Lost Ohio: More Travels Into Haunted Landscapes, Ghost Towns, and Forgotten Lives

by Randy McNutt

  We passed the cobbler shop, a large wooden building where cobblers made and repaired all the shoes for the community. The frame building, constructed in 1828, is now the Cobbler Shop Bed and Breakfast. In back, owner Sandy Worley uses the original wash house (where all the laundry for the Zoar Hotel was done) for storage.

  At Main and Second Streets, the hotel is the most gothic of all the buildings, with a large cupola, wide front porch, and dormer windows on the third floor. The building awaits renovation by the state historical society. Initially, it had forty sleeping rooms and a huge dining room. People of all income levels stayed there; many arrived by canal boat. Wealthy people from Cleveland came to town in the winter to observe how the Zoarites operated their greenhouses. (They heated them with coal.) All outsiders, whether multimillionaire, middle class, or poor, ate in the hotel dining room. No class distinctions were recognized; even a beggar ate here, and President William McKinley stayed more than one night. People used to walk up the winding stairway to the observatory or tower to meditate.

  “The canal, the woolen mill, and the tin shop practically supported the town,” Shonk said. “The people of Zoar mined the hills around the town and operated a foundry and two iron furnaces. After a slow start, they started making money and paid off their debts. They weren’t afraid of hard work, and they knew how to invest. At one time, Zoar had one of Tuscarawas County’s highest tax bills, because the commune owned so many acres. Back in Germany, the group got into trouble for refusing to pay taxes. They didn’t want their money to support the army. In this country, they didn’t have that problem. They had no problem paying their taxes.”

  As we passed the oddly shaped buildings, most of them built by the people of Zoar, I asked Shonk about the town’s legacy. He thought for a moment and said, “Its legacy is in its buildings. Their houses still remain. Their furniture remains. They left us those things. It’s fortunate that enough descendants were left to donate artifacts to the state when the community was being restored twenty years ago. We lost a few buildings to lack of use, but we still have a town and it looks much the way it did when the commune was running. It is living history to us.”

  Over night, the air turned cool. A misty rain fell across the fields. After a quiet, restful night at the Cowger House, I walked over to the log cabin that Mary and Ed Cowger also owned and operated as a smaller bed and breakfast. Although the couple, then in their fifties, enjoyed meeting people, they were also in a demanding business; taking care of two bed and breakfasts required a lot of time and energy. They had been in the business since they came to Zoar in 1984 and opened the Cowger House. They later bought the cabin (built in 1817) and the first schoolhouse (1833).

  As candles burned brightly on the rugged pine table, I talked in the cabin’s main room, the dining room, and waited for the couple to serve a full breakfast. At 10 A.M., they walked in carrying poached eggs, sausage, biscuits, hash browns, hot tea, and orange juice.

  Scanning the room, I noticed that every piece of furniture was original, at least a century old. I walked across the wood-plank floors to read a framed letter on the wall from a Civil War soldier who wrote that he could see hands and feet of dead comrades sticking out of burial grounds. The letter was just a small part of the walls’ wealth of memorabilia: old photographs, the hides of two foxes, old proclamations, a horse collar, candles, a butter churn, a musket, and an ammunition horn. “It probably looks better than when the Zoarites were here,” Ed said.

  The retired history teacher and his wife sat directly across the table, watching expectantly while I ate at a tavern table made in 1850. Although this was June, the morning was gray and drizzly. The candle on the table provided a fretful light in the dim cabin. The couple seemed to be waiting for me to say something profound.

  “Is it what you expected?” Mary asked.

  All I could reply was, “Yes. Good.” I felt a bit claustrophobic but managed to smile.

  Ed said, “In the old days, innkeepers didn’t have to be nice to you. They didn’t even have to give you a bed. In Zoar, the first hotel opened in 1829. The building we are in was the brewmaster’s home.”

  “To tell you how important he was,” Mary added. “His was the second house built in town.”

  “The idea was, everyone had to work,” Ed said. “They met at the assembly house every morning to find out where they had to work that day. They’d keep their children at the dormitory. The children didn’t like the place, and didn’t like the way they were treated. When one child died, the mother claimed he died of a broken heart.”

  The Cowgers spoke as if they personally knew the Zoarites, as if the German neighbors were still alive. The candles flickered lower. They saw the notebook at my side and asked if I wanted to write about the house. Mary was eager to talk.

  “When we first came here twenty years ago, a woman who owned Number Thirteen welcomed us to the community,” she said. “She asked me, ‘Are you Christian?’ We said, ‘Yes.’ She asked me three times. She said, ‘Do you feel you were drawn here?’ We said, ‘Yes.’ She said the town was different. We thought she was joking.

  “Then one day we went to a meeting in the tavern and meeting hall. The building once had a huge horseshoe bar. We came down the steps to the tavern and I went to open my mouth and people surrounded us. I thought, Is this place possessed? They started talking about the ghosts of Zoar. A man said, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I said, ‘Not yet!’ He said, ‘Don’t be too sure. If a ghost likes you, he will follow you all around from place to place.’ Then they proceeded to all talk about their ghosts and how things were moved around their homes. It was like living in an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

  The Cowgers wondered what to do. They had already spent their savings to buy the property. They talked with a neighbor who had also come to town looking for a relaxing and meaningful life; she had opened a bed and breakfast in the old dormitory building. She told them that the gothic dormitory was a magnet of negativity, as if all the frustration and hurt feelings of the Zoarites had built up inside its walls and were never released. “So many strange things happened there in the dorm,” Mary said. “Another owner was walking up to the attic and passed his two boys. He turned around and saw a white mist following them down the stairs. The man was no kook; he was a former FBI agent. He was shaken up by it. We leased the boys’ dorm for a time and stayed there, and our daughter claimed she heard a baby crying. There was no baby.”

  At this point, the Cowgers broke the news to me: a ghost lives in their inn—the one in which I had slept the night before. Sometimes he appears as a dark figure. The couple calls him George. He also appears in the annex cabin, where I was having breakfast. Visitors have reported seeing the man dressed in an old-fashioned, purple robe. That’s not all. “A friend of ours told us he thought he saw something white drift by, and once somebody tapped him on the shoulder,” Mary said. “Our friend was painting in the inn at the time. He left his paints and ran away. He was reluctant to tell the story, but I got it out of him finally. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘This frightens me.’”

  Ed said, “People say they hear parties, the clinking of German steins. I was skeptical, but one day I thought I heard the clinking and I yelled, ‘Das ist gut!’ I didn’t hear them for a time.”

  By now, I was feeling uncomfortable. Mary went on: “One time, after a candlelight dinner, somebody asked about ghosts in our main house. A man said, ‘My wife and I were on the top of the stairs and we saw a man this morning. He had long, white hair.’ His wife added, ‘The Quaker Oats ghost!’ Then the man said, ‘He was dressed in a purple coat and he went through the door but it didn’t slam.’ I told this to my friend Jenny, who lives across the street, and she said she had seen the man in the window, wearing purple. He must follow us from house to house.’”

  A year later, the Cowgers learned a clue about the spirit’s identity from a guest who stayed in the cabin. He said his father bought it in 1949 at a sheriff’s sale and owned it for
several years. The guest, a colonel in his sixties, explained to the couple that his father loved the cabin. He saw some meaning in the talk about the robe, saying his father once went to Japan and bought an unusual purple robe. He wore it in the log house frequently. Mary said, “That story gave me the chills.”

  Ed excused himself. I noticed that it was still dark inside the cabin, but outside the sun had started shining. Ed returned minutes later with a black-and-white photograph of a white-haired Cleveland physician who had also enjoyed the cabin years earlier. He loved it so much, in fact, that his family buried his ashes in the cabin’s backyard. He is not the purple-robe ghost, but another spirit who can’t let go. Ed said, “I suspect it is the doctor who we have seen around here, too. We have several guests who require no pampering whatsoever.”

  “Maybe the doctor makes house calls,” I told him.

  Someone does. About 1:30 A.M. several years ago, Mary was painting in an upstairs room in the cabin. Ed had already grown tired and left for the couple’s main house. She remained to finish the room. “Fifteen minutes later, the front door opened,” she said. “I know how that old thing sounds; it’s loud and it sticks. I heard hard-soled shoes, heavy footsteps, coming up the steps. I could feel them getting closer. Then a man’s voice yelled, ‘Honey, I’m back.’ Naturally, I thought it was Ed, so I said, ‘OK. I’m finishing up.’ Then suddenly I realized: Ed had been wearing tennis shoes. And Ed never calls me honey. Nervously, I called his name, and got no answer. Then I got shook. I grabbed the telephone and called Ed. When he answered, I said, ‘Uh-oh.’ He said, ‘I’m on my way.’ I was even more shook up when I remembered that I had locked the door when Ed left. No one could have entered that house from the outside.”

  Other strange occurrences have rattled the Cowgers over the years. Ed took a new roll of toilet paper to the guest room in the cabin. No guests were staying in the house that night, yet the next morning the paper had been removed from the roll and piled neatly down the stairs. A ghostly cat, perhaps?

  Mary said, “I told him, ‘Now, explain that, Mr. Logical.’”

  “Of course, I couldn’t,” he admitted.

  Mary said, “I was raised with Christian beliefs. I believe you go to heaven or hell. So I have a hard time believing in ghosts. The Bible talks of evil spirits. If you believe what the Bible says, you’ve got to believe those are evil spirits. Or maybe good. All I know is, I’ve seen these things and I don’t like the experience. Leave me alone! I don’t want ghosts playing with me.”

  “What if there are different dimensions, and for a few seconds they lock in and we can see each another as though we’re staring through a screen door?” Ed said. He paused for a moment to reflect, and said, “Where do they end?”

  I couldn’t help but think of his theory as I shook his hand and walked down the creaky stairs, passing the hallway where the Cowgers had seen the shadow man. All I noticed there was warm air striking my face from a window, and the sun coming up over the canal.

  8

  The Song of Mount Nebo

  Mount Nebo, an old ghost town in Athens County, lies on a remote hill that most people will never see. It is on a peak called Mount Nebo, reportedly rising more than a thousand feet above sea level. According to legend, when the Shawnee arrived on the hill in the eighteenth century they found stone altars left by an earlier people. The tribe refused to hunt in the area, saying the wooded hill was a mystical place better left alone.

  In the early nineteenth century, white settlers stood on the ridge and looked down and thought they had discovered their own promised land—Ohio. It spread out below them like a big green quilt, ready to fulfill their every desire and provide food and shelter and enough potential to meet their meager dreams. They named the hill Mount Nebo, in reference to the mountain from which Moses saw the Promised Land. Its summit was named Pisgah.

  But not every settler who came this way was looking to the earthly plane for sustenance. Some were looking to the spiritual world. When I first heard of Mount Nebo and its unusual history, I wanted to go there. Its past is intertwined with the past of American spiritualism, the belief that the dead live as spirits who can communicate with the living through a medium.

  I didn’t need a medium to tell me how to get to Mount Nebo; I consulted an Athens County map and, with my wife Cheryl as my guide, set out to explore the ghost town around Halloween. (I didn’t do this on purpose; I happened to get a little free time then.)

  Our first stop: Athens. At Ohio University, in this small city inside Appalachian hill country, Halloween is an excuse for excess, especially when the big night falls on a Friday. Book-weary students roam for some action, jack-o’-lanterns with silly grins perch atop black lampposts at brick fraternity houses, and young people’s eyes reflect a little mischief.

  I trudged toward the Alden Library on a mission while the university marching band practiced a rousing number on a crowded downtown street. Drummers rapped out a steady beat as I crunched the dry brown leaves on the brick sidewalk that leads up the hill to Alden.

  I took the elevator to the fifth floor of the almost deserted building. A librarian in her thirties stared at me in boredom as I walked up to the counter.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’m interested in—”

  “Spooks?”

  “Close enough.”

  She handed me a large gray folder and said in a robotic monotone, “Sign here.” She pushed a pen and tablet toward me. “We keep a record. Do you mind if I open the window to hear the band play? It’s such a beautiful night.”

  Apparently the file is so popular that she keeps it on the counter for students and researchers. On its smooth cover a librarian had scrawled in pen the words “Spook Files,” and stamped the official mark of Ohio University’s library. Somehow, the university stamp gives the file—and its incredible stories—a little credibility. (Perhaps too much.) I spread about twenty photocopied stories across a large rectangular table. Among them I found newspaper and magazine stories written from the 1960s through the 1990s about ghostly happenings in Athens County— on the back roads, in the dorms, the cemeteries, the old buildings, the old towns. One writer claims Athens is the center of a pentagram that comprises area cemeteries and small towns. He said any community that falls inside that diagram is ripe for paranormal activity. Glancing at the headlines, I placed several of the more lurid stories into a pile: “Monster No Joke For Those Who Saw It,” “Wilson Hall Has History of Paranormal Activity,” “Watchman May Still Walk Rounds,” “UFO Spotted Over Athens; Resembles Patrolman’s Hat,” and, my favorite, “Runaway Slave, Nicodemus, Haunts AOPI Sorority House.”

  But the story that impressed me most and prompted my trip to Athens County was the haunting of Mount Nebo. I had heard about this ghost town, on Peach Ridge in Dover Township, about ten miles north of Athens in Athens County. Fortunately, I had enough sense not to go there on the full-moon night when I arrived in town.

  The next morning, I went to the Athens County Historical Society’s museum to research Mount Nebo. The museum is a well-stocked place that also houses the genealogical group in a small building downtown.

  Joanne Prisley, the staff director, took me to a research room where she keeps several histories of Athens County. She is a slim, gray-haired woman with a sharp wit and a keen researcher’s eye. Unfortunately, Mount Nebo is one of Ohio’s forgotten places. We couldn’t determine much about the community’s past. As she stood up to leave me with the books, she suddenly looked at me closely and said, “Now, I hope you don’t believe all that gibberish about Mount Nebo and ghosts.”

  “Well—”

  She sat down again and said, “Do you know that Athens County is supposed to be the most haunted place in the United States? Why, I have no idea. It’s ridiculous! Supposedly some British psychic research group has made the claim. That reputation won’t go away. Every Halloween, I am swamped with calls from television and print reporters who want to know about our ghosts. We’ve bec
ome their guinea pigs. Honestly, I never heard much about the subject when I was a student at Ohio University many years ago. It didn’t start until after the late 1960s and 1970s, when The Omen and similar scary movies came out. I think they got people wondering about Athens. It is an isolated town and is therefore good for making up stories. A lot of radio and television students need something to write about, too. One girl talked about her sorority house being haunted by the ghost of a little girl. But the early family that lived in the house didn’t even have children. Then there’s the story of the ghost of a black man who was hidden in a building here in town during the Underground Railroad days. Why on earth would anyone bring a black man into the middle of an all-white town if they wanted to hide him? Besides, the building wasn’t even built yet.”

  She finally walked away, muttering, “They get into how all of our old cemeteries and houses are haunted. If that’s the case, then all old houses and cemeteries are haunted.”

  Two older women researchers who were sitting in the room with me looked up and wrinkled their noses. I smiled and closed my notebook. One said, “That Mount Nebo is trouble.”

  Totally intrigued, I decided to visit the Mount. I learned that the name refers to a ridge and a ghost town. The story began long ago, when ancient Indian tribes occupied the area and built burial mounds on the ridge. They considered Mount Nebo a sacred place and used it for funerals.