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.
