For most people, ghosts, spirits and all of those things that go bump in the night are only thought of around Halloween, and maybe the occasional Friday the thirteenth. However, for those living in various areas in Ohio—especially Stark County—hauntings are actually more common than most might expect.
There are possible haunted spots in every county in the state, and a variety of websites list them so that the adventurous soul is able to do his or her own investigating. ForgottenOh.com has an expansive collection, and its founder, 29-year-old author Andy Henderson, started the website nearly ten years ago as a project at The Ohio State University.
“I had a friend teach me HTML code and it basically became a hobby,” he said. “It wasn’t a major thing until they started running stories in the local paper, and now I’m on TV and radio stations as an expert. People take this haunted stuff seriously.”
Henderson said that while he doesn’t personally believe in the hauntings, he gets e-mails daily correcting him on the details of each individual place from people who think the stories are true.
Forgotten Ohio lists hauntings around the Stark County area, including the Alliance Fairmount Children’s Home, the Massillon YMCA, Lock Four in Canal Fulton, the McKinley Monument Cemetery and the Black Plague Subdivision of the Massillon Union Cemetery. However, Henderson said the real attraction to any place, whether in Stark County or in Ohio in general, is the folklore behind each haunted spot, and not the possibility of physical activity there.
“I was an English major and I loved my folklore and creative writing classes. While it’s cool to go to the haunted places now, it’s the stories behind them that are really captivating,” he said. “You can’t tell me that the wind blowing is actually a ghost. It’s more interesting to learn about what happened at a place.”
Hoover AP English teacher Miss Tiffany Walker said she believes people are attracted to scary things for a variety of reasons.
“I try to stay as far away as possible from those kinds of things, but I think the people that do like those things just have a natural attraction to being scared,” she said. “I think some people just like the folklore and the stories because it gives them an idea about the afterlife,” she said.
Junior Stephanie Satrape had a personal experience with one of the most popular folklore stories in Ohio, Crybaby Bridge. Another website, deadohio.com, has a list of over twenty crybaby bridges. Satrape’s experience took place in Massillon.
“One of our campsites for Girl Scouts was Camp Lycopodia, and there’s a crybaby bridge there. The older scouts always told us the story in the dark, and then took us down to the bridge so we could see if the witch was actually there or if the baby was crying,” Satrape said.
The general story behind any of the crybaby bridges holds that a mother and father were traveling with a newborn baby and the baby either fell out of the carriage or was snatched up by a witch. Satrape’s particular story involved the witch and the mark of her green handprint in the trees at camp.
“It was the story behind everything that got us so scared. The older scouts knew it so well, and they would do everything to make it seem real,” she said. “Once we were in charge, we did the same thing. A bunch of us would paint our hands green and mark the tree and a couple people would hide under the bridge and cry. It was very realistic, but it wasn’t real.”
However, these experiences at Lycopodia have not convinced Satrape that ghosts and other hauntings are real.
“I think there’s an afterlife and everything but I don’t believe in ghosts or anything like that. I mean, I’ve never had an experience that really set me off in that direction,” she said.
Walker said she agreed.
“I just don’t think those things are real. I mean, some people can take reassurance in knowing something happens after you die, and I think there are people who wonder, ‘Oh, can I get revenge on so-and-so once I die?’ or something along those lines,” she said.
Henderson said he believes that people who do believe in ghosts do it as a replacement for religion, as a way to calm their fears of death and the afterlife.
“I just don’t think we have anything to do now that the Cold War is over, and I think a lot of people are drifting away from organized religion. They’re combining the aspects that they like, and ghosts just become part of that,” he said. “However, so many of the stories I hear and compile are subjective and it can be impossible to determine what’s true and what’s false.”
Henderson said that for his website and his two books, “Weird Ohio” and “Forgotten Columbus” (with a third to be released this year), the stories within weren’t added until they were confirmed by multiple unrelated sources.
“Everyone thinks their house is haunted. It’s not until you start digging deep and talking to different people that you can discover what may be true and what’s made up,” he said.
Regardless, of what’s true and what isn’t, Henderson says he enjoys the stories.
“It’s definitely an interesting job. I mean, who doesn’t want to know about what the serial killer did in such-and-such house? It’s never boring,” he said.