Ghosthunting Ohio: On the Road Again. John B. Kachuba
jiggling the compass.
We continued asking questions for quite some time but did not hear audible responses of any kind. Early in the morning, we concluded the investigation.
Later, upon review of the data we found that we had recorded several EVPs. In the upstairs bedroom, a female voice said, Help me, followed by a childlike, whispered Help. Also upstairs, Melinda asks, “Maybe they will ring the bell?” followed by a man saying, Can’t. At one point, while we were all downstairs, we had left a recorder switched on upstairs. That recorder picked up breathing sounds and Yes.
There is no question that the historic Ross Gowdy House has a ghost or two still living in it. Who the ghosts are remains a mystery, one you might be lucky enough to unravel.
Legendary Ghosts: Enos Kay
Back in the nineteenth century a young man named Enos Kay lived along Egypt Pike in Ross County. Enos was an honest, hard-working young man who had become the envy of the county since he won the affections of Alvira, the local beauty.
It took several years of scrimping and saving for Enos to get together enough money for a wedding worthy of his beloved Alvira. But at last he had the money, and soon wedding arrangements were under way. The wedding clothes were being fashioned, and everything was going well for the young couple until the fateful day in 1869 when they decided to attend a church picnic.
A mysterious stranger, a man none of the churchgoers had ever seen, showed up at the church picnic that day. It was even unclear what the man called himself; some of the picnickers thought his name was Smith, while others thought it was Johnston, or maybe Brown. One thing they all agreed upon was that the man clearly had eyes for the beautiful Alvira. Throughout the day, the stranger did his best to woo the girl while meek and hapless Enos simply stood by and watched.
It wasn’t long before rumors began to circulate that Alvira had been seen walking hand in hand with the handsome stranger, rumors that Enos simply dismissed as idle chatter. How could the love of his life, the woman who had promised her love to him, be with another man? Impossible. But when Enos heard a few days later that the man had climbed through Alvira’s bedroom window at night and proposed to her, and that she had accepted and run off with the man, he was stunned.
Enos immediately ran to his fiancée’s house, where he discovered, much to his grief, that Alvira had, indeed, jilted him and was gone forever. Enos let out a heart-breaking cry and swore that he would forever haunt happy lovers until Judgment Day. Then, he walked out to Timmons Bridge, the local lovers’ lane, and hanged himself from the rafters.
Not long after Enos’s body was committed to the ground came the frightening stories of lovers being terrorized at the bridge by some unseen force. Couples reported an invisible force attacking their buggies, shaking them violently, and spooking the horses. Some couples said that the malevolent force ripped open the tops of the buggies, revealing the demonic face of Enos Kay peering down at them.
Encounters with the ghost of Enos Kay are reported to this day. Apparently, he will not bother lone motorists passing over the bridge, or a parked couple who are arguing instead of kissing. True to his oath, the ghost claws and scratches at the parked cars of those couples who are expressing their ardor. Some of these “couples interruptus” recall seeing the ghost’s devilish grin through the steamed car windows. The moral here might be, Get a room!
Spotlight On: The Ghost of Englewood Dam
While I was doing some research at the Dayton Metro Library, I met Nancy Horlacher, the Local History Specialist. She was interested in my project and e-mailed me a story titled “The Phantom Driver on Englewood Dam,” from the manuscript entitled Tales and Sketches of the Great Miami Valley, by Earl Leon Heck, written in 1962.
Mr. Heck reports on a strange and disturbing vision that terrorized truckers in the winter of 1952 as they drove their rigs on the road that crosses the Englewood Dam. The road was narrow, flanked by wooden guardrails on either side, with a precipitous 125-foot drop-off should a driver become careless or sleepy.
Heck writes that on a stormy, icy night that winter a seasoned trucker named Roy Fitzwater stopped at a small inn located near the dam, a favorite stop for drivers. He was shaken and visibly distraught but refused to answer any of his fellow truckers’ questions, stating only that he had witnessed something “quite horrible.” Ohio Highway Patrol Officer Harrell was also eating at the inn and knew Fitzwater. He asked the trucker what was wrong but Fitzwater simply shook his head and declined to say anything more, eventually leaving the inn without revealing anything.
Over the next few weeks, three more truck drivers stopped at the inn as frightened as Fitzwater, but none of them would talk about what they had experienced. Officer Harrell happened to be at the inn each time and saw these seasoned, professional masters of the road reduced to nervous, scared children. About a month later, Roy Fitzwater stopped at the inn and Officer Harrell was once again present—you have to believe that Harrell needed a lot of coffee to keep himself going since he was so often at the inn. This time the patrolman convinced Fitzwater to tell his story.
Fitzwater said that while he was crossing the dam on a dark, stormy night, car headlights suddenly appeared in the opposite direction heading toward his truck.” It comes straight toward me, with blinding lights,” the trucker said, “just as if he intended to plunge right into me.”
Fitzwater told Harrell that he slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve out of the way, knowing that if he was not careful, he could drive his rig over the side of the dam. When the car was only about 200 feet away it turned across the truck’s path.
“The lights go out,” Fitzwater continued, “but inside the car appears a dull blue-green light of the most unearthly kind, revealing a skull and skeleton at the wheel. You can see the bones all lighted up with this peculiar, uncanny light. It is just too horrible to describe. It just about takes the life out of you.”
Harrell and other patrolmen staked out the dam and the road, but the phantom driver was never seen again after that horrific winter in 1952. Perhaps he’s driving other highways of America’s Haunted Road Trip.
CHAPTER 4
Snow Hill Country Club
NEW VIENNA
WHEN I FIRST HEARD THAT Snow Hill Country Club in New Vienna was haunted, I had visions of ghosts madly driving golf carts over the fairways and spectral golfers breaking spectral clubs over spectral knees after shanking spectral Titleists into the very real woods. As it turned out, I wasn’t that far off.
Originally built as an inn in 1820 by Charles and Catherine Harris, who had moved to Clinton County from Snow Hill, Maryland, Snow Hill quickly gained an excellent reputation and was frequented by many a weary traveler. In 1840, the inn hosted the famous Philadelphia Circus; it also served as a polling place for forty years. But, as so often happened with many of America’s old inns, modern forms of transportation, especially railroads, meant fewer and fewer customers at Snow Hill. In 1898, the inn was sold at auction and became a storage place for grain. The elegant old structure began to fall into disrepair until the early 1900s when Norma Harris, the granddaughter of Charles and Catherine, bought the inn, renovated and expanded it, and opened it in 1924 as Snow Hill Country Club.
At the invitation of Steven Powell of the Ohio Organization for Paranormal Studies (O.O.P.S.) I found myself driving through a torrential downpour one July night to join the O.O.P.S. team for an investigation at Snow Hill. The rain sluiced over my car and the country roads were narrow and hilly, all of which made driving a nightmare. At one point, I drove through the sprawling and abandoned DHL airport facility, where the ghosts of 10,000 lost jobs still lingered. At another point, I missed a turn in the deluge, ended up at a dead end, and had to reroute myself. Even my GPS was confused. Finally, I pulled into the parking lot beside the white-columned clubhouse, thinking to myself, if the trip out here was any indication of what was to come, it was going to be a wild night.
Steven