Good Golly
This past week I was fortunate enough to have a grounds tour of Molly Stark Hospital, a beautiful vacant Spanish revival style building. The tour was offered by Stark Parks.
Molly Stark, a mysterious former tuberculosis sanatorium, opened in 1929 and closed in 1995, holds many stories beyond that ivy-covered exterior. Over the years, Molly Stark also treated patients for mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse. In the later years, the hospital was used as a nursing home. In fact, I think our Girl Scout troup may have visited to bring Christmas cheer to the elderly patients. The design of the hospital was brilliant: lots of light and fresh air, good treatments for TB patients.
At one point the campus contained several buildings: the main building, the boiler plant, the children’s building, and the staff housing facility. An underground tunnel structure connected each building.
The building is now owned by the Stark County Park System. There have been several conversations about restoring the building, but it would be a lot of work, as the building has undergone some significant structural damage from fire and water. All of the asbestos was removed a few years ago, but there are some parts of the facility that may be difficult to salvage.
Let’s talk about the ghosts. Is Molly Stark haunted? Some credible sources would answer that question with a resounding “yes”. Four members of law enforcement based there for a metro drug unit, say they encountered strange, unexplainable things. Although many have asked permission, no official ghost hunts have been conducted here. Many ghost hunters have, however, broken in over the past 23 years that it has been sitting vacant. Over 60 people were arrested for trespassing, and then about five years ago a barbed wire fence was installed. That didn’t necessarily deter hard-core ghost hunters. They found away to cut through or sneak under.
The Stark County Sheriff recalled what happened there on a sunny afternoon over 18 years ago. Officer Swanson escorted a small group of jail inmates inside the sprawling network of corridors, rooms, stairwells, nooks. Another deputy or two were among the group. They were searching for furniture and other items to sell at a county auction. The sheriff describes “We were back down on the first-floor in one of the hallways and all of a sudden we heard a bed being dragged across the floor.” Deputies and inmates traced the origin of the mysterious noise. “You could see where it was drug through the dust,” he said. “It was scooted across the floor.” The building was vacant. Nobody had separated from the group.
Another officer serving on the narcotics unit reported a similar sound, and heard his name being called out in the darkness in the vacant building. The Louisville police chief has been in the building alone and described his hair standing up on end, as he traipsed through an empty building. One officer, Sgt. Pellegrino, spent the night there, and described the noises as industrial in nature (like the boiler unit coming on), but then he also heard noises like a scraping sound. He couldn’t explain it, but it made him feel anxious. When he went to investigate, he saw that a bed had been moved from the place where it was when he had been in that room earlier. He also saw a man in a brown suit moving around the building, and peering out the windows. This was not the first mention of this sighting- others had seen him during a SWAT training exercise. All of these men are skeptical about ghosts, but they know what their senses told them.
Look closely at the two photos directly below. Do you see the turkey voucher perched on top of the building?
The photos below depict the former children’s ward. There is no barbed-wire fence around this structure, and it was easy to peer into the windows and see some of the rooms.
Interestingly enough, the mailing address is Louisville, OH (the town where I grew up), but the top artist rendering below says “Canton” and the postcard below that says “Alliance”. Molly Stark is in the middle of farmland and cornfields, a pleasant country area. I am really not sure which of the three locations is correct, but we can all agree that it is in Stark County. The Stark family was significant to Ohio’s history. Molly was the wife of a Revolutionary War general, John Stark, who was known for his brilliant strategies on the battlefield. Molly served as a nurse, and opened up her home to ailing soldiers, which is why she is the namesake of the hospital.
What happened and what exactly continues to happen behind this shuttered building? Who was the man in the brown suit? Why are beds moved around? We may never really know. It saddens me that such a beautifully designed building now lies vacant, rotting and decaying…..A stark contrast to how it looked in 1929.
