Deep Creek Lake

Deep Creek was not even the first lake in the valley. Around 1883, fish commissioner Gus Delauder and T. Harrison Garrett dammed the creek near Cherry Creek to make Lake Cleveland — a mile long, stocked for game fish, with a lodge, canoes, and a miniature steamboat, named for a president who had honeymooned nearby at Deer Park. In 1893, R.T. Browning — grandson of the frontier chronicler Meshach Browning — built Lake Brown near the Glendale Bridge, likely Maryland's first publicly built lake made purely for recreation. Both were gone before the utility surveyed the valley; neither appears on the developers' 1923 maps.

The lake that replaced them filled behind an earth-and-rock dam eight miles north of Oakland, fed by a purpose-built B&O rail spur that hauled in the heavy equipment. For decades it was a utility that tolerated recreation; the State of Maryland only bought the lake itself in 2000, and Deep Creek Lake State Park now administers the public share of it. The lake's centennial in 2025 produced a county-wide commemoration — a hundred years of a valley that voters never approved and swimmers now take for terrain. The dam itself still makes power; the utility still holds the operating license; the state merely owns the water.

The haunting layer is thin, and the file says so. The saddest entry is the one the park's own retellings keep: a snowmobiler lost on the winter ice, reportedly seen afterward by the wife he left. Local lore adds an apparition near the dam on Christmas Eve — the power plant's barrier keeping a ghost of its own. Beyond that, the record is honest: a ghost-hunter who canvassed the area for stories reported coming back empty, and a lifelong trail guide told her he had never heard of one.

What the lake does produce reliably are winter emergencies. The Maryland Park Service has issued formal warnings about the frozen lake — snowdrifts ramping sleds airborne, plowed salt thinning the ice under bridges — a documented danger that needs no legend to be lethal.

Under the jet skis and the rental pontoons, the record insists, there is still a valley: farmsteads purchased in 1923, stone walls and a quarry, two earlier lakes folded into the third. The lake above it became Western Maryland's recreation capital — Wisp's slopes, Oakland's Autumn Glory Festival, and for a stretch of the sixties a 21-foot swan-shaped excursion boat, built by a Westvaco engineer named Noel Obenshain, that dipped its fourteen-foot neck to pass under the Glendale Bridge. Whether that substrate counts as haunted is beyond the file's scope. It counts as submerged, which is close enough for the archive's purposes.