Small Town Spooks
Happy Halloween weekend. It’s go-time! This whole month has been, actually. Every October before my own local ghost tour business ramps up, I try to take in a few small local tours in northeast Ohio . This autumn’s lineup takes us to Stark and Medina counties and I got to do (almost) three: ”Eerie on Erie” in Massillon; Medina Ghost Tours; and Louisville Ghost Tours.
Massillon is a beautiful little town in Stark County and the Erie Canal was built right through the center of it. Often mispronounced, never duplicated, Massillon is a quirky town with a strong high school football following and loads of history. A local acting troupe presented ”Eerie on Erie” the first weekend of October and this quick 50 minute tour took us to a handful of spooky and unique venues. We started with a dance studio that once was a casket factory, conveniently located just down the street from a funeral home. The dance studio has some restless souls who aren’t so light on their feet, as they often hear unexplained banging.
Appropriately, we next moved to a private home that once housed a church of Spirituality, which specialized in seances and tapping. (Do you see a theme here?) If you don’t know what spiritually is, do a quick search for the “Fox Sisters” and you’ll learn more about this phenomenon.
As we meandered up the hill to the top of 5th Street, once known as Prospect Avenue, we visited the Massillon Women’s Club, also known as Five Oaks. It is a very grand old home, and although there were never any reported deaths in the building, they have some strange occurrences, like windows opening on their own and dress forms rolling across carpeted floors without any inertia to begin said movement.
We walked down the street past some other grandiose mansions on a once very prominent street in Massillon and stopped to hear about a church that once housed the Red Cross building during the times of the Spanish Flu. Parishioners often report hearing disembodied sounds of wailing and moaning and painful cries inside the building.
Next we moved to the Massillon Pubic Library where we learned that books and papers often trap the essence of former dead visitors to the buildings. Employees and visitors feel a cold chill in the building, the sensation of being pushed, and the fragrance of a women’s perfume. A security camera in the library has been catching the elevator moving up from the first floor to third floor at 3 a.m. on various different occasions. The doors always open and a bright light can be seen. The phenomena has been caught on tape several times, but there is no explanation.The library is the former home of James Duncan, the founder of Massillon. After he lived there, but before it became the library, two more families took residence there. Two deaths occurred in the home. Could this have something to do with the unexplained sensations? No one really knows for sure. Why are libraries so haunted? As I’ve been researching my own tour, I found an interesting quote stated by a librarian and historian: “Profound human interaction, the exchange of the ideas, the solving of problems and, at times, the breaking of bad news all took place here – reasons for residual energy, both good and bad. The library has been and still remains a place of shared knowledge, ideas, and experiences, and would understandably continue to be a special place for people to congregate, those both living and dead.”
Next, we were supposed to be walking to the Massillon YMCA, but there was some police activity in the area, so we bypassed that and went straight to the Lincoln Theater that once hosted vaudeville acts and other plays, but now is a movie theater. The story behind the YMCA is that it once housed mentally ill patients and there were some suicides and deaths that occurred in that structure. Some of those patients never left and continue to make a raucous in the building.
As for the theater, there is a ”show girl ghost” from the vaudeville era, but no one really knows who she is or why she stays there to haunt the theater to this day. Our tour rapidly came to an end after this. We saw a lot of buildings in a short amount of time. There is not a lot of reasoning or substance behind the hauntings, but there is some interesting history and the unexplained events leave a lot to the imagination….Some ghost tours are very focused on stories and others are focused on buildings and weird happenings. This one focused on the latter. I tend to be more interested in the stories and lore, but I learned a lot tonight nonetheless. The art of storytelling seems to be a bit lost, so when the legends and folklore are part of any ghost tour it really grabs the attention of those in attendance. Still some interesting history in Massillon, either way.
Medina ended up being a wash, as the tour operator ended up confusing the dates, but it was still a very fun evening and I enjoyed being in such a cute downtown area on a beautiful autumn night. My travel companion and I did visit the cemetery, which the tour operator told me over the phone is haunted by a ghost named George.
Also the coffee shop and a local bistro have their own ghosts, but I don’t know the details. It was not a wasted night, whatsoever. Any time I get to see a cemetery and enjoy a margarita at a local Mexican restaurant, I’m good. The tour operator also offered me a complimentary psychic reading, which is very kind of her. I will be looking forward to it, and that may deserve a blog of its own.
Louisville is the town where I grew up. There are lots of spooky corners and interesting stories. This tour, like Massillon was more focused on the buildings than detailed stories of those who lived there, but was duly interesting. The Historical Society consulted with a Psychic Medium whose findings were the basis for most of the tour. There were about 12 people on the tour, but originally there were more. A woman who had over-indulged tripped and fell forward, so her entire party of six decided not to complete the tour. This happened right after the initial meeting spot, just as we were about to launch. It looked like she hit the ground fairly hard and she also had a lollypop in her mouth, so she is lucky that didn’t choke her! I do hope she was not seriously injured, but I was also grateful that this party of six dropped off, because they were loud and talking over everyone, making it hard to hear the guide. Aside: I used to enjoy haunted pub crawls, but more often than not, I find that the drunken guests talk over the guide, and it makes everything less enjoyable. But it’s hard to control what anyone chooses to consume before-hand. Second Friday was also going on downtown, so at first it was somewhat distracting with loud music playing. Ultimately it got much better as we moved away from all the action. The Historical Society has a lot of orbs actively appearing on camera long after they have shut down for the day. We were shown a video of hundreds of orbs in motion flying down off the ceiling. My favorite part of the tour was hands-down the former graveyard associated with St. Louis Parish. This is the church I attended when I was growing up and I had no idea the ground to the left of the rectory once held bodies. Interestingly enough, the stone wall was made of actual headstones! The epitaphs had long faded, but makes you wonder where these headstones came from. Were they simply discarded and used in place of actual stones? Were they not moved with the body to the new location? Or…….are the bodies associated with the headstones……still there?
There are other small seasonal town ghost tours in the greater Stark county and northeast Ohio area: Zoar, Canal Fulton (which I have taken in the past), Barberton (although I didn’t see any advertisements for their tour this year), Kent, the Perkins mansion in Akron, Salem (not the one famous for witches, but the one right here in Ohio), and also several in Cleveland proper. One Cleveland tour is in Ohio City and one is in the Flats. I think there may be a third one somewhere else downtown. Maybe Tremont? That seems like a good place for a walk on a crisp October evening. Some of these fly-by-night seasonal tours operate better than others. That’s not to discredit them, although I do think some could try a little harder. I was surprised to find that more than one tour was read from a written script by the guide. It’s probably okay to have stage notes, but I’m not sure that it’s professional to read a script when you are charging patrons for tickets. Take some time to learn your stories. Give it a good old college try. I put the question out to my professional ghost tour guides group, and my industry colleagues agreed this is not good. I also notice that some of these one-and-done tours don’t have the background in tourism, so they forget important details to communicate to guests like: where to meet, where to park, the length of the tour, cancellation policies, etc. One tour advertised it was two hours, but we ended up being done in 50 minutes. It wasn’t expensive, but they should probably do a few walk-throughs just to make sure they have the correct timing published. Also during one of the other small aforementioned seasonal tours she had a group of sixty. That is way too many people to really allow everyone to enjoy the ambiance. Just add more dates and cut the tours in half. There are also a handful of tour guides who are not miked, and on busy streets it is nearly impossible to hear them. And then of course the incident where the guide forgot she had a tour scheduled….
Is it worth doing these small seasonal tours even if not everything is perfect? I think it is. I still manage to learn something or discover a new spooky venue. I also sometimes learn what doesn’t work and what not to do with my own tours. Let me know your thoughts on any really good (or really bad, for that matter) seasonal ghost tours.
