Marwood Mansion - Potomac MD Haunted Place

Recently Shared Experiences & Comments

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  The Thing In The Window

  It's been quite a while now but from what I can remember it was either 2000 or 2001 because I moved from Potomac to Chicago in 2002. I was with two buddies of mine Jason and Shawn and we had just picked up a couple of 22oz beers for each of us and were looking for a place to drink it. Jason said he knew of a really chill place that overlooks the Potomac River. So we decided to head in that direction. We turned off River Rd into an affluent development. We followed the road thru a heavily wooded area all the way till it dead-ended at this one house. Seeing that this was clearly a residential property I told Jason that we can't go in there. He said that no one currently lives there. There were a few lights on in the house that you could clearly see into its windows and see that it there was no furniture and a bunch of construction equipment laying around like scaffolding, spent caulking tubes and leftover pieces of drywall etc... We agreed the house looked vacant and had been undergoing some light construction/remodeling. So we parked the car just a little past the main entrance because I didn't want to park the car right in front of the house. Shawn and I with beers in hand, followed Jason to the back of the house. It was just like he said, it overlooked the Potomac which was beautiful because the water was sparkling in the moonlight. We cracked open our beers and started drinking. That's when Jason hit us with, "You know this house is haunted right?" Shawn and I looked at each other puzzled and that's when Jason told us the story. (I really don't remember the story Jason told me and Shawn and in fact I never heard the story about this house ever again - sorry.) I remember at the time the story did get a little under my skin. However there was a large part of me that thought Jason was just messing with us which wouldn't have been out of character for him to do so. We started to check out more of the grounds. We checked out the pool and the pool house. From what I can remember there was nothing interesting in there. Then we walked back to the house looking for an open window or an unlocked door. To be honest, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about entering the house so I wasn’t really turning any doorknobs or trying to open any windows. At this time Jason was still in the back of the house peering into windows as Shawn and I were walking around to the side of the house. I remember Jason saying that he saw a lit candle in a candle stick floating in the air. I remember thinking that Jason was laying the paranormal stuff on a little too thick and that he was definitely messing with us to the point of implausibility. While Jason was trying to find a way in, Shawn and I were on the side of the house at which point we saw a concrete staircase leading to a basement door. We took one look down the stairs and it was way too dark at least for me to go down there and check the basement door. I think Shawn had the same sentiments as well because he wasn’t making a move to go down there either. I’m not exactly sure what drew our attention away, perhaps Jason yelled something from the back of the house and one of us replied to him, I’m not sure. What I am sure about is what happened next. Almost instantaneously something caught both of our eyes when we looked down the stairs again. There was a light emanating between the fan blades of an in-wall AC unit to which we could see a sliver of the basement which was completely pitch black a moment ago. This light was not whitish with a flicker like a fluorescent light, nor was it a standard light bulb and LEDs didn’t exist yet. This light was a yellowish-orange light – in other words it was natural light from fire – like from a candle. Startled, I turned to Shawn and made sure I wasn’t going crazy and asked, “That wasn’t there a second ago was it?” “No.” he replied. I immediately yelled out towards Jason whom was still around back, “Jason we’re leaving let’s go!” Looking back on it, it was kind of messed up but neither Shawn or I waited for Jason and we hightailed it towards my car. It wasn’t until we were back on the driveway that I could hear Jason coming around to the front of the house mumbling something to the effect of, “How are ya’ll just gonna leave me?" Anyway all three of us made it back to my car. I started up the engine but I didn’t put it into gear yet. I wanted to look back at the house to see if anyone was coming after us. Jason was like, “what the hell, why aren’t we leaving?” and that’s when it appeared to us. Shawn was the first to see it. I remember him directing our attention to a 3rd floor window in the center of the house. “What is that?” Shawn asked. As soon as my brain recognized what it thought it saw, it brought a tear to my eye for it was impossibly awkward and unnatural. I was so scared but completely in awe of it that I couldn’t look away either. All of us saw the same thing. All of us were transfixed by the sight of it. Now some people might call this a ghost or an apparition, to this day I still don’t know what it was but I remember clear as day what it looked like. It was a perfect silhouette of a front-facing a person standing at the window as if it were looking out it. Also this silhouette thing was slowly moving from side to side in an unnatural way. By that I mean when a person walks, the body will dip slightly in between strides like their head is bobbing up and down a little bit. There was no such movement this thing made. It was too fluid to be human as if it were standing on a skateboard that was rolling from side to side...or for that matter, floating from side to side. However unlike a silhouette, there were no shades or curtains over the window. We could see into the room since there was a light on. With my limited knowledge of cinematography at the time, I did have a basic understanding of how lighting worked. For instance you have a subject, in this case a person, then if you situate a light source shining directly in front of the subject, it should cast a shadow behind it. I was trying to rationalize my cognitive dissonance by trying to figure out what we were seeing. It was clear that this thing was not a silhouette because we could clearly see into the room all the way back to the wall with no obstructions. As such, it wasn’t a shadow either because the light source and subject would’ve been visible from our angle to be able to be projected onto the window. Except this too was wrong. The only way to cast a shadow onto that window would’ve been if the subject was hovering in front of the window…three stories up. However this was awkward as well because how can a shadow be projected onto something that is transparent like glass. It would’ve therefore been projected either onto the floor or the back wall depending on the light source which had to be coming from outside as well. Light just doesn’t act this way, what we were seeing was impossible and our brains knew something was off; something was extremely unnatural about the thing we were seeing. It was at this point we realized the more and more we tried to figure it out the more we got creeped out by it. We left after a minute or two. This was about 20 years ago; I will be 44 in a week. To this day this remains the closest thing I’ve had to a paranormal experience. I still chalk it up to something that I just can’t explain. I’ve been down to Key West and saw Robert the Doll. I took pics of him and some selfies with me and him against his wishes. According to lore, you have to ask him permission to take his pic. The next day I was scuba diving, exploring the Vandenberg wreck when I ran out of air 90 feet down. Thankfully someone in the group had a pony bottle that I could use. I joke about it today saying that I was messing with a haunted doll and I almost died the next day. But there are too many plausible reasons why I ran out of air. Marwood Mansion on the other hand, I still don’t understand what we saw that night. I actually have been back to Marwood Mansion on a couple occasions. But nothing I experienced as significant as the one I just described. Though real quick, On Halloween 2000 or 2001 – Yes I know it sounds contrived. But that’s how I convinced several people from my neighborhood to go to Marwood Mansion. Anyway long story short – we basically parked and got out in the driveway and looked at the house for few minutes. The group didn’t seem to be very interested so we all piled back up in the car. I noticed a glove on the ground so I picked it up and got in the car. I asked if anyone was missing a glove but everyone’s gloves were accounted for. So I threw it out the window back onto the driveway and we left. If that glove belonged to something paranormal, I certainly did not want to be in possession of it. I was on the phone with Jason the other day talking about this and as a goof I typed in the keywords Haunted House Potomac into a Google search and that’s how I found the link to this page. We took the address and put it into Google Earth so we could confirm that this was in fact the same house we went to 20 years before. We both agreed that it was however there had been some major changes to the house since we had been there. For example, I didn’t see a stairwell on the side of the house where Shawn and I saw that light. Also, the driveway was gravel when we were there. Now it’s paved and from the looks of it the garage is underneath the driveway now. This was not so back then. I don't remember there ever being a garage. Since they added a subterranean garage assumingly with an entrance to the basement, it’s possible they got rid of the side entrance to the basement. Anyway, I would love to hear other people’s experience with this house.

  Posted 2/27/22

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