#1092 Haunted Ohio: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Buckeye State

Haunted Ohio: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Buckeye State, Charles A. Stansfield, Jr., 2008, 102 pp, trade PB, $10.95

Quite a lot of tales are packed into this volume–many of them a page or less. The wandering ghost of assassinated President James A. Garfield, the pitiful ghosts of the Millfield miners, the phantom Airship Shenandoah, the charred spirits of inmates of the Ohio State Penitentiary who died in a horrible fire in 1930. And not just ghosts–there are monsters of the Black Swamp, UFOs in Dayton, a vampire in Gallipolis, and several witchcraft stories. The credulity of the reader may be strained at times, for example, by the supposed appearance of the nude ghosts of the spiritualist Claflin sisters dancing at Homer or of Paul Lawrence Dunbar reciting poetry to the other ghosts at Woodland Cemetery. Whether folklore, fantasy, or fiction–documented or undocumented–some of them are still fun reading.