The Abandoned Places

Every town has their own Marsten House from The Shining. Every rural place has a Sleepy Hollow nearby where the urban legends about the man with the hook or even cousins to the Headless Horseman lurk. If you've ever driven through Nevada, you've seen whole towns abandoned. Incidentally, my one experience with Beatty, Nevada, which looked like dozens of towns I've driving through in Ohio, minus the scrub desert and wild asses, turned out to be an annex of Area 51. So that speeding ticket went to fund stealth fighter research, according the Annie Jacobsen. But like a certain pundit, I digress.

 In Ohio, we have all types of abandoned places. These are the most famous. 

The Peters Cartridge Family

 I discovered this one by accident while riding the Little Miami Bike Trail. The Peters Cartridge Factory has its own haunted history. Four major explosions took place there, many related to the nearby Little Miami Railroad (now the aforementioned bike trail.) A rail collision in 1890 killed 12 and leveled serveral buildings on site. A machine accident set off the 1922 blast. While no one was killed, eight were injured, including one worker who was blinded. In 1942 and 1943, at the height of the war effort, two more explosions which remain unexplained, the 1942 blast shattering windows thirty miles away. Which means windows in Kentucky sustained damage.

When the plant closed after World War II, the building deteriorated, becoming a ruin not unlike Detroit's Packard Plant. It also became a magnet for ghost stories. A horror movie was filmed there in the 1990s. But ruin explorers have also run afoul of collapsed floors and left over debris.

The site, however, is a retired part of this list. Over the last decade, the hairpin road to the factory was redone with straightened curves and  the buildings renovated as loft apartments and a brewery. So instead of being a location for Ghosthunters, it's now a local tourist trap.

 Helltown 

Once upon a time, there was a town called Boston near Cleveland. Then the Department of Interior created the Cuyahoga Valley National Forest for 1974. The town was abandoned and closed off. Portions remain restricted. But grafitti in the town's former church gave rise to rumors of Satanic cults sacrificing humans in the former city, giving it a Salem's Lot aura. Further, rumors spread that the government bought out the town to cover up a chemical spill that created all manner of mutated monsters, including the Peninsula Python, a monster snake found in a nearby suburb. The best legend was the haunted bus. A schoolbus left behind. Legend has it that cult members attacked and slaughtered a bus full of children. Funny how that never made the news when mobster Danny Green's personal unscheduled rapid disassembly made the national news. (Green was a noted Irish mobster in Cleveland.)

The National Park Service razed most of the town, which is now open as picnic an hiking areas.

 

The Lockland Incinerator

If you drive south on I-75 through Cincinnati's northern suburbs, you come to a section of the freeway known as the Lockland Split. The northboard lanes veer off to go around the site of the former Stearns & Foster Mattress plant. The southbound lanes go between the walls of the former C&O canal. Before the two sides merge just above Ronald Reagan Highway, there lies a swatch of overgrown vacant land. Vacant, that is, except for a lone brick building seemingly alone in the middle of a wooded area. The smokestack has been covered in grafitti. This is the former Lockland Incinerator. 

One intrepid urban explorer dubbed it "The Well of Souls," fancying himself as a modern-day Indiana Jones. After a couple searches on the building, I did find minor legends about the place, namely another blogger who called the place creepy and having a "dark vibe." 

In reality, motorists, even residents of Lockland, have been asking what the hell that thing was. The incinerator handled trash, some from a closed landfill at the end of Reading, Ohio's Davis St. and the West Mill Creek. Our intrepid explorer found trash, grafitti, and... A motorboat? There was a motorboat lying along the remains of that section of Davis St. The building began operation in 1936 and shut down roughly when the Big Red Machine peaked in the mid-1970s. 

Alas, the building's days are numbered. By 2032, the land will be taken to run I-75's northbound lanes alongside the southbound, closing the Lockland Split and opening up the land east of the former Stearns & Foster site.

I've also written about Chippewa Lake Amusement Park, which has a more storied history about all these except maybe the Peters Cartridge Plant. Whereas Peters is apartments, a brewery, and businesses, Chippewa Lake is an actual park now, its ruins part of a hiking trail. 

Death of an Amusement Park

All photos © Alexis Dees (carouselofchaos.com)

Today, I want to talk about arson. When we're not on about writing, language, books, or writing, we usually like to blog about murder and theft. Sometimes both. But arson is its own thing. Sometimes, it's for money. Sometimes, revenge. Just as often, it's because, to paraphrase Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, someone just wants to watch the world burn.

In the case of Chippewa Lake Park, we may never know why someone, or several someones, began torching the buildings in the idle amusement park. 

For perspective, Chippewa Lake Park was a destination only a few miles from my childhood home. In fact, my uncle began his farming career by working for a dairy farmer whose property overlooked the lake and its coasters. Evenings, one could often hear music coming across the lake, and not just your local band trying to gain a career while playing cover songs. In the park's last year of operation, Cheap Trick played a sold-out concert there.

These days, as the property converts to a county park with some of the rides and buildings still standing, Chippewa Lake is known as a ruin, increasingly overgrown, trees growing through the Ferris wheel. Until 1978, it was mentioned in the same breath as coaster meccas Cedar Point and King's Island. The company that owned the venerable amusement park needed to modernize. However, the village of Chippewa Lake, one of three villages along the eponymous lake, would require an upgrade to local infrastructure. So the park closed at the end of summer, 1978. Even Cheap Trick never knew it was their last gig there.

For about four years afterward, many of those who owned individual rides and attractions stayed within the park. Some lived there, moving to open parks in Florida in the winter. The closure simply became a warm-weather off-season.

Until 1982. Up until 1982, everyone concerned felt the park's eventual reopening would happen, even if it took a decade. That year, someone burned the Penny Arcade. In modern parks, Six Flags, Cedar Fair, and Disney own everything in the park. In more traditional parks before the modern era, many of the businesses and rides were owned by individuals and families. When the Penny Arcade went up, the hotel and grand ballroom were still prepped for a still-unscheduled reopening. Sadly, many vintage arcade machines were destroyed, and the family who owned the arcade lost everything. At that point, people realized the park might not open again.

A second fire in 1988 destroyed the picnic pavilion on the lakeshore. By then, nature had started to reclaim the park. The actual death blow came in 1991, mere weeks before I moved to Cincinnati. 

One weekend, a group of vandals were caught trashing the Chippewa Lake Hotel, one of the largest structures left in the park. Police ran them off. However, they came back after sunset and lit the hotel up. It was one of the biggest fires in surrounding Lafayette Township in recent memory.

The 1991 Hotel fire.
You could still smell it a
week later when I visited.

A coworker was also a volunteer firefighter for the department shared between the three villages along the lake. We worked third shift together, and the Saturday morning after the fire, he invited me out to see the damage. Hardly anything remained of the hotel, once considered a local landmark. But more jaw-dropping was the state of the park. Trees not only grew up through the Ferris wheel, but they had encroached on the Big Dipper, the park's wooden roller coaster. It no longer looked like an amusement park. It looked like an ancient ruin.

My friend said he didn't believe this or the pavilion fire were accidents or vandalism. He suspected someone intended to cash in on the insurance money, though he wouldn't say that to the press.

The last fire occurred in 2002, when the Grand Ballroom went up. (Cue "Smoke on the Water," minus Frank Zappa and the Mothers.) No, a guy with a flare gun or spiteful vandals did not set it off. It was a child playing inside who accidentally started it. Normally, beyond the child's safety (he escaped unharmed), the fire would not have posed a threat to the surrounding village. Only the summer cottages inside the park had become permanent homes. The ballroom's destruction threatened to spread to the cottages, forcing residents to flee. Firefighters were able to contain the blaze. But any idea of clearing the trees and brush and salvaging the park went up in smoke.

This last fire had clearly been an accident. The earliest fire, a tool shed in 1980, had also been accidental and might even have happened if the park had remained open. However, in between, the arcade, the pavilion, and the hotel all fell to arsonists. No one was ever caught, aside from the hotel.

Other parks in Ohio disappeared. Geauga Lake, eventually a Six Flags park before closing for good in the 2000s, simply couldn't compete with Cedar Point, Northern Ohio's huge coaster mecca. Similarly, LeSourdesville Lake, called Americana when I first arrived in Cincinnati in 1991, would close for a season, make a two-year stab reverting to its original name, then found itself stripped for parts before the New Millennium dawned. And Coney Island, originally the parent of King's Island, finally closed its doors in 2024, making way for a new facility for the Cincinnati Pops.

None of them succumbed to arson, though, the way Chippewa Lake had. Chippewa's ruins were finally demolished in the 2020s with the Ferris wheel (and its attendant trees) sections of the Big Dipper, and a few other rides serving as artifacts in a new Medina County park. So once again, Chippewa Lake welcomes summer visitors, but not thrill seekers or music fans. That might have changed if a handful of firebugs put down the matches.

https://www.carouselofchaos.com/chippewa-lake-park-demise/