The town of Ellicott Mills was terrorized in the year 1819. Hundreds of kids had vanished with no trace. After several of the children were last seen speaking with Edwin Graveleigh, parents got concerned. Edwin was the unpopular Graveleigh family’s youngest son. Years of bizarre and loud nighttime noises emanating from their home had enraged the neighborhood.
Rumors abounded in the isolated industrial town. After local officials failed to respond to public demands for a search, a mob formed to conduct the search themselves. Locals invaded the Graveleigh Mill, armed and enraged, only to discover it had been completely vacated. The family was nowhere to be found. After search groups were unable to locate the culprits, others speculated that the Graveleighs had fled west. Others speculated that they had simply gone into hiding in the Patapsco Valley’s deep woodlands.
The village eventually returned to normal, and the memories of the missing youngsters faded away. Until 1869, when seven children vanished in the span of a week. Locals speculated that a “troubled” soldier from the civil war was to blame. Some of the town’s older residents, on the other hand, had a different theory. The Graveleighs were back. The disappearances of that week turned out to be isolated over time, and the Graveleigh family faded farther into oblivion.
The Graveleigh family had been forgotten when children went missing in late October 1919 and again in 1969, and the village accepted the unresolved disappearances as incidents of group runaways or bad luck.
Signs of the Graveleigh family have begun to appear in the woods 200 years after the first abductions. Hikers have observed the Graveleigh family emblem near trails and mill ruins in Patapsco State Park, and a collection of graves with the mark were discovered in a thicket off of Church Rd.
Authorities have dismissed the incidents as pranks. The most superstitious among us, on the other hand, believe we may be witnessing the reappearance of the family responsible for the disappearances that have afflicted the area every fifty years.
Nick DaMostra from Ellicott City MD
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