![]() They were very happy and shared 40 years of marriage before Martha died. They agreed that the ticking would symbolize the love that they had for each other, and that it should go on for eternity, even after they died. It wasn’t long before she heard the steady tick…tick…tick in her new husband’s chest, and he explained the strange encounter that he’d had with Mason and Dixon as a child. Within a year, his ship was lost at sea and Minuit and Martha were married. ![]() The sea captain had a daughter, Martha, and eventually Minuit agreed to take care of her if anything should happen to the captain. A friendship started between the two men. Okonowicz writes that Fithian Minuit met a sea captain who had a broken chronometer that needed to be repaired. Oddly, the boy who swallowed a timepiece grew up to be a clockmaker and worked in a shop filled with the sounds of ticking. While Mason and Dixon gained notoriety-they have their names attached to the Mason-Dixon line-Minuit lived a comparatively quiet life. Some versions of the story maintain that it was Mason who put a curse on the boy, and for the rest of his life the timepiece remained inside him where it ticked continually. Mason, the legend goes, was quite upset at Fithian Minuit that day. ![]() The boy grabbed the object and swallowed it before the assistant could stop him. One of Mason’s assistants panicked when the baby started to cry and used Mason’s invention to calm him. The child, who was notorious for eating anything he could get his hands on, crawled into Mason’s tent. One day in 1764, Mason and Dixon were working in the Landenberg area and mapping out the route for their Mason-Dixon rail line when a local youngster named Fithian Minuit managed to grab a portable chronometer that Mason had been working on. Residents in small towns like Oxford and Rising Sun were sometimes paying taxes to both the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Calverts in Maryland because there were ongoing boundary disputes between the two colonies, and there was confusion about which colony the taxes were rightfully owed to.Ĭharles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, a pair of master surveyors, were sent to mark out the definite boundaries between the colonies. At this time, maps were inaccurate and the legal descriptions were confusing, at best. Royal charters had been granted to the Penns of Pennsylvania and Delaware and the Calverts of Maryland, but these charters sometimes overlapped. The story dates back to a time before the American Revolution. Okonowicz writes extensively about how the legend of the ticking tomb developed in his book about true Mid-Atlantic ghost stories. Adams III, and “Up the Back Stairway,” which is Volume VII in the Spirits Between the Bays series by Ed Okonowicz. Or, if visiting a ghostly graveyard is just a little too spooky for you, even at Halloween, then you can read about the ticking tomb in books like “Weird Pennsylvania,” “Ghost Stories of Chester County and the Brandywine Valley” by Charles J. ![]() Visitors can put their ears to the gravestone and determine for themselves whether they can hear the steady tick…tick…tick Some people believe that the ticking tomb, situated in a small church cemetery, served as the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” While it seems unlikely that the master of the macabre actually based one of his most terrifying tales on the ticking tomb, it is still a worthwhile destination for anyone who enjoys a little bit of mystery-or history. Tales about the mysterious grave have been shared for more than 200 years. One of the most famous and enduring local legends is the ticking tomb near Landenberg. ![]() The spooky season is upon us and it’s a great time of the year to explore the unusual and the unexplained. ![]()
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