maryland, published by the Carroll County Public Library system in 1982. I also have to say that there is no oral or written tradition involving any Crybaby Bridge in or around Westminster dating before those Internet “seedings” of 1999. I know, because I have throughly searched the 19th and 20th century newspapers, read the old books, and interviewed many of the old-timers who resided their whole lives in that area of Carroll County, and nothing remotely like this or any version of the Crybaby Bridge story surfaced. In short, if it had been there, I would have found it. The story that your anonymous student says his or her anonymous friend told, is yet another bit of fakelore to add to the pile. As a folklorist you would do better, David Schlossman, than to accept such bouts of creative writing uncritically. Here’s the url. Jesse Glass

Hi all! Am happy to say we’ve just received David Axelrod’s newest title, Deciduous Poems, from the printer! Writes Hugh Seidman of David Axelrod’s latest volume:

These poems movingly explore both the highs and the lows of the family drama and of the down-to-earth variety of everyday experience. Axelrod is tender, angry, playful and vulnerable. As he says in one gentle love poem, ‘So many pieces to the heart’.

Copies of Axelrod’s latest are presently on their way to Small Press Distribution — we’ll give you a heads-up when they are available for purchase.

Until then, feel free to query us for purchase information! More from us all soon!