Ghosts of Maine is a sister site to Ghosts of DC, where this all started in 2012.
Why I started this
My name is Tom. I lived in DC for more than 20 years, and Ghosts of DC grew out of a 1903 rowhouse I owned in Columbia Heights.
I wanted to know who had lived there before me. Once I started looking, I couldn’t stop. Every corner store and apartment building on my walk had a past I knew nothing about.
In January 2012, I didn’t have kids yet, so my weekends were my own. I spent countless hours reading old newspapers, land records and census pages, starting with an address and following whatever turned up. Plenty of searches went nowhere. A few turned up stories nobody would believe if I’d invented them, like the man who punched a shark in the Potomac. Honest.
Those stories landed on the blog. The more of them I found, the stronger my connection to the city’s history.
During the pandemic, my wife and I moved to Maine with our three girls. The archives came with me.
Ghosts of DC came first. The same idea now runs on Ghosts of Baltimore and Ghosts of Maine, my home today. Same approach, same sources you can check, new lost and untold stories.
What this blog is about
A place’s history is usually told through its monuments and its famous names. The people who actually lived here, the grocers, cops, landlords and kids, mostly don’t make the tour. They’re the point of every Ghosts site.
Most stories start with a real address you can still walk past. New and updated stories end with a list of the sources they came from, so you can check the work yourself.
How I work now, and why I’m telling you
Today I have minimal time for that. For years, good stories just sat hidden and untold.
I’m a technologist who loves history, so now I use AI to do the digging. The research that used to eat up my weekends now fits into the time I actually have. Without AI, I couldn’t do this at all. Every fact still gets checked against the original record, and I read every story before it goes up.
Along the way, I often catch old reporting errors, where two sources from a century ago disagree on the details. People made mistakes then, too.
I know some people will say I should just put in more effort. But for me the choice was never more effort or less. The alternative was no stories at all.
The podcast works the same way, narrated by an AI version of my voice. My kids, it turns out, love it. We listen on the way to school.
I’d rather tell you that up front than have you wonder. Here’s exactly how it works, in our AI policy.
These tools let one person bring back stories that would otherwise stay buried. But they only work if a person is in charge and the facts hold up. That part is still on me.
Tips, memories and corrections
Some of the best stories here started with a reader’s note about a grandparent’s old business, a house with a past or a photo in a shoebox. If you have one, I’d love to hear it.
And if something here is wrong, tell me. I’ll fix it and say so.
Email me at tom@ghostsofdc.org.