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

by Randy McNutt

  Newspapers splashed the story across page one. They called Daniels the “glamour-boy killer” because he wore white shirts and ties and smoked cigarettes.

  From Mansfield, Daniels and West headed toward Indiana. Police established roadblocks on all the major highways. Along the way, the two men stole another car in Tiffin, Ohio. West shot the car’s owner when he refused to cooperate. The two abducted his wife and kept her temporarily. Four miles up the road, they decided to steal a truck. West shot the driver in the head and laughed about it. Not far from the Indiana border, they came to a roadblock set up by the Ohio State Patrol at State Routes 224 and 637 in Van Wert County. West wounded two deputy sheriffs but they continued to shoot and finally killed him. Deputies captured Daniels without a struggle. He was tried and later executed in the electric chair on January 3, 1949. A reporter wrote: “One would scarcely have recognized him as the cocky youngster who wisecracked with newsmen on the rear steps of the Van Wert County Jail last July 23.” A final headline read: “No Swagger Left as Daniels Pays for Crime Spree.”

  The Daniels-West killing spree and other negative incidents represent the prison’s bad karma, which hangs in the air like stale smoke. Some people have tried to capture it with cameras. “One of the former guards came through here on a tour with a digital camcorder,” the guide said. “She saw an orb—a little ball of light flying around. We have some weird stories. My son was up here one day taking pictures. He later found images on the field other than what he was shooting. We don’t understand it. It just happens.”

  Quietly, we left the cellblocks and headed to the lobby to look around the museum and gift shop. The museum, in the former superintendent’s office, is as stately as the cells are stark. Rich woodwork and spacious windows underscore the difference between the law enforcers and the lawbreakers.

  The furniture collection includes some old oak teachers’ desks that were crafted by prisoners. The walls are like big lineup cards, filled with pictures and words about young inmates who were incarcerated in the prison in the late 1800s. I was surprised that their sentences didn’t run longer; some stayed only a year or two for serious crimes. The walls also held old black and white prison photographs from the early 1900s. They gave me a chilling sense of being there at that time.

  As we walked around the gift shop, I noticed people buying postcards, T-shirts, old photographs, and even black plastic license plate holders that read, “GHOST HUNTER … Ohio State Reformatory Historic Site.” All proceeds go to the preservation society to operate the prison.

  We gladly walked out of the prison a couple of hours later. Even the dark, thickening air of an approaching thunderstorm felt fresher than the air in the cellblocks. Out front, under the big towers, we met Ike Webb, a seventy-five-year-old former captain of the guard who had worked in the prison from 1954 to 1965. He had stopped to visit on this Sunday, as he does about once a month. He enjoys watching the people and their reactions. “In our time, they knew the rules and they obeyed them,” Webb said of the inmates. “They were starting this prisoner-reform stuff. I didn’t like it, so I left. They were giving inmates too many privileges. We didn’t treat them mean or nothing, but we had discipline. All that has disappeared. We believed in security first, then rehabilitation. Now, it’s the reverse. You can’t teach somebody something if he won’t listen. We didn’t have as many prisoners return as parole violators. A couple of years ago, they got as many as sixty percent coming back. We were lucky to have ten percent.”

  He said the prison operated with 175 guards; 42 worked on each of three shifts. They controlled as many as three thousand inmates on a few occasions.

  “In ’57, we had a riot that started with some juvenile delinquents who had been sentenced to ‘one-to-age,’ meaning when they turned twenty-one we had to turn ’em loose,” Webb said. “They knew it, too. They started a riot for the fun of it. They had no complaints; they did it just to do it. Rioters intended to take over the dining room, so they’d have food, but we locked it up real quick. Eighty percent to 90 percent of the inmates wanted nothing to do with the riot, and they ran into their cells. About a hundred continued to roam the yard. We rounded them all up and put them in the hole. They stayed down there for ninety days—until we found who their ringleaders were. We had no more trouble with them after that. The hole cured ’em real good. See, when I worked here, the hole was different. We had only twenty cells. No bed. No light. Inmates slept on concrete floors. The temperature was kept at ninety-two degrees so they wouldn’t catch cold. For breakfast, they’d get two slices of bread, and for lunch, a bowl of soup. On the third day, they’d get a full meal. Then the process would start over again. It was a good place to go if you wanted to lose weight.”

  Tour coordinator Jan Demyas, who oversees thirty volunteers, was selling tickets and trying to talk to us at the same time. She is among those people who are convinced that the prison is haunted.

  “On the scale of one to ten, we’re in the seven-to-eight range for paranormal activity,” she explained. “The hole, the warden’s quarters, the fourth tier of the east cellblock—these are the places where sightings occur more often. But they’re not limited just to those places. Sightings extend over the entire building, and they’re not always where people died. In fact, we have no idea how many people died here. That’s state information, and we do not have access to it.”

  She said many people hear sounds in the prison and that one woman claims to hear a little girl singing every time she visits. But Demyas said no record exists of a young girl who died in the prison.

  “I have no idea how these spirits got here, but they’re definitely here,” she said. “I don’t dispute it. Too many people become affected when they enter here, even in the daytime. One young man who visited from Maryland took fifty-two pictures while on tours. When he had them developed, he had more than one image that he couldn’t explain, including a small child in the background. He said he and his buddy were the only people standing in that area of the prison. A lot of times, the spirits are not even identifiable. They will be sounds. One year, a lot of people developed their film and it had flames in the background. So it’s not defined images. It’s different.”

  Many visitors echo her thoughts. A Portsmouth woman wrote to the preservationists that she and her friends went on a ghost hunt in 2002. Her letter was posted on the prison’s Web site: “The first thing that happened is one of my friends and I saw a black figure at the end of the bottom of the west cellblock as we were walking past the scaffold … the figure disappeared soon after. It couldn’t have been our shadows because the light source was in front of the three of us. The second thing that happened was when we were walking into the east cellblock on the bottom. First, we felt a cold blast of air, which was noticeable since it was so humid in there that night. As we reached the middle of the east cellblock, up above us we heard what we thought was the sound of the cells slamming. They continued to slam and get louder and closer to us. It really startled us because there were no lights above us anywhere. We also knew those cells are so hard to close that they couldn’t possibly be slammed over and over by somebody.”

  John Toney, president of the prison preservation group, suggested to me that some spirits come from the Civil War, or even earlier. Of course, he said, the prison itself holds enough bad memories. “It can be scary,” he said. “We’ve had a few people get so frightened that they’ve asked to leave. We have to be careful in there. You can get lost down in those catacombs. Last year, it took us two weeks to find a little kid.”

  He contorted his face in an exaggerated grimace and winked.

  I think.

  10

  Louisa’s Legacy

  One day in 1861, a weary John Batterson Stetson arrived at his sister’s little house in Waynesville in rural Warren County. The train trip had been arduous for the sick but hopeful man who wanted to earn a fortune and a reputation out West. But first, he knew he had to achieve the nearly impossible: conquer tuberculosis.
He never doubted that he would win.

  In those days, Ohio and Waynesville were technically no longer the West, except to Easterners like Louisa Stetson Larrick. Since 1803, when Ohio entered the Union, the borders of America’s great western nether region had slowly expanded to include Missouri and beyond. That’s where John Stetson was heading—toward the golden horizon. On the way, he wanted to see his sister Louisa and recuperate at her home.

  Only months earlier, on the Larrick family farm outside of town, Louisa’s world had finally crashed. She felt trapped and hopeless. Her marriage was crumbling. She felt stifled by Hiram Larrick, whom she had married in 1838, so she left him and moved into the little house in town. For that bold move she earned the contempt of many townspeople, who did not take separation or divorce lightly. To them, leaving a spouse was sinful and disrespectful.

  Her move, as well as the impending visit from her brother, would change the direction of her life and those of millions of other people, but at the time she didn’t realize it would mean anything to her. She only worried about her health and the health of her children. She prayed they wouldn’t catch tuberculosis, and that her brother would miraculously recover. She did not consider turning him away.

  Louisa and John were products of an Eastern upbringing and a large family. Born March 2, 1819, in Connecticut, Louisa was the daughter of a small-time hat manufacturer, Stephen Stetson III, and his wife, Marianne Batterson. Brother John was born May 5, 1830, in Orange, New Jersey. Being eleven years his senior, and one of an army of twelve children, Louisa was never extremely close to John, but her parents stressed togetherness and a strong family bond. They made it known that John, being a son, would one day enter the family business as a partner. Louisa, as were other girls of her era, was expected to marry her way into prosperity.

  John didn’t fare much better. Although he didn’t receive a partnership in the family hat factory, he worked for his father long enough to learn the hat trade from the inside. His brothers earned all the money and left him struggling. So he decided to start his own factory.

  But tuberculosis changed his plans. When doctors diagnosed the young man just before he turned thirty, his father assumed John would not live to see his thirty-fifth birthday. So Stephen Stetson had another reason not to invite John into the business. It was just as well, for a short time later his father lost all his money through a bad investment deal. He died soon after.

  On the advice of his physicians, John Stetson left the cold, polluted Philadelphia for the West and its clean, warm air. He never thought much about dying, for he had too many dreams to fulfill. He wanted to be rich. The doctors said perhaps the clean air would help restore John’s lungs, but they warned him that tuberculosis was a contagious, debilitating disease for which there was no cure.

  In Warren County, John stayed with Louisa while he gathered his strength. The country air seemed to revive him. He felt stronger every day. From Waynesville, John left for St. Joseph, Missouri, where he found a job in a brickyard. Months later, he was promoted to manager. He saved his money and bought the business. He believed he would be healed and his material needs would be met; he didn’t worry about the future.

  On the verge of financial success a year later, he watched as the flooded Missouri River washed away his business and his dreams. Despondent, he attempted to enlist in the army at the start of the Civil War in 1861, but recruiters turned him down because of his disease. He felt even worse. They would take anyone, he told himself as he wandered. On the trail he met a group of prospectors heading to Pikes Peak and other faraway places to search for gold. They accepted him. On long nights in camp he passed the time by experimenting with furs for hats. Others marveled as he took pieces of leather, shaved them, boiled them, loved them, and molded them into about any shape he desired. He preferred high crowns and wide brims to keep the sun out of his eyes.

  John Stetson became an artist with leather.

  Meanwhile, Louisa Larrick’s town was suffocating her. It was too old-fashioned for her eastern tastes. People talked about her.

  When I arrived in Waynesville, in search of her story, I envisioned the town as it was in 1860. I walked along its old-fashioned streets and imagined seeing Louisa walking to the general store. Superficially, at least, the town hasn’t changed much since she lived. Most of the architecture is nineteenth century, and the town’s antique shops sell the same kinds of utensils, tools, and other materials that the townspeople used back then.

  These days, Waynesville, a Quaker community cut from the wilderness in 1797 and named for General Anthony Wayne, promotes itself as the antiques capital of the Midwest. Despite its old and Anglo pedigree, Waynesville’s image is that of a German town. The annual Ohio Sauerkraut Festival assures that the taste and odor of old-fashioned sauerkraut drifts into people’s consciousness and typecasts Waynesville as the home of sauerkraut and antiques. In that way, perhaps, the town has changed.

  But there’s more to Waynesville than musty rooms and cabbage. A few weeks after the annual October festival comes Halloween and a much closer approximation of Waynesville: the Most Haunted Town in Ohio. A writer applied the nickname in the 1990s, and nobody has bothered to dispute it. In fact, some townspeople have encouraged it by proclaiming Main Street as America’s Most Haunted Street.

  Ghost stories are the folklore of Waynesville, which lately has been promoting itself as haunted. Supposedly, haunted buildings line Main Street like tombstones in a country cemetery. Thirty years ago, town historian Dennis Dalton started collecting the old stories and interviewing people. So I asked the conductor of the “Not So Dearly Departed Tour” himself to show me around town and introduce me to Louisa Larrick—or, more exactly, to her reputation.

  Dalton is the perfect neighbor for the job; he grew up in Waynesville in the 1950s, and he knows every house and legend. He is one of those vanishing characters, bigger than his reputation and perpetually in a good mood. He is the last of an indispensable breed, the small-town storyteller, historian, and folklorist. Physically, he reminds me of a Dickens character—ruddy-faced, robust, talkative, and dressed in an early 1800s costume befitting his status as Warren County’s official town crier.

  As we walked down Main Street, Dalton explained the stories behind each old house. I realized that Waynesville is at once a living town and a ghost town. Its past is superimposed on top of its present, slightly off-kilter, the way those old 3-D pictures look before you put on cardboard glasses. “I make the tours historical,” Dalton said. “I tell about the times, the buildings, and the town. These stories are a part of us—our own folk tales. They can’t be separated from the history of the village because it is all one. As a result, the people who take my tour leave here with more than just tales of ghosts.”

  On the surface, the village looks benign enough. Frame buildings are painted light yellow, peach, light blue, green, tan, and white. The brick Wayne Township House, a “newer” structure built in 1878, is painted red. The downtown is meant for walking and greeting neighbors. White wooden porches spill over into green yards. Black iron streetlights give the feel of New England. Yet two Waynesvilles exist, each without the other knowing. In Dalton’s world, Waynesville is a town of ghosts, inhabited by the living but still dominated by the dead. He has studied their every move until he feels that he knows them.

  When Dalton was growing up in Waynesville, Main Street had a variety store, a department store, several supermarkets, a canning factory, a greenhouse, two barbershops, a theater, a hardware store, a luncheonette, and a weekly newspaper. Now, the town consists mainly of antiques shops; merchants sell the past. With little industry, Waynesville should be dead. Yet other small towns envy Waynesville’s economic success.

  More than seventy antiques and specialty shops operate in five blocks. In the late 1970s, the antiques business provided the failing, out-of-the-way town with a strategy to compete. To R. Kevin Harper, a former village administrator who later helped the town exploit its past, Waynesville achi
eved a nearly impossible goal—thriving in a regional economy that is based on the suburbs. “We’ve capitalized on our own history,” he said.

  In addition to sharp entrepreneurs, Waynesville has other spirited boosters. They lurk in parlors and old shops, waiting for the annual return of Dennis Dalton and company. It’s a long wait, but they don’t have a lot of options. They’re ghosts.

  “I started this tour in 1987, right after I did the Haunted Hot Dog Roast in Springboro,” Dalton said. “It has grown every year. I have to turn visitors away. They’re fascinated. I think maybe it’s the intrigue of the unseen. But I don’t want people thinking that I’m exploiting our folklore. People simply have unusual experiences in this town.”

  I told him that I am fascinated with one story: Louisa’s. She always did consider herself an Easterner although she lived in Waynesville from the late 1830s till her death in 1879. After leaving her husband, she spent most of her time in the two-story frame house at 234 South Main Street. It became her refuge from an unhappy marriage and the eyes of a prying village. Today her old home is the Cranberry Bog, a specialty shop. I stepped inside and walked around the three rooms on the first floor. They were crammed with dozens of home décor items, including framed prints and artificial flowers and soaps. The shop smelled sweet.

  Outside, Dalton and I surveyed the frame architecture: beige with green shutters, two stories, a small brick chimney, a white wooden picket fence on one side of the yard, an addition on the back, and a small wooden front porch filled with wicker chairs. The front steps were lined with purple petunias.

  “The Larrick House was built in 1820,” Dalton explained. “In 1861, it became the home of Louisa, a Yankee from the old Stetson family. She had met and married Hiram Larrick and came to live on his family homestead on the southeast side of Waynesville. She never did like the town much, though. I can understand why. This was still the West to her. There wasn’t much beyond it but St. Louis. She found the life disagreeable. Women smoked pipes. Small children chewed tobacco and spat on the sidewalks. Swearing, public drunkenness—life was rough and uncouth here. She became disenchanted with her life and husband.”