Well, this has been a weird summer, but I think the summer of 1951 may have been an even

weirder time for some of the people who lived in Baltimore.

The city was squeltering under a heat wave and only the wealthiest residents of the region

could afford air conditioners at those times.

And there were no air conditioners to be found in O'Donnell Heights, a housing project on the

southwest side of the city.

This is a place where steel mill and shipyard workers lived with their families.

And for those folks, the overpowering heat was less of a worry than the specter that was stalking their streets.

At some point in July, a tall thin figure dressed all in black

began sprinting across the rooftops of O'Donnell Heights.

It left on and off buildings broke into houses

attack people, enticed a young girl to crawl under a car and played music in the

nearby graveyard. Groups of young men patrolled the streets while others waited by their windows at night keeping a sleepy watch for the phantom prowler that eluded his pursuers and vanished into the cemetery before he could be caught.

By the end of the month police were arresting people for

disorderly conduct and carrying weapons but the phantom had disappeared and was never

seen again. So what in the hell happened in O'Donnell Heights in the summer of 1951?

Well, to this day, no one really knows.

O'Donnell Heights was only eight years old when the mysterious stranger began making his appearances,

built as a housing project for defense industry workers at Bethlehem Steel,

Martin Aircraft and Edgewood Arsenal during World War II,

it was never meant to last long or definitely never to be pleasing to look at.

Tightly spaced two-story row houses went up on 66 acres of what used to be farmland.

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