Haunted Cemeteries of Ohio

INTRODUCTION

Carl Logies didn’t believe in ghosts—that is, not until he saw one. It was the summer of 1922, and the Painesville farmer was conducting his nightly check of the livestock when he first caught a glimpse of the apparition. He described it as a sort of white shadow that slipped past the barn and across the field. When Logies bought the farm a year earlier, he had heard that it was haunted but chalked the stories up to superstitious neighbors. His skepticism faded, however, when he began to see the white shadow more and more frequently—always at the same time of night and always with it first appearing at the barn and then moving across the field.

Early on in these encounters, the bewildered man tried shooting the figure, and when that proved futile, he started following it, noting that it always disappeared in the vicinity of an old, unused well.¹ In time, he became convinced that the apparition was in some way connected with the spot, and that August, he set about removing the large rocks that a previous owner had used to fill in the watering hole. His hunch was proven correct when he got to a depth of twenty feet and found a deteriorated shoe filled with bones. The sheriff and coroner were called out, and further clearing away of the stone revealed the skeleton of a man who appeared to have been struck down by an axe.² A watch that had stopped at 9:35 was also found, which happened to correspond with the time of night when the white wraith would be seen moving toward the well.³

The bones were identified by the timepiece and dental fillings as those of Henry Lipinstock, a hired hand who had gone missing while working at the farm seven years earlier. That night and into the next day, Logies’s dog howled and whined incessantly, only calming after the remains were conveyed to the local cemetery and given a proper burial. Frank Lerman, the man who owned the farm at the time of Lipinstock’s disappearance, was charged with the murder and taken into custody, although he was ultimately freed the following April due to insufficient evidence.⁴ Despite the lack of a conviction in the murder case, Lipinstock’s ghost was never seen again following the interment of his remains at Evergreen Cemetery.⁵

This well-documented case from 1920s Northeastern Ohio is almost identical to an account from Athens, Greece, that was recorded by Pliny the Younger during the first century AD. In his letters, Pliny wrote about a philosopher who lived in a haunted house and was one night led to an unmarked grave by its ghost. After the bones were discovered, they were given a proper burial, and like the shade of Henry Lipinstock, the spirit was neither seen nor heard from again. Similar tales told throughout the course of human history hint at the possibility that after we die, some sentient part of us might still be entwined with our earthly remains and affected by their mistreatment. Even though the Buckeye State has only existed for a few hundred years, locally the belief in this link between ghosts and the grave is thought to date back nearly three millennia.

When the first non-indigenous people arrived in the territory now known as Ohio, they discovered a landscape strewn with more than ten thousand strange earthen structures. The native populations were asked about these mysterious embankments, but they claimed no knowledge of their purpose or origins. Some were large geometric shapes that lay in open plains, others followed the contours of hilltops like ancient fortifications and certain earthworks seemed to take on the shape of giant animals rising from the ground and stretching across the landscape. Most of these enigmatic formations, however, were rounded, cone-shaped mounds. These ranged from subtle rises in the earth to abrupt peaks towering nearly seventy feet in height. Upon investigation, it was discovered that many of these mounds contained human remains and grave goods. They were, in essence, mortuary structures, and most of Ohio, it appeared, had at one time been a graveyard.

Today, the construction of these earthen tombs is largely attributed to two ancient indigenous cultures: the Adena, who lived in the region between 800 BC to AD 1, and the Hopewell, who flourished here from AD 1 to AD 400. The archaeological record indicates that both cultures reserved mound burial for special individuals within their societies, such as healers or spiritual leaders who were thought to have the ability to transition between the worlds of the living, the dead and the purely spiritual. When these mystics died, they were placed in a grave along with the sacred tools they used to move between the realms. This would include objects like musical instruments, platform pipes or, in one instance, a fearsome bone mask stitched together from the fragments of a human skull.⁶

In the case of the Adena, once the funerary rituals were complete, they would mound over the grave, and when later spiritual leaders passed away, the process would be repeated on top of the burial, creating a sort of vertical cemetery. The death rituals of the Hopewell were a bit grislier. Typically, they would strip the dead of their flesh, cremate the remains in clay basins and then bury what was left in the floor of charnel houses. After a varying number of these burials were made, the structures would be destroyed or dismantled, and the sites would be mounded over. The general population of the Adena and Hopewell cultures are thought to have been treated much less ceremoniously and laid to rest in common burial pits.

Scholars have suggested that, like many traditional indigenous North American cultures, the Adena and Hopewell believed that after death, an individual’s soul would split into halves. One aspect of the spirit would enter the underworld, or domain of the dead, and the other would remain with the corpse as a grave ghost. There it would linger and watch over the body until it returned to clay.⁷ Beyond the cliché of the cursed Indian burial ground, grave ghosts have been part of many cultures across the globe. In Sumerian writings from 3000 BC, they were called the gidim, in the Norse sagas they were haugbúi and in ancient China they were known as the po. These entities were believed to have the power to wreak havoc on those who disturbed their burial sites, no matter whether the desecration was for plunder, progress or preservation. In line with these beliefs, many of Ohio’s prehistoric mounds have developed a reputation for being home to the spirits of those who were buried within. They are Ohio’s very first haunted cemeteries, and it is with one of these magnificent structures that this journey begins.

PART I

SOUTHEASTERN OHIO

MOUND CEMETERY, MARIETTA

Ohio would have a lot more stories that start out with the phrase There used to be a mound here if it weren’t for the pioneers’ knack for burying their own dead alongside these ancient tombs. Throughout the state, you can find cemeteries where the first burials (though rarely marked) were made well over one thousand years before the headstones, fences and gates went up. Some of these mounds are small and hardly noticeable, while others have been made unrecognizable after being intruded upon by more recent burials. In a few instances, they are large and dominate the marble and granite grave markers that surround them. Of all these ancient turned modern burial sites, none is more imposing or well known than the grand Conus Mound at Marietta’s Mound Cemetery.

When Marietta was established in 1788, the area was home to a large complex of both Hopewell and Adena earthworks that encompassed much of what is now its downtown. The city’s founders recognized the historical significance of the ancient architecture and vowed to preserve a few of the more impressive features as parks. One of these was the Conus Mound, a large conical structure that perched loftily on a hilltop overlooking the settlement. In a move that would later seem quite fitting, it became the focal point of a park called Marie Antoinette Square. However, there was a change of heart in 1793, when the village and park’s namesake was beheaded by the people of France, and in 1800, the public square was repurposed for use as a burial ground. One year later, Colonel Robert Taylor became what is often referred to as the cemetery’s first interment, which is correct, unless you count the inhabitants of the Conus Mound.⁸

Mound Cemetery’s gates, where mysterious figures are said to lurk. Author photo.

Prior to 1801, the burial of Marietta’s dead took place at the nearby Fort Harmar Cemetery or, quite literally, various patches of grass around town.⁹ In 1839, the village decided to dig up these random burials and move them to Mound Cemetery. Because of these efforts, it contains the most Revolutionary War officers of any burial grounds in the United States. This includes historic figures like General Ebenezer Sproat, Ohio’s first Buckeye (as he was called by the local Native Americans), and Commodore Abraham Whipple, whose sacking of a British navy vessel in 1772 precipitated the Revolutionary War. As an interesting aside, Whipple was also a distant ancestor of the horror author H.P. Lovecraft and is mentioned in his works The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Shunned House.¹⁰

Another body moved to Mound Cemetery in 1839 belonged to Sally Dodge Cram Green, a member of a prominent Marietta family, who had been sent to the Ohio State Asylum in Columbus a year before.¹¹ Sadly, she died while institutionalized there, and her remains were buried in the pauper’s section of a local cemetery. Her son was sent to collect the body for reburial at Marietta, but when he arrived in Columbus, he found the grave empty. Suspicion quickly fell on the Worthington Medical College, which had long been rumored to source its cadavers from the city’s graveyards—a once necessary, though understandably vilified, step in the quest for medical knowledge.¹² A few days later, a mob of outraged citizens stormed the school. They destroyed the building and ran a doctor out of town but recovered three corpses in the process, including the remains of Sally Dodge Cram Green, a pawn in the struggle between science and convention that now rests peacefully at Mound Cemetery.¹³

Speaking of grave robbing, in Haunted Marietta, author Lynn Sturtevant tells a bizarre and frightening story that reputedly took place in the cemetery when it was little more than a decade old. In those early days of Ohio’s settlement, not much was known about the mounds, and there was often wild speculation about their contents and the people who built them.¹⁴ For example, there was a legend that Conus Mound held buried treasure and was guarded by a curse that prohibited any man from looting the grave. On a stormy summer night in 1814, a group of women, thinking that their gender would protect them from the spell, decided to take a crack at pilfering the mound’s prizes. So, under cover of darkness, they snuck into the cemetery and began to dig. They had only been at their work a short while when they heard the distinctive clink of metal hitting metal. This was soon followed by a jangling of coins. The excited troupe dropped their tools and drove their hands into the soil when, suddenly, they were met with a roar of thunder and brilliant flash of lightning that illuminated the ancient monument. It was in that moment that the would-be grave robbers saw a horrible, goblin-like creature atop the mound, glaring as it pointed down at them. The terrified treasure hunters ran for their lives and were so shaken by the experience that, even in the light of day, they refused to enter the cemetery to reclaim their abandoned tools.¹⁵

Abraham Whipple’s poetic grave marker. Aside from his many accolades, Whipple was also a character in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, written by his distant relative H.P. Lovecraft. Author photo.

While the story of the guardian goblin is entertaining, it was probably concocted to discourage anyone who had ideas about the earthwork from acting on their curiosity. The only person known to legitimately explore the mound was Dr. Manasseh Cutler, who conducted a brief survey of the earthwork in 1788.¹⁶ He found a single adult skeleton and several flat stones that might have indicated cremation burials but then stopped the excavation for fear of destroying the structure’s integrity. After this, he went on to found Ohio University, serve as a member of Congress and lead a long and full life, seemingly unaffected by any