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The Lamplighter’s Girlfriend (from the series The Restless Spirits of Caroline County



The Lamplighter’s Girlfriend



In the early 1900’s, Bowling Green was lit by gaslights. In fact the gas pipes still lie below the streets. In those days, the job of lamplighter belonged to a man named Valentine Fitzhugh Makely. Val was in love with a lovely young Bowling Green girl whom he had known since childhood. When she turned eighteen, she accepted his proposal of marriage and the two set a June wedding date.

Alas! His fiancé took sick, and after a brief illness died. After her wake, which was held at the Bowling Green Baptist Church, the young lady’s body was sealed in her coffin, where it remained for the night in the sanctuary. Val’s uncontrollable grief was known far and wide. He was so sorrowful that he kept a vigil, sitting with his head in his hands on the front steps of the church.

Suddenly he thought he heard his fiancé calling for help! “She is still alive,” he thought. He could hear her pounding on the lid of the box which entombed her and making the most awful cries. Desperately, he tried to get into the church – but all the doors were locked. He ran for help, but to no avail.

Everyone assumed the grieving man had lost his mind. He ran and ran, calling to anyone who would listen, trying to pull the minister and deacons from their beds and beating on the doors of the town folk over and over again. Finally they came, but none too quickly. As the sun rose overhead he insisted they pry open the coffin and there they made a grisly discovery. Bloody fingernail scratches on the lid showed she had indeed been alive. She had suffocated to death.

Val never married, nor looked at another woman. He lived to be 85 years old, and is buried in Lakewood Cemetery. After his death in 1945, town residents began to be disturbed by loud knocks upon their doors in the middle of the night.

Fearing some calamity, they hurried to the doors only to find no one there. Older residents who remember Val say it is his spirit reliving that awful night of tragedy.

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