BGuthrie Photos: MD -- College Park -- University of Maryland -- Hornbake Library -- Exhibit: Exorcist

MD -- College Park -- University of Maryland -- Hornbake Library -- Exhibit: Exorcist:

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Description of Pictures: "Exorcist House"
In 1971, William Peter Blatty published The Exorcist, a chilling novel that continues to frighten readers today. The story is inspired by events that tok place in a neighborhood just a few miles from campus. As a college student at Georgetown University in 1949, Blatty heard tales of a teenage boy allegedly possessed by the devil, who was later revealed to live at 3210 Bunker Hill Road in the Mt. Rainier neighborhood. Although Blatty's novel centers around a teenage girl, many of the girl's symptoms mimic those of the Mt. Rainier boy: violent screaming and cursing, speaking in Latin or Aramaic, and moving furniture around the room.
After numerous exorcisms were performed in the Mt. Rainier home, a priest accompanied the boy to St. Louis for treatment, and his symptoms eventually ceased. The Mt. Rainier street was rumored to be cursed for years to follow, with misfortune seemingly finding every family on the street. The house was eventually razed. but many visitors still feel a tingling in their spines when they walk past the devil's former address.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] UMDHEX_140707_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] UMDHEX_140707_04.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] UMDHEX_140707_07.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[4] UMDHEX_140707_10.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] UMDHEX_140707_13.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] UMDHEX_140707_16.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. UMDHEX_140707_04.JPG: "Exorcist House" In 1971, William Peter Blatty published The Exorcist, a chilling novel that continues to frighten readers today. The story is inspired by events that tok place in a neighborhood just a few miles from campus. As a college student at Georgetown University in 1949, Blatty heard tales of a teenage boy allegedly possessed by the devil, who was later revealed to live at 3210 Bunker Hill Road in the Mt. Rainier neighborhood. Although Blatty's novel centers around a teenage girl, many of the girl's symptoms mimic those of the Mt. Rainier boy: violent screaming and cursing, speaking in Latin or Aramaic, and moving furniture around the room. After numerous exorcisms were performed in the Mt. Rainier home, a priest accompanied the boy to St. Louis for treatment, and his symptoms eventually ceased. The Mt. Rainier street was rumored to be cursed for years to follow, with misfortune seemingly finding every family on the street. The house was eventually razed. but many visitors still feel a tingling in their spines when they walk past the devil's former address.
2. UMDHEX_140707_13.JPG: Bladensburg Dueling Grounds: A small, grassy field off Maryland Route 450, not far from College Park, has a violent past. Known as the Bladensburg dueling grounds, it played host to duels between many notable nineteeth-century Washingtonians. Francis Scott Key's son Daniel Key, Maine congressman Jonathan Cilley, and American naval hero Stephen Decatur were among the more than 50 men killed at this location. Bladensburg served as a popular location for duels because Maryland statutes against dueling were more lax than those in Washington, DC. Cilley's death in 1838 caused such a public outrage that Congress soon passed a law making the challenge, acceptance, or actual act of a duel illegal in the District of Columbia. Duelers continued to meet in Bladensburg, however, in the middle of the night, to settle their differences. Today urban development covers much of the land, but on foggy mornings visitors to the remaining grassy area have seen at least one ghostly figure, a man, dressed in black, with his head bowed. Could this be one of the fatally wounded duelists?
3. UMDHEX_140707_16.JPG: Surratt House: In nearby Clinton, Maryland, stands the country home of Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the United States government. Allegedly connected to the Lincoln assassination, Mary was accused of offering her Clinton home as a "safe house" for the conspirators as they fled the Washington, DC, area. The house, now a museum, is reportedly a hotbed of ghostly activity. Mary was hanged July 7, 1865, at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. Since that time, her ghost has been seen in several places -- in Fort McNair, in her Washington, DC, residence, and in her Clinton home. Several witnesses have seen Mary on the porch and slowly descending the main staircase. In addition, visitors have heard men's voices, heavy footsteps, and the clinking of glasses in the back room. Could this be the conspirators themselves having a congratulatory toast? Clinton, Maryland From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... History Clinton was founded in the 1770s. The town, then named Surratt's Villa, was actually a simple crossroads with a few buildings. In the 1800s, it became known as Surrattsville. The main building served as the post office, an inn and tavern, and a polling place. This main residence was one of two properties owned by the widowed Mary Surratt; the second property was in Washington, D.C. On 14 and 15 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth, who had two hours earlier assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, stopped by the Surrattsville tavern to pick up weapons and supplies. The U.S. government alleged that Mrs. Surratt had gone there earlier with these supplies, and was in collusion with the conspirators, one of whom was her son, John Surratt. Because she was found guilty of complicity in the Lincoln assassination, Mary Surratt was hanged at the Capitol Prison in Washington D.C., on 7 July 1865. (Her house is now the Surratt House Museum, with a focus on the assassination.) The U.S. Post Office renamed the town Robeysville, due to the notoriety of the Surratt name, and in keeping with naming towns after the post master. In 1879, Robeysville was renamed Clinton. The local high school, however, retains the name of Surrattsville, and some locals continue, in common usage, to call the town "Surattsville".
Wikipedia Description: University of Maryland Libraries
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The University of Maryland Libraries is the largest university library in the Washington, D.C. - Baltimore area. The university's library system includes eight libraries; seven are located on the College Park campus, while the eighth library, Priddy Library, is located on the University System of Maryland satellite campus in Shady Grove.

The UM Libraries are a key academic resource that supports the teaching, learning, and research goals of the university. The various materials collected by the libraries can be accessed by students, scholars, and the general public. The libraries feature 4 million volumes and a substantial number of e-resources (including more than 17,000 e-journal titles), a variety of archives and special collections, and a host of technological resources which enable remote online access to the Libraries' holdings and services. The libraries are currently ranked 10th in electronic resources as a percentage of total library materials by the 115-member Association of Research Libraries. Patricia A. Steele currently serves as the Dean of Libraries, taking over the position in the Fall of 2009.

...
Hornbake Library.

Constructed in 1972 as a separate undergraduate library, Hornbake Library was named in 1980 for R. Lee Hornbake, the former Academic Vice President of the University of Maryland. The building was repurposed as repository for special collections, and now Hornbake Library is home to the College of Information Sciences, the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, the Gordon W. Prange Collection (a collection of Japanese print publications issued during the early years of the Occupation of Japan, 1945-1949), Library Media Services the central campus audiovisual research and instructional library facility; the Katherine Anne Porter Room; and the Maryland Room, which houses Special Collections and University Archives. In September 2012, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) moved to a new space in Hornbake Library, having been previously located in the basement of McKeldin Library. Hornbake Library is located in Hornbake Plaza, which sits east of the Adele H. Stamp Student Union.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
2014 photos: Trips this year: three Civil War Trust conferences (Winchester, VA, Nashville, TN, and Atlanta, GA), Michigan to visit mom in the hospice before she died and then a return trip after she died, and my 9th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Las Vegas, Reno, Carson City, Sacramento, Oakland, and Los Angeles). Ego strokes: Paul Dickson used one of my photos as the author photo in his book "Aphorisms: Words Wrought by Writers". Equipment this year: I mostly used my Fuji XS-1 camera but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Number of photos taken this year: just over 470,000.
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