Each Halloween, we like to revisit one of Montgomery County’s most enduring ghost stories… the supposedly haunted stretch of Game Preserve Road in Gaithersburg. A video of the road can be seen below.
With its winding pavement, dense woods, railroad crossings and proximity to Seneca Creek State Park, Game Preserve Road already has many of the ingredients of a classic scary-road story. Add nearly 150 years of reported strange encounters, local legends involving a headless Civil War soldier, phantom figures and stories of cars mysteriously refusing to start, and it has a case for being called the scariest road in Maryland.
Whether any of it is actually supernatural is another question. One of the most interesting parts of the legend is just how far back reports of strange activity in the area go. An account published in The Montgomery County Sentinel on March 17, 1876, and later shared by Montgomery Ghosts , described residents near Clopper’s Mill becoming alarmed by mysterious activity at the railroad bridge over Big Seneca Creek, just off what is now Game Preserve Road.
“The people in the neighborhood of Clopper’s Mill in this county have been very much excited for several weeks pas...