long after Enos’s body was committed to the ground came the frightening stories of lovers being terrorized at the bridge by some unseen force. Couples reported an invisible force attacking their buggies, shaking them violently, and spooking the horses. Some couples said that the malevolent force ripped open the tops of the buggies, revealing the demonic face of Enos Kay peering down at them.
Encounters with the ghost of Enos Kay are reported to this day. Apparently, he will not bother lone motorists passing over the bridge, or a parked couple who are arguing instead of kissing. True to his oath, the ghost claws and scratches at the parked cars of those couples who are expressing their ardor. Some of these “couples interruptus” recall seeing the ghost’s devilish grin through the steamed car windows. The moral here might be, Get a room!
Spotlight On: The Ghost of Englewood Dam
While I was doing some research at the Dayton Metro Library, I met Nancy Horlacher, the Local History Specialist. She was interested in my project and e-mailed me a story titled “The Phantom Driver on Englewood Dam,” from the manuscript entitled Tales and Sketches of the Great Miami Valley, by Earl Leon Heck, written in 1962.
Mr. Heck reports on a strange and disturbing vision that terrorized truckers in the winter of 1952 as they drove their rigs on the road that crosses the Englewood Dam. The road was narrow, flanked by wooden guardrails on either side, with a precipitous 125-foot drop-off should a driver become careless or sleepy.
Heck writes that on a stormy, icy night that winter a seasoned trucker named Roy Fitzwater stopped at a small inn located near the dam, a favorite stop for drivers. He was shaken and visibly distraught but refused to answer any of his fellow truckers’ questions, stating only that he had witnessed something “quite horrible.” Ohio Highway Patrol Officer Harrell was also eating at the inn and knew Fitzwater. He asked the trucker what was wrong but Fitzwater simply shook his head and declined to say anything more, eventually leaving the inn without revealing anything.
Over the next few weeks, three more truck drivers stopped at the inn as frightened as Fitzwater, but none of them would talk about what they had experienced. Officer Harrell happened to be at the inn each time and saw these seasoned, professional masters of the road reduced to nervous, scared children. About a month later, Roy Fitzwater stopped at the inn and Officer Harrell was once again present—you have to believe that Harrell needed a lot of coffee to keep himself going since he was so often at the inn. This time the patrolman convinced Fitzwater to tell his story.
Fitzwater said that while he was crossing the dam on a dark, stormy night, car headlights suddenly appeared in the opposite direction heading toward his truck.” It comes straight toward me, with blinding lights,” the trucker said, “just as if he intended to plunge right into me.”
Fitzwater told Harrell that he slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve out of the way, knowing that if he was not careful, he could drive his rig over the side of the dam. When the car was only about 200 feet away it turned across the truck’s path.
“The lights go out,” Fitzwater continued, “but inside the car appears a dull blue-green light of the most unearthly kind, revealing a skull and skeleton at the wheel. You can see the bones all lighted up with this peculiar, uncanny light. It is just too horrible to describe. It just about takes the life out of you.”
Harrell and other patrolmen staked out the dam and the road, but the phantom driver was never seen again after that horrific winter in 1952. Perhaps he’s driving other highways of America’s Haunted Road Trip.
CHAPTER 4
Snow Hill Country Club
NEW VIENNA
WHEN I FIRST HEARD THAT Snow Hill Country Club in New Vienna was haunted, I had visions of ghosts madly driving golf carts over the fairways and spectral golfers breaking spectral clubs over spectral knees after shanking spectral Titleists into the very real woods. As it turned out, I wasn’t that far off.
Originally built as an inn in 1820 by Charles and Catherine Harris, who had moved to Clinton County from Snow Hill, Maryland, Snow Hill quickly gained an excellent reputation and was frequented by many a weary traveler. In 1840, the inn hosted the famous Philadelphia Circus; it also served as a polling place for forty years. But, as so often happened with many of America’s old inns, modern forms of transportation, especially railroads, meant fewer and fewer customers at Snow Hill. In 1898, the inn was sold at auction and became a storage place for grain. The elegant old structure began to fall into disrepair until the early 1900s when Norma Harris, the granddaughter of Charles and Catherine, bought the inn, renovated and expanded it, and opened it in 1924 as Snow Hill Country Club.
At the invitation of Steven Powell of the Ohio Organization for Paranormal Studies (O.O.P.S.) I found myself driving through a torrential downpour one July night to join the O.O.P.S. team for an investigation at Snow Hill. The rain sluiced over my car and the country roads were narrow and hilly, all of which made driving a nightmare. At one point, I drove through the sprawling and abandoned DHL airport facility, where the ghosts of 10,000 lost jobs still lingered. At another point, I missed a turn in the deluge, ended up at a dead end, and had to reroute myself. Even my GPS was confused. Finally, I pulled into the parking lot beside the white-columned clubhouse, thinking to myself, if the trip out here was any indication of what was to come, it was going to be a wild night.
Steven gave me a quick tour of the premises, which included the original 1820 building—now completely restored with a bar, dining room, and guest rooms—and the 1920s addition of locker rooms, card rooms, and meeting rooms.
Steven told me that O.O.P.S. (I love that name!) was formed three years ago and that they conducted paranormal investigations primarily in the Wilmington area. Over the years the group had become Snow Hill’s “house band,” and they routinely conducted investigations there and also sponsored a “Dinner and a Ghost” event each October.
“So, tell me what you’ve experienced,” I said to Steven, as we stood in an empty dining area.
He pointed to the old doors of the room and said that the door latches sometimes move on their own, as if some invisible being was seeking admittance. In that same room, an antique candle maker fastened to the wall came off all by itself.
“We’ve also recorded a lot of EVPs in the building,” Steven said, referring to mysterious voices and sounds picked up on recorders but inaudible to investigators at the time they were recorded. The voices are believed to be those of spirits.
We walked into the lounge, where Steven pointed out rows of glassware on shelves behind the bar. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about them that I could see, but Steven said that one night the glasses in a back row lifted up and over the glasses in the front row. I went behind the bar to take a closer look at the shelves and I could see no way that such a thing could happen without human intervention.
As we were talking, more O.O.P.S. members drifted in and began setting up the investigation, running cables throughout the building and positioning cameras and recorders in various rooms. Steven had previous obligations and would not be staying for the investigation, but I would be working with the rest of the team: Tom, Scott, Steven’s daughter Jennifer, Chanda, and Andrea.
The O.O.P.S. team was well organized and seemed to have everything under control. Steven had already prepared a map of the building on which the team could mark the placement of the equipment … and they had a ton of electronic gear. For the most part, I just tried to stay out of their way
