Haunted Delmarva: Ocean City Life Saving Station Museum

OCEAN CITY, Md. – If you frequently visit the Town of Ocean City, chances are you’ve probably passed the Ocean City Life Saving Station Museum at one point, but what you might not know is that if the museum’s walls could talk, they would speak of brave shipwreck rescues, as well as ghost stories.

Mindie Burgoyne, the author of Haunted Ocean City and Berlin said, “A lot of times what killed people was hypothermia, because there’s only a few months out of the year where the water isn’t cold enough to freeze you.”

Death at sea, sailors meeting their untimely end, their screams often drowned by the noise of the crashing waves.

At the Ocean City Life Saving Station Museum, it seems some of these lost souls are begging to be heard.

Burgoyne said, “There was one lady who said she was in here she felt extremely cold and when she looked in the life car she saw a man in a slicker and he was dead just for an instant like an apparition.”

What she may have seen could have been one of the many who spent their finals hours shivering cold in this very vessel, a vessel that would be shot out of a cannon to sailors in distress in an attempt to pull them safely back to shore.

Burgoyne said, “You could have maybe three people, maybe four lay on top of each other, lay on the bottom of this thing close the hatch and then they would pull it in through the surf and you would be tossed and turned in this thing.”

Unfortunately, the time spent tossing and turning in the surf would be the last living moments some of those sailors would spend on this earth, their memories trapped inside.

For the woman who may have encountered those spirits, the sight of an apparition was enough to send her scrambling out of the museum refusing to ever return, but her story is just one of many.

Mindie Burgoyne tells us the museum’s workers have their own share of unexplained experiences, most of which center around a pale, blonde boy.

Burgoyne said, “He was only high enough to come up to the counter so maybe three years old, maybe four and he ran into the museum.”

According to the stories, this mysterious young boy roams these halls neither going here, nor there, just joyously drifting around free of any care in the world.

Workers say he looks so real they once went looking for both him and his parents when he ran into the museum just before closing time.

Burgoyne explained, “They looked in the boats, looked in the life car, looked in the tower, but he vanished and he was never seen, so they left and that was the end of that.”

That wasn’t the end. Some time after that experience, the staff repainted the stairway leading up to the attic. Just a few days later, staff were shocked and disturbed disturbed to find a singular foot print from a little boy’s shoe at the top of the stairs.

Burgoyne said, “When they did go up there they found at the top of the stairs, just after the painted area an imprint in that some colored paint of a child’s shoe.”

Take it for what you will, but according to psychic mediums, there is in fact a child’s spirit roaming around the museum.

Burgoyne said, “Sometimes psychic mediums come in you know they want to see the museum and they mention you know there’s a child here.”

If those mediums are right, then perhaps the same little boy is the mastermind behind another haunting in the building, a haunting that would send anyone with a fear of clowns or dolls running for the hills.

Laughing Sal, an old prop used for grabbing attention of people passing by arcades back in the day, is now the center of many ghost stories.

Burgoyne said, “Sometimes she laughs when you don’t push the button.”

Oftentimes Laughing Sal is described as having a mind of her own.

One guest had a particularly hair raising encounter with the life sized doll.

Burgoyne said, “There was an account of somebody pushing the button and it didn’t work, it didn’t work, it didn’t work, and then she was walking around and looked at everything up here I think she said twenty minutes and then just as she started to go downstairs, Laughing Sal started to laugh, so it scared her.”

Laughing dolls, mysterious little boys, sailor apparitions, all working together creating the perfect spooky storm along the coast of Ocean City.

If you’re brave enough to pay a visit to the Ocean City Life Saving Station Museum, they’re open from 10 AM to 6 PM.