We’re investigating a private home in Barnesville, Ohio this Friday. We’re finally starting to get requests again, we’ve basically had nothing since Covid hit.
Well, I’ve been doing historical research on the house and immediate neighborhood all week and I wasn’t expecting to find much but omg.
I haven’t found any info on anyone dying in the house or anything but even if anyone has, that’s hard to find if it wasn’t something recent. I did find tons of property records going back to the start of the town, so we do have many of the owners’ names and the surrounding property owners’ names going back to the beginning.
I discovered there was a “Home for the Aged” on the same block, about 50 feet from the house, in the early 1900’s. It was just a largish house, so only up to 4 or 5 residents at a time. That was common for the time. But a nursing home - there had to be some deaths there.
The most interesting thing I discovered is that when the town was first created in the very early 1800s there was a church and cemetery built just a few hundred feet from the house. The church is still there (torn down and rebuilt bigger several times) but the cemetery was abandoned and gone from the maps by around 1915. In an old book about the history of the town, there’s one sentence mentioning that the graves were moved to another cemetery. But I wondered if they actually moved the bodies, or just the headstones. I asked some local history buffs and found out that only the headstones were moved, and when the church was later rebuilt and a few homes next to it, they found some bodies while digging the foundations.
Not only THAT, but when the original church was built (one of the very few structures of the town in the beginning, which was nothing but thick woods when plotted), they destroyed an indian mound to build it. I’m told they used the clay and sand from the mound as materials for the church. This is very possible - I had read in an early account that there were mounds in the town. They aren’t noted on early maps of the town, even though I’ve seen other maps of areas nearby, made by the same mapmakers, that did mark mounds. So whatever mounds were there were destroyed very early on.
So not only was there an abandoned settler cemetery that was later dug up and disturbed, there was also at least one mound, possibly a burial mound (not all of them were for burials, some were ceremonial but that could be bad, too), in that same spot that was destroyed!
Like, damn… old people dying next door, a disturbed cemetery, a destroyed mound - that whole couple of blocks could be haunted. It’s a perfect recipe if I’ve ever seen one. 😮🤔
Cross-posting to main because this is INTERESTING.
