Haunted Places in Ohio

It’s October and that means Halloween and scary stories and who doesn't like a good scare? There are over 30 haunted places here in Ohio, such as the Collingwood Arts Center, the Higginsport School, the Cincinnati Subway and much more. These 3 places are haunted by many spirits and are available to visit. In the spirit of Halloween, I visited the Collingwood Arts Center, the Higginsport School, and the Cincinnati Subway to tell you about the backstory and my experience in these buildings.

My dad and I went to visit the Collingwood Arts Center at 824 East Ave. in Wellington, Ohio and it was pretty interesting to be in. There was so much interesting paranormal energy, it was bone-chilling! The Collingwood Arts Center was built back in the 1872 and is haunted by a ghostly bride who appears in the main parlor, and the ghosts of children who run out of the closets in the back room. A malevolent nun haunts the back rows of the theater,

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those she doesn't like. Employees sometimes see strange blurry things, which is described as "molecular windstorms.” Currently, the Collingwood is a residence and performance center for artists, who are offered dorms there at reduced rents, so it’s still up and people are still visiting. After hearing so much about the place, I was pretty anxious to go. So on October 13, 2017, we headed over to the art center. We parked in the side lot and walked around, assuming it was a museum of some sort and that people wouldn't mind if we just walked in. There's a regular house out front which serves as sort of a facade in front of the gigantic, gothic Arts Center, which definitely looks haunted if nothing else. Unfortunately, all the doors were locked, and looking inside we saw nothing but empty rooms. We walked around the side and examined the place. Some windows were open; some were broken. There were no lights on, and no cars in the parking lot. It looked abandoned.We slipped around to the back through a hole in the gate and happened to see, up in one of the second-floor rooms, the silhouette of a man and a boy facing each other. They didn't move. Eventually, we realized that this was a statue of what looked like Jesus and a little boy, left in the window, maybe to scare people away? There was a broken window in the back of the place and we decided to head inside. Inside, it looked like any other haunted place; dark, dusty, kind of foggy, and incredibly scary. We decided to head up to the 4th floor and you won’t believe what we found. Rooms, but not just any rooms, they looked like cells. There was nothing in there and doors were metal. The air was dense and it was very hard to breathe. We got out as fast as we could and went back home for the day.

The next day, my dad and I went to the Higginsport School, which is supposed to be extremely haunted. A man was burned badly by the boiler and died in the basement and died. In October of 2003, they started using it as a local haunted house, playing up the ghost stories and giving paid tours through the heavily decorated school building. Strange voices are heard inside, even though for most of the year, no one uses the school. So, my dad and I went there and this building was even more broken down than the last place. Mostly all the windows were broken and moss and vines coated the outside of the school walls. We went inside through a door that led to the basement and the place was covered in dirt. Not just the ground, from the floor to the ceiling! There were piles of dirt and we couldn’t get past, so, we found another way to get inside on the main floor. It was broken down on the inside as well. The wallpaper was coming off the walls, there was no furniture, and it had an overall weird vibe. We explored it for a little and it wasn’t as near as interesting as the last one, but we did find this one room with a chalkboard and graffiti all over the walls. It was extremely cold in that room and, just like the last place, the air was dense in that room. We headed out and home for that day as well.

The last day, we went to the Cincinnati Subway and this one was the one was easily the creepiest. The idea really originated in 1884, when the Cincinnati Graphic printed an illustration showing trains chugging along underground, in an old canal bed covered with a new street. After their remarkably brief golden era, canals quickly became even more of a nuisance than they had been when they were bringing in trade. Many were partially drained; whatever water there was ended up breeding mosquitoes and disease. The muddy canal bottoms were used as refuse dumps. Since the Miami & Erie rivers cut right through the heart of the city, it was a particular eyesore in Cincinnati. The plan was made in 1912 to build a sixteen-mile rapid transit rail system in a loop around the city, with a branch going underground and heading downtown. It surfaced at Brighton and Saint Bernard and ran above ground along the Ohio River. In 1926 Mayor Murray Seasongood took control of the transit project from the county and gave it to the city, then estimated another $10 million needed to be spent to see it through to completion. Central Parkway, which was built atop the underground tunnels, opened in 1928, and that seemed to be all the transit Cincinnati residents wanted at the time, especially with such a steep price tag for finishing the project. Of course, in 1929 any consideration of paying the millions evaporated when the stock market crashed and the country plunged into the dark depths of the Great Depression. Proposals came and went in the 30s, but none were implemented. One idea was to run trolleys through the tunnels, but the trolley cars were too long for the subway's bends. Another proposal, made by City Manager C.O. Sherrill in 1939, was to use them for automobile traffic, but the cost of the plan was too high. A 1948 study finally mothballed the Cincinnati Subway for good, though efforts to do something with the tunnels have been constantly ongoing for more than half a century. Ideas have included a bomb shelter, a shopping and nightlife district, a massive wine cellar, and more rapid transit. The latest proposal is for another subway. The subway project was scrapped without a single train ever having run. The debt incurred by the project wasn't fully paid until 1966, at a cost of $13 million--in addition to the lives of several workers. The subway is said to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead workmen. You can’t enter this place, and we weren’t able to get in, but the background itself was very bone-chilling. The map below is the map of the subway tunnels.