The Slave Who Avenged His Wife on Halloween — and Turned His Master and Overseers Into Scarecrows | HO

Washington County, Maryland — Autumn 1862.

While cannon fire thundered twenty miles away at Antietam, another kind of war was being fought on a small tobacco plantation tucked into the hills of western Maryland. It was not a battle of armies, but a battle of souls—fought not for territory, but for justice, vengeance, and the dignity of the enslaved.

On that cold Halloween night, while the nation bled through its Civil War, a man named Jerome rose from the depths of despair to rewrite one of the most horrifying—and haunting—stories in Maryland’s history.

A House Built on Terror

Leander Kenny was the son of Irish immigrants who brought with them the old Celtic rituals of Samhain—what Americans would later call Halloween. But there was nothing festive about the way he observed the holiday.

Kenny was known across the county as a man without conscience. At forty-five, broad-shouldered with red-gray hair and pale, icy eyes, he ruled his 150-acre estate with cruelty so extreme that even neighboring planters whispered his name like a curse.

He called his punishment barn the dark place. It was a dungeon of chains and narrow compartments where men and women were contorted into impossible shapes. The floor was covered with jagged stones. Light came only through tiny slits that painted the prisoners’ faces with eerie, trembling beams.

Every October, Kenny staged his twisted version of the Irish harvest festival. He forced his fifteen slaves to carve grotesque faces into pumpkins—grinning demons that lined the path to his house. And each year he selected one man or woman to serve as a “living scarecrow,” tied to a wooden cross in the field overnight, left to the cold and the dark as the overseers drank and laughed.

It was a performance meant to terrify. But in 1862, it would summon something far more real than superstition.

The Breaking Point

Among Kenny’s slaves was Jerome, a twenty-eight-year-old man born on the property, known for his quiet intelligence and careful restraint.

His wife, Naomi, worked inside the main house. Six months pregnant, she had drawn the unwanted attention of Kenny himself—attention that filled Jerome with dread.

That autumn, as the war crept closer and panic spread among Maryland’s planters, Kenny grew even crueler. He drank heavily, prowling his property like a restless animal.

One sweltering October day, Jerome collapsed in the fields, overcome by fever. Instead of offering help, Kenny ordered him dragged into a toolshed and left to die. Naomi secretly brought him water and whispered prayers through the night. Her defiance was noticed.

When Kenny caught her visiting the cabin, he accused her of “aiding a malingering slave” and ordered her punished in the dark place. For three days she was tortured—forced to stand with her arms outstretched until she collapsed, to kneel on stones until her knees bled. Kenny mocked her pain, whispering that her husband had abandoned her.

On the morning of October 10, the screaming stopped. Naomi was found dead in a pool of blood, her child stillborn on the filthy floor.

The Birth of Vengeance

Jerome awoke two days later to whispers of what had happened. Something inside him changed. The man who had once endured quietly now moved with a cold, methodical calm. His grief turned to calculation.

Through sympathetic slaves—especially Wilder, the cook who risked her life to pass information—Jerome learned that Kenny was planning to flee the plantation before Union troops arrived. He would take eight of his “strongest hands” to sell in another state and leave the rest locked in their quarters to starve.

The date was set: October 31, 1862—the night of the new moon. Halloween.

For Kenny, it was a symbolic night of “rebirth.”

For Jerome, it would become the night of reckoning.

The Conspiracy

In secret, Jerome began to organize. His allies were men and women bound not by hope, but by shared pain. Simon, an older man scarred by hot irons; David, a youth who had watched his sister die under an overseer’s whip; and Wilder, whose guilt over Naomi’s death burned like acid.

They communicated through coded work songs and the placement of tools—a secret language of survival. Jerome’s plan was as elegant as it was terrible: lure Kenny and his overseers into an ambush, and make their deaths mirror the suffering they had caused.

Simon and David would pretend loyalty, volunteering to join the escape party. Kenny’s arrogance made him believe the ruse instantly. By the final week of October, he even confided in them about the route—an old wagon path that curved through dense woods.

Jerome spent the last nights carving four pumpkins in the barn. Not for Kenny’s amusement, but as symbols. Each face represented what he had seen on the tortured: Agony. Terror. Despair. Death.

The Night of the Dead

October 31, 1862. The sky was moonless, the air sharp and heavy. Inside the main house, Kenny downed Irish whiskey and bragged that by dawn he’d be rich again. His three overseers—Brennan, Hamilton, and Denim—checked their pistols and chains.

At 11 p.m., they marched to the slave quarters carrying lanterns that swung like fiery pendulums. Eight chosen captives were chained and loaded into a covered wagon. Simon and David walked alongside, pretending obedience.

Jerome was left behind, kicked to the ground as Kenny spat, “Not worth hauling.” Exactly as planned.

By 2 a.m., the procession creaked down the dirt road—the sound of chains and wagon wheels echoing through the dark. Kenny sang a slurred Irish folk tune as if mocking the dead.

Ahead, hidden in the trees, Jerome waited with six allies.

The Ambush

When the wagon slowed at the bend, Simon and David struck first. Clubs crashed against skulls. Brennan fell instantly. Hamilton reached for his rifle but was dragged down. Denim fired blindly into the trees, hitting no one.

Jerome leapt from the shadows. Behind him, Wilder pulled tight a rope stretched across the road. Kenny’s stallion stumbled, throwing him into the dirt. Before he could rise, Jerome was upon him—hands around the throat of the man who had murdered his wife.

“You remember Naomi?” Jerome hissed. Kenny’s only answer was a strangled gasp.

Within minutes, the overseers were subdued and dragged to a clearing deep in the woods—a place Kenny once used for hunting runaway slaves. The same ground where he had turned men into prey would now become his own execution ground.

The Scarecrows of Samhain

Jerome’s revenge was ritualistic, precise. Each man was bound in the same positions he had once forced upon others. Brennan, the eldest overseer, was made to kneel on stones. Hamilton hung by his wrists, his toes barely touching the earth. Denim’s back was bent until his spine cracked.

Kenny was tied upright to a wooden stake—arms stretched wide, body straining against the ropes—the very pose Naomi had died in.

Around them, Jerome placed his four carved pumpkins. Their candlelight painted the trees in flickering orange and shadow. To the terrified men, it must have looked like the faces of demons.

As dawn bled over the horizon, the forest filled with the sound of breaking bones. One by one, Jerome snapped fingers, toes, ribs—the same punishments Kenny had once called “discipline.”

Brennan’s heart gave out first. Hamilton and Denim followed by mid-morning. Kenny lived until noon, gagged and trembling as Jerome listed every name of every slave he had tortured.

When Jerome finally struck the last blow, he whispered, “Now you’ll stand watch forever.”

The Harvest of Justice

With the overseers and master dead, the slaves worked in silence. They raised the four bodies upright in the field, tying them to the stakes where the “living scarecrows” once hung. Over each head, Jerome placed a pumpkin—the same grotesque faces that had mocked them every Halloween.

Kenny’s jack-o’-lantern bore the expression of endless agony: eyes hollow, mouth frozen in a scream. The others showed terror, despair, and death. As the sun rose higher, the macabre tableau glowed with sickly light.

By afternoon, the message was clear to anyone passing along the road: the old order had met its harvest.

Three days later, Union soldiers marching through the region found the bodies still standing in the field. Hardened by war, even they were shaken by the sight. None investigated. In a land littered with corpses, four dead slaveholders were hardly worth a report.

The plantation was soon abandoned, left to rot. Jerome and his companions vanished into the chaos of war—some joining the Union Army, others heading north under assumed names.

The Legend That Wouldn’t Die

Locals said the Kenny place remained cursed. Farmers avoided the land, claiming to hear screams in the wind and see pumpkins glowing faintly among the weeds every Halloween. Children whispered that Jerome’s spirit still returned each year to make sure the scarecrows stood watch.

No official record ever identified him. No trial was ever held. But the story spread through Maryland’s hills—a tale of vengeance so exacting it bordered on myth.

Over time, it became part of local folklore: the enslaved man who avenged his wife, who turned his tormentors into scarecrows of Samhain, and who disappeared into the fog of history.

The Price of Revenge

The tale of Halloween 1862 forces an unsettling question: when justice fails, what is left but revenge?

Jerome had lost everything—his wife, his unborn child, his humanity stripped away by cruelty. In the end, he became the very thing Kenny had feared most: a man with nothing left to lose.

Some say he went north and lived quietly under a new name. Others believe he died in battle, finally free. But every October, when the wind howls across Maryland’s empty fields, locals still claim to see four faint lights swaying among the corn—pumpkins burning in the dark.

Whether ghost story or grim history, the message endures:

On that Halloween night in 1862, the dead did return to settle accounts with the living.