Urban Legends

I LOVE this topic. I always love to read urban legends and ghost stories.

When I lived in Ohio, I lived in an area that had A LOT of legends and ghost stories.... I'll post a few..

Most of these can be found on the website Forgotten Ohio

I used to live in Logan, which was in Hocking County.

Wolf Cemetery is at the top of a hill in Haydenville, the Hocking County village most famous as "Ohio's last company town." Haydenville once existed solely as housing for employees of the local brick furnace, and the vast majority of the structures in town are built from the same brick they manufactured.

Wolfe Cemetery would be a pretty ordinary country graveyard if it weren't for the scary stories that center around it. They say that a witch or a warlock was put to death here and buried beneath a flat stone--flat to keep him or her in the ground where he/she belongs. If you touch the stone, which is supposed to have a large crack in it, it will be warm to the touch. If you stand on it, the witch's hands will seize you and pull you down.

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Cemeterie...metalfence.jpg
Picture from Wolfe Cemetery

Moonville Tunnel

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Moonville/tunnel2.jpg

"In the southeastern Ohio town of Lake Hope sits the MOONVILLE TUNNEL. This long forgotten railroad tunnel is one of the only remaining remnants of a small mining town that thrived for a short time. The town of Moonville was born in the late 1850's when the Marietta and Cincinnati railroad was built to transport the coal and iron out of the Ohio mines. Moonville was never a big town, at its height, there were probably never many more then 100 residents, and almost all of them were exclusively miners and their families. There was a row of houses along the railroad tracks, a sawmill, schoolhouse, post office, general store, and a saloon. In its early days the residents of Moonville worked in the Hope Furnace nearby, but later on they turned almost exclusively to mining underground. The coal and iron was then used in the Hope furnace, where weapons and artillery for the Union Army were made during the Civil War.

By the turn of the century the coal mines were closing and the town was dying. The last family left in 1947, by the 1960's all of the buildings were gone. The tracks have recently been removed along with the trestle that used to cross raccoon creek.
The Moonville tunnel is about 50 yards long and is very narrow, trains would go through at full speed and have very little clearance on each side.

The most well-known story is that someone who worked for the railroad, possibly an engineer or a brakeman was crushed under the wheels of a train. It's been said that he was a conductor murdered by a vengeful engineer who asked him to inspect underneath the train and then started it up. One source even said that he was trying to get the train to stop because Moonville was in the grip of a plague and was running low on supplies."

Many legends of moonville, people claim that while walking thru the tunnel at midnight people see the Moonville ghost as a swinging light in the tunnel.....but upon closer inspection, realizing that nobody was holding it.

There were at least four deaths near the tunnel, including a young girl who was killed by a passing train on the nearby trestle while going to visit a lover.

Hope Furnace

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Junk/furnacenew.jpg

"The Hope Furnace is located not far from Moonville, right beside Lake Hope. There was an entire iron works in operation here from 1854 to 1874, before the lake was created as part of Franklin Roosevelt's public works program in 1940.

Legend has it that a watchman fell into the molten iron, which couldn't have been a pleasant way to die. He is supposed to haunt the preserved brick furnace, still keeping watch, and is said to be visible on rainy nights as a silhouette against the ghostly fires of the furnace. "

Of course there are MANY MANY legends of Ohio University being haunted and perhaps being the most haunted campus in the US. Athens Ohio is supposed to be one of the most haunted places in the US. There is a legend that if you draw a line on a map from each cemetery located in Athens, OH it will form a pentagram with Ohio University located in the center. Many of the buildings now owned by Ohio University were once part of the Athens State Mental Hospital that closed down in the early 1980s... when it closed the university bought much of the land. It is said that patients or residence of the hospital now haunt the grounds where the hospital used to be.

"The Ridges"
http://www.forgottenoh.com/Ridges/ridges-hist6.jpg
Athens Asylum for the Insane