MOLL DYER ROCK
Folklore Monument — Leonardtown, Maryland
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/moll-dyer-rock-leonardtown-maryland/

Folklore monument associated with published local folklore.

Moll Dyer Rock is a folklore monument in Leonardtown, Maryland. Folklore monument associated with published local folklore. The name the accounts keep returning to is Moll Dyer. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, 1 legend and 1 named or described presence — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting.

Moll Dyer Rock is Maryland's witch stone — the boulder where, legend says, Moll Dyer froze to death in February 1698 after a Leonardtown mob blamed her for the influenza killing the county and burned her cabin on the coldest night of the hardest winter anyone remembered. A boy found her days later, one hand on the rock and one raised to the sky; when they pulled her loose, the story goes, her handprint stayed in the stone.
Moll was probably real — a migrant woman, an herbalist, maybe a healer trained in the West Indies, living alone on charity at the edge of a suspicious town. Whether the mob and the burning happened as told is legend, but the county named a road and a stream for her, the rock was found in the woods in 1968 and moved to the Old Jail in 1972, and in 2021 Leonardtown gave it a shelter at Tudor Hall and made February 26 Moll Dyer Day. Visitors still leave trinkets on it; the curse is still said to make you dizzy if you touch it.
The file keeps the rock: the 1698 winter, the mob legend, the found stone, and the town that eventually made its accused witch a memorial.
Moll Dyer Rock is the archive's witch file — the influenza panic, the frozen handprint, and the stone Leonardtown shelters now.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Moll Dyer Rock is the archive's witch file — the 1698 legend, the rock with the handprint, and the town's late apology.
A stone that holds a curse keeps its shelter — the file's suggestion being that Moll Dyer's hold is the community's guilt: the witch they burned, the rock she froze to, and the day they finally gave her name a holiday.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] folklore legend: The historical society recounts Moll Dyer supposedly freezing at this rock. Moll Dyer Rock's file is thin on proof and long on persistence — the standard profile of American place-lore. 'Moll Dyer Rock' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. The legend does what legends do — it explains the place in a way the records can't.
  source: Moll Dyer Rock (https://www.stmaryshistory.org/content.aspx?club_id=706426&module_id=487754&page_id=22)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Moll Dyer Rock — St. Mary's County Historical Society
  https://www.stmaryshistory.org/content.aspx?club_id=706426&module_id=487754&page_id=22

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/