Ghosthunting Ohio: On the Road Again. John B. Kachuba

      THE BEAUTIFUL TWO-STORY GREEK REVIVAL HOME known as the Ross Gowdy House was built in New Richmond in 1853, during the town’s heyday as a steamboat-manufacturing center. Hard by the Ohio River, the brick house has been ravaged by floods over the years but has survived them all. The house is named after its first two owners, David Ross, a mayor of New Richmond, and Thomas Gowdy, who bought the house in 1865 from Roseanna Ross, one of David Ross’s relatives. Two other New Richmond mayors have also lived in the house. Now owned by the nonprofit Historic New Richmond, Inc., the house is open to the public as a museum and local historical center. And, of course, it is open to ghosts.

      I didn’t know anything about the Ross Gowdy House until I met Melinda Smith, founder of Southern Ohio Apparition Researchers (S.O.A.R.), at the Queen City Paracon in Cincinnati, where I was a speaker. I stopped by the S.O.A.R. information booth, where Melinda’s knowledge and expertise in ghosthunting so impressed me that when she later invited me to join S.O.A.R. on an investigation of the Ross Gowdy House, I readily accepted.

      I arrived early for the investigation at the house. It was a hot, dry July evening, and what Melinda and her team had not planned for was the band concert in the park right next door to the house. Now I like John Philip Sousa as much as the next guy, but tuba and sousaphone melodies are not conducive to a successful ghost hunt; we would have to delay until the concert was finished.

      With time on my hands, I was able to walk around the front yard, admiring the Prussian blue columns of the front porch and the trim of the six-over-six windows set neatly in the brick walls. Inside the house, Melinda and some of her team members were setting up their gear. After a few minutes I went inside to join them and was pleasantly surprised to see Cheryl Crowell, an old friend with whom I had lost touch and had not seen for nearly ten years, who was now affiliated with the nonprofit that owned the house and would be on the investigation with us.

      Also inside the house was Greg Roberts, a local historian who knew everything there was to know about the house and the city of New Richmond. Greg gave me a chronology of all the past owners of the house—always good to have when trying to uncover the identity of the resident ghosts—but there didn’t seem to be any murders, suicides, or other acts of violence and mayhem that often result in hauntings. With the exception of the periodic floods, life at Ross Gowdy House appeared to be peaceful and serene. But peaceful and serene could be good hunting grounds for ghosts, too: there is a theory that ghosts haunt the places where they were happiest in life. The Ross Gowdy House could be such a place for those ghosts. I wondered if the house, so close to the river, could have been a stop on the Underground Railroad, but Greg didn’t think there was any evidence to support that.

      “So, what exactly goes on here?” I asked. We were standing in the front parlor off the entrance hall. Melinda was adjusting a monitor she was setting up on a table in the corner. Behind the table stood a beautiful, ornately carved organ.

      Melinda turned to me. “For one thing, there was a sighting of a woman dressed in white in the upstairs bedroom window,” she said.

      “In a 1937 flood, there was a trapped woman who was rescued from that window,” Greg said. “She was old, though, and died from a heart attack.”

      “And that’s the ghost?” I asked.

      “It could be,” said Melinda. “We don’t know for sure.”

      Cheryl said that she felt shivers and had the strange sense of another presence in the house when she was working there alone. She said that the alarms in the house go off without anyone being there and that lights blink on and off.

      Other people have experienced cold spots in the house and have heard disembodied footsteps and loud knocking on the walls. A former occupant renting the upstairs rooms felt someone in a dress brush by her and saw the curtain at the windows moving. Someone saw an apparition of a woman in a white dress standing in the doorway of an upstairs bedroom whispering, I promise.

      When the band’s last “oompah” finally sounded and the crowd dispersed, we set about getting the investigation under way—it was almost 10:30. Melinda’s team had placed some cameras in different parts of the house, both upstairs and down, so the monitor on the table now showed four areas inside the house simultaneously. While those cameras filmed throughout the night the rest of us would work in small groups in the various rooms with handheld equipment.

      The house was not very large; a small parlor off the hall on the ground floor and a larger dining room with an elegant fireplace mantel at the end of the hall. A tiny kitchen was to one side of the dining room, and a little bedroom with a four-poster bed occupying most of the space was located at the rear of the house. The curved staircase led to two empty rooms on the second floor, one of them taking up the entire front of the house.

      Because a ghost had been seen by the window in the front room upstairs, a S.O.A.R. team member spread a plastic garbage bag on the floor beneath the window and sprinkled it with white powder in hopes of recording spectral footprints if a ghost decided to climb out—or in, I suppose—through the window.

      Several of us gathered in the upstairs front room. Melinda placed a tray on the floor and upon that placed an antique musical shaker, an old baby shoe, a compass, an antique desk-bell, and a lighted candle. She also sat an EMF meter and a K2 meter on the tray. Throughout the night Melinda, or any of us, would ask the ghosts to make use of the various objects on the tray; ring the bell, blow out the candle, rattle the shaker. The EMF and K2 meters would hopefully capture their responses. I liked the idea of giving the ghosts something to play with, something to do; the afterlife appears to be a boring place.