Ohio has its share of spooky stories

Host Pam Machuga, a park ranger at Cuyahoga National Park, directed a Facebook

Live presentation Monday night in conjunction with the Auglaize County Historical Society, “Trainwrecks, Shipwrecks, and Spooky Tales.”

“I would suggest that transportation changed everything about the lives of the people that lived in this area,” she said. “Each mode of

transportation changed the jobs we had, the goods and services we received. It changed how we went about living.”

She suggested one of the best ways to learn about transportation was through storytelling. And because it’s the season, spooky stories were in order.

The first story was about Mary Henry, who died in 1845. But Henry’s gravestone was different than the others because of the red stain on it that couldn’t be removed.

Her story started after she married James Henry, an up-and-coming farmer in love with

two women (Mary and Jane) who rode his horse - the primary mode of transportation at the time - everywhere.

One night after drinking. his horse led him to Mary’s house. He took it as a sign Mary was the

one he should marry, and the beginning of their life was wonderful.

Two months before their one-year anniversary, Mary became sick and died, an event the left James heartbroken.

One day while visiting her tombstone he saw Jane, who had been stalking the cemetery hoping to see James. Soon enough friendship turned into romance and the two married. But there was one problem: Jane wanted James to sell Mary’s horse.

Initially reluctant to do so, after his friend found a red stain in the shape of a horseshoe on Mary’s tombstone James sold the horse.

The next morning Jane sent James to the barn, retrieve the horse and hitch it to a wagon so they could take it to town and sell it. But as the morning drew on and his breakfast grew cold, she went to investigate. When she got to the stall the horse was at she found him dead with a bloody horseshoe print on his face.

Machuga then talked about how Ohio was a western frontier in the early 1800s. To receive and export crops, the Ohio and Erie Canal was

built between 1823-25 to get from Akron to Cleveland. By 1832 the canal was 308 miles long and allowed farmers to move their crops to the

east coast. It also meant Ohioans could get luxury items from the east.

Lake Erie is also the shallowest Great Lake, which is where the next stories came in.

The first story about a shipwreck involved a lighthouse keeper who loved watching storms that would pass by. But one day he saw a man

clinging to a wooden hatch and trying not to hit an area with jagged rocks. So he went out to

help, but one wave pulled the man underwater while another caused the lighthouse keeper to retreat to the building.

On his way back he tripped over the body of the man who had been pulled under and whose

body had washed up. The lighthouse keeper also found a money belt on the man, took it for

himself and shoved the (presumed dead) man into the water.

Not long afterwards, the lighthouse keeper started having nightmares and was eventually fired. It got so bad that after he returned home he stopped eating and sleeping.

Eventually, he confessed to his family what he did. The ghost of the man he’d killed suddenly

appeared, and the former lighthouse keeper died. After his death, the family couldn’t find the money.

Another story involving water was about a sailor who encountered a storm bigger than he’d ever seen. While sailing, the man was tak-

en under water, and when he came back up he grabbed onto part of the boat, pulled himself onboard and laid there barely conscious.

He was eventually found by a passing ship - the Merchant - moving mining supplies. But after sailing for three days without reaching a port he became uncomfortable about the lack of direction the boat was traveling.

Eventually he remembered hearing a story about a ship named the Merchant that disappeared. Realizing he was on a ghost ship and

sailing for eternity, he escaped and rowed a tender until he made landfall.

Machuga shifted from boats to railroads, which displaced the former as the primary

mode of transportation. Railways provided jobs laying tracks, clearing land and offered new forms of communication. But they were also dangerous.

The next story was in third-person where a woman reflected on a story her father had told

her during the Great Depression when her father became a railroad hobo, rode the rails and occasionally searched for work.

But one day while in Walbridge a man named Bill approached her father offering food and

shelter. Bill instructed him to go to the house while he went to the barn.

Bill’s wife reassured him her husband would be fine. But the next morning Bill hadn’t returned from the barn, and when he asked the wife, she told him her husband - a switchman on the railroad - had been dead for two years

but kept sending young men to the house. The man ran out the door and never hitched a free ride on the railroad again.

The final spooky story was about an old, abandoned storage shed in Harper’s Ferry, WV that lined the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. Poor

people would live in the shacks next to the railroad, one of them being Jenny.

One night while eating Jenny’s skirt caught on fire, but because she was hungry she didn’t

notice until flames reached her legs. She ran out of the shed and onto the tracks where she was

hit by an oncoming train and eventually forgotten in time.

But one month later another train was coming around the same bend in the tracks and was

confronted by the ghost of Jenny. And on the anniversary of Jenny’s death, her ghost still haunts the tracks where she was killed.

Machuga ended the presentation by noting the railroad companies - the newest form of transportation - wanted to lay tracks in national

parks, the idea being that if more people visited then hotels could be built.

“I think it’s interesting that each mode of transportation is faster and faster,”machuga

said. “Think about the cars we drive. Think about the planes we fly.”

She also said progress could be defined by setting aside land for places where people had the option of bringing horses, walking, biking

or even getting on the train that traveled the park to stare out the window.