Ghosthunting Ohio: On the Road Again. John B. Kachuba

      ONE OF THE PLACES YOU WOULD LEAST EXPECT to find a ghost would be an astronomical observatory. That was why I was so surprised when I received an e-mail message from John Ventre, historian at the Cincinnati Observatory, America’s oldest public observatory.

      John explained to me that he had heard me on Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory, a popular late-night radio show, and wondered if I would like to visit the observatory. Cryptically, he said there was “something” at the observatory that might be of interest to me.

      I’m not an idiot; I knew what John meant by “something,” so I contacted my friend DaShane Watkins, founder of a Cincinnati paranormal investigating team called Spiritual H.O.P.E. (Historians of Paranormal Evidence) and asked him if he’d like to come along with me. On a cold February night, my wife, Mary, and I met with DaShane and a few members of his team at the observatory.

      We parked our cars in the cul-de-sac of Observatory Place atop Mount Lookout. Lights gleamed inside the main building. Built in 1873, its silver dome stood prominent above the columned porch of the stately Greek Revival building. The smaller Mitchel Building, named for Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, who founded the observatory in 1843, sat at the right side of the cul-de-sac. Built in 1903, this building houses the observatory’s original telescope, a beautiful brass-and-teak instrument built in Bavaria in 1845—and still fully operational today.

      Our group entered through the towering door of the main building, where we met John Ventre. A friendly and gregarious man, John gave us a history of the observatory as we stood in the lobby. He told us that the observatory had originally been located on Mount Ida in 1843; former president John Quincy Adams, who was himself an amateur astronomer, laid the cornerstone of the building. The mount was renamed Mount Adams in his honor. As Cincinnati grew and became more industrialized—and as it became a center for the slaughtering of pigs—the air above the city became hazy and polluted, making stargazing nearly impossible. So, the observatory moved to the Mount Lookout location, where the air was clearer.

      John said that both telescopes mounted in the buildings still functioned, but that the observatory today served more as an educational museum of astronomy than as a center of astronomical research. Designed to re-create the conditions of an early twentieth-century observatory, the equipment still needs to be operated manually with pulleys, wheels, and gears.

      While all that information was helpful, we still waited to hear the ghost story we knew was coming. But John was still being cagey. “Here’s what I’d like to do,” he said. “Why don’t you all check out the buildings, do what you do, and then meet up back here. Then, I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

      DaShane, Robert and Lori Demmon, Crystal Ayers, and I explored the buildings, while John and Mary waited for us in a lecture room. We were not prepared to do an in-depth investigation, but we did have some equipment, mostly cameras and electromagnetic frequency (EMF) meters, to help us collect data. Working in two groups, we detected a slight and unexplainable rise in EMF on the stairs leading to the telescope room in the main building, but little else that indicated any paranormal activity.

      But when we returned to the lecture room, the story that John Ventre related to us gave us hope that there might indeed be “something” in the observatory. John asked us what we had found, and we said nothing other than the EMF readings on the stairs. He smiled at that and said that that was where his story took place.

      “After a group of visitors had come down from the dome, one woman was shaking. She told me that she was sensitive to spirits and that there was something going on here. That’s how she said it, although she could not be any more specific. She said she felt it in the dome and on the stairs coming down.”

      “Any idea what she could have been feeling?” I asked.

      John then told us about a murder that had taken place in front of the main building in 1986. A woman who had been involved in several domestic disputes with her ex-husband followed him to Observatory Place where she shot him three times, leaving him lying on the ground between his motorcycle and a large rock. She got in her car but then got out again and shot him two more times before finally driving away. The man died at the scene, and the neighborhood kids nicknamed the rock “Blood Rock.” The rock was moved from in front of the building to a side lawn, where it stands today.

      Had the observatory visitor detected the ghost of the murdered man? DaShane set up an in-depth investigation at the observatory for a few weeks later. Maybe we would find out.

      We all came together again on a bitterly cold night in February, minus my wife, who had sense enough to stay home in a nice warm house. The temperature was below twenty degrees, and snow flurries danced in the night sky. This would be a tough investigation since the rooms in which the telescopes were mounted were not heated.

      Before we began, we all sat in the lecture room to discuss how we would proceed. DaShane is a young guy and has not been ghosthunting all that long, but I was impressed by his knowledge and thoroughness; he would call the shots for the investigation. He surprised me when he took a photocopied newspaper article out of a folder.

      “Got something for you,” he said, a satisfied grin upon his face.

      I read the brief article from The New York Times, dated September 30, 1943: Cincinnati, Sept. 29 – Dr. Elliot Smith, aged 68, astronomer at the University of Cincinnati, was found hanging from the telescope mounting at the observatory late today. Coroner Frank M. Coppock issued a verdict of suicide.

      “Holy crap!” I said, impressed by DaShane’s research. “How did you find this?”

      “Good job,” John Ventre interjected.

      “You knew about this?” I asked John.

      “Yes, but I wanted to see if you would find out about it in your investigation.”

      “Have there been ghost stories connected with the suicide?” I asked.

      “No one has ever seen anything,” John said, “but there is a story about a woman who called the observatory at a time when no one was in the building. She got a garbled man’s voice on the line. She couldn’t understand the voice and thought maybe it was a malfunction in the phone’s answering machine. The problem was that the answering machine had not been turned on. She happened to be calling on September 29, the anniversary of Smith’s suicide.”

      I looked at DaShane. He just smiled, pleased with himself.

      John went on to explain that Smith had some health problems when he received word that his son was missing in action against the Japanese in the Pacific. That may have been cause enough for Smith to take his life. Ironically, his son survived World War II.

      Robert, DaShane, and I began our investigation in the main building while Lori, Crystal, and John Ventre worked in the Mitchel Building. We walked up the stairs to the domed room that housed the telescope from which Dr. Smith had hanged himself. Walking into the circular room was like walking into a freezer. Our breath condensed in the frigid air.

      In the center of the room the huge telescope pointed skyward, easily twenty feet above our heads. Nearby was a tall ladder that looked more like a narrow set of bleachers mounted on wheels. Astronomers used the ladder to reach the eyepiece of the telescope. Or to