this work, Watkins has been awarded a Certificate of Appreciation from the Ohio Historical Society for his contributions and for teaching the public about history in an interesting manner. The group was also the first to investigate the haunted Cincinnati Observatory (see the chapter about the observatory in this book).
In addition to conducting investigations, DaShane is a film-maker and, with Crystal Ayers, cohosts a podcast called “Widespread Paranormal.”
DaShane’s favorite haunt is the James Rupert house in Hamilton, Ohio. One Easter in the 1970s, Rupert used three different guns to shoot to death eleven members of his family; oddly, no one else heard a single shot. DaShane talks about an investigation he and Crystal conducted at the house:
“I had never been actually touched by something paranormal until that night walking up to the back porch. Crystal and I were walking around the side of the house, and as we headed to the back porch, I was poked in the chest by an unseen force. It felt like the end of a broomstick being poked into my chest very hard. As I jumped back, I turned on the flashlight to see if maybe there was a stray branch poking out from the vines that had grown up the lattice that covered the whole back porch. I thought for sure that I would find a branch that had been freshly cut and was sticking out, but after careful examination, I found nothing to offer an explanation. No branches, sticks, or twigs poking out from the lattice. Nothing. So now my senses were on high alert. Heart pounding, adrenaline pumping. What poked me? Suddenly, in the midst of this, I saw two images flash in my head, a little boy and a girl on the back porch. The flash was in black and white except for the little girl’s pink bow on her hat. Then it went away. After doing research on the murders, I found out that the girl was the only one that got close to getting away. She made it as far as the back porch with her brother close behind her before they were shot by the madman.”
DaShane reports that, at the same time, Crystal asked the ghost to make the EMF meter she held in her hand record higher readings. It did and Crystal felt something slap the back of her hand, as if to knock the meter out of her grasp. Later, the two discovered that they had recorded two EVPs at that time, a man’s voice saying, I’m doing it and a growling voice that said, Get out of here. Crystal also received mental images from the porch; DaShane notes that neither of them are psychics.
For more information about Spiritual H.O.P.E. Society, go to the group’s website at spiritualhopesociety.com.
What’s in a Name? Spooky Hollow Road, Indian Hill
The Village of Indian Hill is a Cincinnati-area bedroom community with sprawling mansions and picturesque bridle trails nestled among rolling hills and leafy woods. It’s the home of the area’s wealthiest movers and shakers and celebrities, such as rocker Peter Frampton.
But Indian Hill may also be home to ghosts. How else can we explain the road named Spooky Hollow Road? An unlighted two-lane road that twists and turns downhill, Spooky Hollow Road is indeed spooky, if you drive it too fast or under the influence of spirits from a bottle.
I checked with the Indian Hill Historical Society to see how the road received its name. In the eighteenth century a man named Eli Dusky operated a sugar camp in the area where he made maple sugar. The story goes that one night, after perhaps imbibing some of the aforementioned spirits, Eli decided to check on his sugar vats and walked through the dark woods to the camp, located in a hollow. When he got there, he saw “hobgoblins” dancing round the vats. Scared out of his wits, Eli ran back to town, raving about the spirits in the hollow. Of course, no one believed him.
No one knows whether or not poor Eli ever returned to his sugar camp, but his story became notorious enough for the road to be named after his adventure.
And no one knows if the hobgoblins continue to dance in Spooky Hollow.
CHAPTER 2
Cincinnati Observatory
CINCINNATI
ONE OF THE PLACES YOU WOULD LEAST EXPECT to find a ghost would be an astronomical observatory. That was why I was so surprised when I received an e-mail message from John Ventre, historian at the Cincinnati Observatory, America’s oldest public observatory.
John explained to me that he had heard me on Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory, a popular late-night radio show, and wondered if I would like to visit the observatory. Cryptically, he said there was “something” at the observatory that might be of interest to me.
I’m not an idiot; I knew what John meant by “something,” so I contacted my friend DaShane Watkins, founder of a Cincinnati paranormal investigating team called Spiritual H.O.P.E. (Historians of Paranormal Evidence) and asked him if he’d like to come along with me. On a cold February night, my wife, Mary, and I met with DaShane and a few members of his team at the observatory.
We parked our cars in the cul-de-sac of Observatory Place atop Mount Lookout. Lights gleamed inside the main building. Built in 1873, its silver dome stood prominent above the columned porch of the stately Greek Revival building. The smaller Mitchel Building, named for Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, who founded the observatory in 1843, sat at the right side of the cul-de-sac. Built in 1903, this building houses the observatory’s original telescope, a beautiful brass-and-teak instrument built in Bavaria in 1845—and still fully operational today.
Our group entered through the towering door of the main building, where we met John Ventre. A friendly and gregarious man, John gave us a history of the observatory as we stood in the lobby. He told us that the observatory had originally been located on Mount Ida in 1843; former president John Quincy Adams, who was himself an amateur astronomer, laid the cornerstone of the building. The mount was renamed Mount Adams in his honor. As Cincinnati grew and became more industrialized—and as it became a center for the slaughtering of pigs—the air above the city became hazy and polluted, making stargazing nearly impossible. So, the observatory moved to the Mount Lookout location, where the air was clearer.
John said that both telescopes mounted in the buildings still functioned, but that the observatory today served more as an educational museum of astronomy than as a center of astronomical research. Designed to re-create the conditions of an early twentieth-century observatory, the equipment still needs to be operated manually with pulleys, wheels, and gears.
While all that information was helpful, we still waited to hear the ghost story we knew was coming. But John was still being cagey. “Here’s what I’d like to do,” he said. “Why don’t you all check out the buildings, do what you do, and then meet up back here. Then, I’ll tell you what’s going on.”
DaShane, Robert and Lori Demmon, Crystal Ayers, and I explored the buildings, while John and Mary waited for us in a lecture room. We were not prepared to do an in-depth investigation, but we did have some equipment, mostly cameras and electromagnetic frequency (EMF) meters, to help us collect data. Working in two groups, we detected a slight and unexplainable rise in EMF on the stairs leading to the telescope room in the main building, but little else that indicated any paranormal activity.
But when we returned to the lecture room, the story that John Ventre related to us gave us hope that there might indeed be “something” in the observatory. John asked us what we had found, and we said nothing other than the EMF readings on the stairs. He smiled at that and said that that was where his story took place.
“After a group of visitors had come down from the dome, one woman was shaking. She told me that she was sensitive to spirits and that there was something going on here.
