Blue Dog of Port Tobacco

Port Tobacco, in Charles County on the Potomac side of Southern Maryland, was once Maryland’s second-largest town; today it is the smallest incorporated town in the state, with an 18-person census count in 2020 and a small historic village of restored buildings. It is also home to Maryland’s most famous ghostly dog. According to the legend, a large blue-tinged mastiff haunts Rose Hill, on the outskirts of town, guarding the buried treasure of the man it died defending.

The story has many variants. In the version retold by cryptozoologist Karl Shuker, the victim was Charles Thomas Sims, a peddler, who arrived in town with a large blue-gray, mastiff-like hound and drank at the St. Charles Inn, where he let gold coins show. A man named Henry Hanos and a gang lured him to Rose Hill, clubbed him and his dog to death, and buried the gold under a holly tree. When they returned for it, a glowing blue dog attacked them, and Hanos soon sickened and died. Other tellers set the murder in the late 1700s, in the Revolutionary War, or after the Civil War, and some identify the victim as a returning soldier rather than a peddler. A rock called Peddler’s Rock, with reddish stains, is said to mark the spot.

Treasure seekers reportedly tried to dig up the gold afterward and were driven off by howling and a charging blue hound, including, in some versions, soldiers under Union General Joseph Hooker during the Civil War; that detail is unconfirmed. Shuker reports that the earliest written record is an 1897 item in which Olivia Floyd, a former Confederate spy who owned Rose Hill, told the Port Tobacco Times she had seen the dog. Mysterious Britain notes that as recently as February 1971 locals claimed to hear the dog’s howling near the rock, and Shuker reports unconfirmed 1970s sightings, mostly in February.

The Blue Dog is now a pillar of local heritage. Port Tobacco has an ornate sign showing the ghost dog, a saloon displaying a large oil painting of the legend, and seasonal storytelling at the Port Tobacco Historic Village. A second Blue Dog of Rose Hill is told in Frederick, Maryland, where a phantom blue dog is said to guard buried treasure at Rose Hill Manor – a separate, though possibly related, story.

A great mastiff of a dog, described as blue-tinged or blue-gray, almost black, and sometimes luminous. It is heard as howling more often than it is seen, and it charges intruders at the treasure site.

Rose Hill Road and the rock called Peddler’s Rock outside Port Tobacco, Charles County. Claimed sightings in the 1970s were mostly in February, the month in which the murder in the tale takes place.

The Blue Dog is the best known of the Charles County legends. Port Tobacco has a sign showing the ghost dog and a Blue Dog Saloon with an oil painting by artist Don Zimmer showing the dead peddler in snow and the dog’s ghost watching over him; prints raise money for a water project. The county’s Port Tobacco Historic Village hosts October tours and readings of the tale, and tellers regularly call it Maryland’s – or even America’s – oldest ghost story.