Don’t go out after dark: Remembering the caped figure who terrorized O’Donnell Heights

The sunny day it happened, Sharon Lowe was just 14, chatting with her girlfriends and walking through their neighborhood, O’Donnell Heights. It was the summer of 1979. As the teens passed a nearby cemetery, they noticed something strange. The pair of vicious German shepherds that always barked and tried to get over the cemetery fence were quiet.

Lowe realized the guard dogs were actually playing with a man. Tall and slender, he wore boots, a white shirt and a black cape lined in red. His eyes were hidden by a top hat.

The entity Lowe saw that day in the St. Stanislaus Cemetery was no stranger to the community in Southeast Baltimore, and the story lingers today among some people who grew up there. They called him the O’Donnell Heights Phantom.

“Why is he wearing a top hat and a cape?” Lowe asked her friends.

They looked at her oddly. They didn’t see any man.

Then the figure flashed Lowe a smile, one that stretched across his thin face, every tooth visible. The Baltimore woman, now 61, said she recognized his features right away. She’d seen him in her nightmares from the time she was about 5.

Almost three decades before he smiled at Lowe, people from her neighborhood had spotted a figure roaming their streets. Described by hundreds of witnesses as being tall, thin and long-legged, with the speed of a horse, he was known to crouch on top of rooftops and peer into homes, tapping on the glass with his clawlike fingernail, according to stories in The Baltimore Sun. People reported to the police that they caught glimpses of him, his cape and top hat silhouetted against the night sky.

According to The Sun, residents described him as being able to “vault like a gazelle” over the 6-foot-high cemetery fences. A 14-year-old girl, Myrtle Ellen Bennett, said she was an eyewitness: “He has a horrible face and is dressed in black.”

He’d whisper to children from under cars. “Come here, little girl. Come here, little boy,” he’d say.

For two weeks in the summer of 1951, men grabbed their shotguns, butcher knives and sticks, ready to defend their families. There were reports that people stayed awake all night on their porches, or slept on the first floor of their homes, too afraid to be on the second floor.

Despite the attention and fear, no one was ever found or caught.

The neighborhood traces its history back to World War II, when the rowhomes were built for white factory and steel workers. In 1967, the Civil Rights Era ushered in change with desegregation, and the neighborhood boomed in diversity. It is remembered fondly as an area where everyone knew their neighbors and for the most part, got along well.

Lowe grew up on Steelton Avenue, off of Boston Street and Dundalk Avenue, steps away from the cemetery.

Like most of the other homes, which were all similar, her family’s place had a skylight. She remembers the one in her house being sealed and painted over. The dark skylight was just one thing that gave her a frightened feeling as a child.

“Why did your dad paint that skylight?” a friend asked Lowe when she was a small child, long before the cemetery sighting. “Because my dad didn’t want anyone looking in,” she replied.

Although their neighborhood was safe, their father had a strict rule: be inside the house by dark.

She never knew why her father had the rule, and neither she nor her two sisters asked why. She vividly remembers one night when she was 5 years old, walking home with her older sister.

“Come on, let’s get home, quickly!” she remembers her older sister saying to her as the sun set. Her sister dragged her along, and Lowe’s tiny legs could barely keep up. Their father was waiting for them at the door.

As she grew up, Lowe tried to ask neighbors and family friends about the phantom she had seen in her dreams and on that fateful day in the cemetery. “That is something none of us want to talk about, Sharon,” a neighbor told her. Lowe’s mother told her to stop asking. Now all of those people have died.

Decades after those rushed walks home and that sunny day smile, Lowe did find an explanation: a news article about the O’Donnell Heights Phantom. She took it to her father.

“I didn’t want to scare your sisters but we knew what was going on — no one would talk about it,” he said. “But we always knew.”

By then, people had stopped speaking of the phantom. It was as if their silence acted as a shield. If no one spoke of him, he didn’t exist. If he didn’t exist, then he wouldn’t come for you.

According to reports at the time, the phantom was last seen heading toward Highlandtown. There have not been any reported sightings in years. Forty-seven years later, Lowe, who no longer lives in O’Donnell Heights, remembers that smile. Just three months ago, she tossed and turned in bed, her husband trying to calm her, while she yelled out during another recurring nightmare of the phantom, and his disturbing face.

“It was full teeth. A smirky kind of look, like, ‘I’m coming,’” she said. “It was me he was looking at. He knew I could see him.”