I’ve lived in Chester Township for thirteen years now. Things have happened to me in that time that I can’t explain — and other folks seem mostly unable to them explain as well. Half of my childhood was spent in this place, and it was sometimes a harrowing experience. Small towns somehow naturally seem to attract strange stories about covert satanic cults, but Chester seems to have attracted a whole lot more. That harrowing feeling — that mixture of fear of and fascination with the inexplicable — is what has prompted me to stay in the area. I could be here for thirteen years more and I wouldn’t even come close to exhausting the catalogue of the bizarre.
Chester Township is in the northwest corner of Geauga County, about twenty miles due east of Cleveland. Practically the entire township is incorporated in the town of Chesterland — an average rural town with a post office, a library, and a gazebo situated at the corner of Chillicothe and Mayfield Roads. In the years that I’ve lived in the area, Chesterland has grown considerably and has made some feints towards serious commercialization, but the locals continue to resist the encroachment of the suburbs. Practically every local candidate runs on the same platform — no streetlights, no city water, and no rezoning.
North of Chester in Lake County is Kirtland. Slightly more civilized than our little town, Kirtland is also even more of a nexus of supernatural activity, with stories dating back to the nineteenth century when the Mormons moved to the area. South of Chester is Russell Township, much of which is also frequently referred to as Novelty. Novelty is a rather less populated area than Chesterland and is home to numerous horse and tree farms. Chillicothe Road runs along a north-south axis through the three municipalities — the tie that binds, so to speak.
In 1996, I began documenting reports of strange phenomena in the general Chester area — both those that I saw myself and that were related to me by others. Originally I kept that journal in a strictly chronological fashion, but I have since reordered and cross-referenced it so that all reports relevant to a particular place or event can be found together. An extensively edited abstract of the reordered version is what is posted here.
Bear in mind that I have personal knowledge of many of these events (sometimes too personal) and that many of the others were given to me as firsthand accounts. I have tried to keep the amount of legend or speculation to a minimum, and have only included such “schoolyard stories” where they add some useful or interesting color. You might doubt the veracity of my claims no matter how strenuously I defend them, so I will only say once (here, that is) that I have not knowingly embellished upon anything presented here. If you’re going to be a skeptic, you won’t get anything out of this. If you are open to events that fall somewhere beyond the pale of ordinary experience, then you may learn something new or you may find some old suspicion of yours confirmed. At the very least, you might find yourself entertained.
The places I am about to describe are real places — you can go and visit them yourself if you’re in the area and interested. Likewise, all of the events are real events, and many are not dissimilar from other such events that have been reported all around the country. It’s true that there seem to be an inexplicable profusion of “public domain” hauntings (as opposed to those that are connected to private residences or persons) in the Chester Township area. I’ve never encountered anybody who could give me a reasonable explanation for why this might be. It’s just something that we take as a fact of life.
I thought I’d start out with a couple of those legends that I promised not to talk about. We can dispatch of them easily enough and move on to more interesting topics. I called Kirtland a “nexus” of the supernatural earlier, and it’s certainly true that the place has far more legends to its credit (largely unfounded) than Chesterland does. One of those rumors maintains that an old church up on Booth Road was once used for satanic purposes. The supposed proof? The church has an exterior design that prominently incorporates an inverted cross motif. What the legends fail to take into account is that such designs are fairly common among Gothic revival churches. I’ve been up to the church (July 10, 1998) and I am willing to categorically state that there is nothing there over which to get one’s trousers in a twist.
The “melonheads” that have been reported in the area for decades are somewhat less easily dismissed. (I have also seen the referent given as two words — that is, “melon heads” — but the signifier remains the same in both cases. Rather, I suppose I should say that that the ostensible signifier is the same, since we are here in part to test the notion that legends are self-verifying.) They are described most frequently as people of short stature with enormous crania that roam the woods and fields of Kirtland at night. Most commonly seen off Wisner Road near the Holden Arboretum, legends usually claim that they are unreasonably violent.
All claims of overt violence can probably be attributed to overactive imaginations. In all the years that I’ve been following paranormal events, I have never been the victim of any sort of physical attack. It is true that I have sometimes felt as though I was in great danger — but any injuries I have sustained (slight as they have been) were all the result of my own stupidity. More convincingly, perhaps, it seems unlikely to me that a police force as meticulous as that which so ably serves Kirtland would permit any protracted campaign of harassment and mauling to continue unimpeded for years at one of their most popular attractions.
Adherents of the melonheads mythos have yet to come to a consensus concerning the origins of the fellows. Various factions are found to claim that they may be patients with shaved heads from a nearby (and presumably covert) asylum, persons suffering from encephalitis, the results of grisly experiments of unclear purpose, or children otherwise deformed by congenital or mutative defects. The legend has survived for decades now, so naturally some suggest that the current melonheads are the offspring of the originals. Although they continue to be reported sporadically in the area, I have never encountered one (or evidence thereof) myself. I’m willing to believe that similar people may have once been known in Kirtland, but that they have all long since gone — leaving behind only a long-embellished story. The full legend has quite a few recurring “facts” that may indicate it has a kernel of truth somewhere, but these are amply documented elsewhere and I won’t bother to duplicate what is already widely available. I have, however, visited some of the specifically mentioned places around the Holden Arboretum, first in October of 1997 and again in January of 1999. I saw nothing.
Now abandoned and vacant for almost two decades, the old public school building on Chillicothe Road just north of the Mayfield intersection is another legendary hotspot of weirdness. Anybody who has learned to drive in Chester Township knows that the driving school keeps cones for maneuverability practice in the empty parking lot. If you’ve ever been maneuvering around dusk, you also know that Chester School is full of bats that flock out of the top story when the sun sets (which is pretty creepy in itself). But if you’ve gone to school in the township, then you’ve also grown up on stories of the satanic cults that hold black masses and sacrifices at the old school.
It actually took me quite a long time to build up the necessary courage to go investigating much around Chester School — testament, I think, to how unshakably the stories were hardwired into my brain. More than that, the building seems to give me extraordinarily bad “vibes” at certain times — an experience that my mother independently verified for me once when I was sixteen and doing maneuverability tests as night fell. Some ghost hunters seem to put an inordinate amount of faith in the their own “vibes” or those of others, often listing them as evidence of a supernatural presence. I have no such pretensions — but that doesn’t change the fact that I often feel uncomfortable and apprehensive near Chester School and tend to be easily frightened around there.
I started investigating the site in July of 1999. Through the fall and winter, I intermittently parked nearby at night and watched for any activity around the school, never venturing any closer than nearby parking lots. I was looking for human visitors, presumably satanic cultists. Beyond bats — and once a pack of feral dogs — I never really saw anything, and suspicions slowly grew within me that humans certainly weren’t using the place for anything. On March 8, 2000, I finally tried to enter the school for the first time. It was night and so I had some difficulty finding a way in. I spooked myself badly pretty quickly and decided to come back the next day to see what I could discover.
On March 9, 2000, I did indeed find a way into the school. It’s empty, dusty, and cold. There is water damage in many of the ceiling panels and some of the interior doors are strangely missing. (I imagine they were removed and used someplace else.) I have since been through almost the whole first two floors, and there is very little furniture and no carpeting in any of the rooms. The lockers and blackboards have been largely removed, but a few of each still remain inside.
There is a lot of trash and junk littered around the rooms closest to the easy ingresses — mostly beer bottles and cigarette butts. There’s also quite a bit of graffiti throughout the building, some of it apparently satanic in nature. It’s all crudely done — just spray painted pentagrams, slogans, and other symbols. (Most humorous are a series of designs that seem to duplicate the decidedly inauthentic logo from the then-popular film Blair Witch Project.) It is my opinion that the graffiti was added by pranksters who had heard the rumors about the school, rather than by any actual devil-worshippers themselves. I found no objects that appeared to be satanic or ritualistic to me, and no evidence that would point to large groups of people congregating in the place. My own observations lead me to believe that the Chester School is not home to any active coven or cult. It seems that the Satanist population in Chester and Kirtland has been — like that of most small towns — greatly exaggerated.
However, on May 19, 2000, I did take the opportunity to drill a few holes in some of the heavy boards that cover the windows of the school. Most of my visits inside the school had taken place during the daytime, and the few night trips I had made had been very cursory. I wanted to see if anything really was going on at night. The holes that I drilled, though small, did allow me to observe some sort of radiating light source moving around inside the school on the nights of May 25 and 26. I can’t say whether it was human or ghostly in nature and I found myself strangely unwilling to investigate at the time as my usual “vibes” were significantly magnified the instant I first saw that light source. The lights stopped appearing on May 27 and they have not repeated themselves as far as I know. On a later investigation inside the school I found that someone had filled up the holes I had made, but it was impossible to tell how soon patch was made. Whether the lights are still in the school — and what exactly caused them — is something for which I have not yet found an answer.
Just east of Chesterland on the north side of Mayfield Road there is a power station. It sits more or less between a driving range and a bookbinding plant, and a little further down the road there is a small cemetery. (The “cemetery” is actually just a very old cluster of about two dozen graves.) Power lines from all around the township converge on the station, but its main path of pylons runs along a north-south axis. Years ago, my older brother pointed out to me that when you approach the power station from the west, a row of three coils high on the plant momentarily appear to read “666” — an accidental but nonetheless spooky coincidence of engineering.
On more than one occasion I have seen those coils glowing with a strange blue or green light as a thunderstorm approached. Though this is almost certainly a natural phenomenon — probably just a result of static electricity in the air interacting with the exposed metal structure — it did cause me to spend a few nights examining the location more specifically. Several times I saw unexplained and apparently disembodied lights briefly floating inside the structure. Once (June 17, 2001) I happened to see something that appeared to be ball lightning descend among the power lines and sink into the earth between two of the metal towers. All told, that particular sighting lasted for about three minutes.
Again, most of what I’ve seen here may not be ghost-related at all, but may rather be common at power plants. Unwilling to electrocute myself in the pursuit of knowledge, I haven’t been able to get a really close or clear look at those lights. However, they seem to largely agree with what I’ve read about St. Elmo’s Fire, ball lightning, and other natural (but difficult to explain) occurrences.
To the west of Chesterland, around the intersection of Caves Road and Mayfield Road, there used to be a small community known as Scotland. Although it is no longer distinguishable from the sprawl of Chesterland, I have seen some recent (and pedantic) maps that continue to list it separately. Of course, these are the same maps that also pinpoint a location for Fullerton — which, as far as I can tell, is comprised entirely of a sign that says “Fullerton” and a burnt-out house. Scotland today is preserved in a few historic buildings, including a one-room schoolhouse, that very few people even notice.
However, what put Scotland on the map (so to speak) was a small train station, now long since dismantled, on one of the lines that ran through northeast Ohio earlier in the century. I freely admit to knowing very little about the station myself, excepting that I recall once seeing a photograph of it. In fact, this particular story doesn’t involve me at all, but rather an acquaintance of mine who described an encounter with a “ghost train” to me. I asked her to write it out so that I could quote more accurately.
She begins the story by explaining that she was driving north on Caves Road one night, expecting to make a right hand turn on to Mayfield. She continues:
As I pulled up to the stop sign on Caves, I looked left and right to make sure the road was clear before I turned onto Mayfield. The road appeared to be clear, so I took my foot off the brake and accelerated. As I did so, I happened to catch some movement in my rearview mirror. A bright light was racing across the road behind me — moving perpendicular to my car. All at once my car began to rock violently and I slammed on the brakes once more, half way around the turn onto Mayfield. I couldn’t make out distinctly what the light was connected to, but it took about thirty seconds to pass by and my car continued to rock the entire time. I didn’t actually see a train, but whatever it was behaved exactly like one.
I haven’t heard of anyone else having a similar experience at that place, but I hardly have any right to call her a liar. The path that she describes for the train would take it first through the parking lot of a service station (always full of cars), across the road, and then into an orchard on the other side. It’s unlikely that she could have mistaken another vehicle for the train, as it would have needed to drive through several solid objects to move along that path. She also claimed to have received two nasty bruises from the violently rocking car, but they had long since healed by the time I met her.
Update… Since posting this particular story online, I’ve received some further information from a helpful reader. According to my correspondent, the tracks for the rail line that ran to Scotland actually lay rather north of Mayfield Road (although the station was indeed near the Caves Road intersection). In other words, my acquaintance reported seeing a ghost train traverse a path that no physical train has ever followed. My own research — which I suppose I ought to have done in the first place — seems to confirm these new claims. My correspondent also suggested that no real train would produce the sort of rocking described by my acquaintance, but I see no reason to continue beating a dead horse (unless it’s after you, I suppose).
I’ll admit now that I never really felt very good about this story — you might say that it gave me bad “vibes.” No one else I knew had ever encountered anything similar to this (and I certainly hadn’t) and the event didn’t seem to “jive” with what I had already observed as far as authentic Chester hauntings go. Still, I wanted to grant my acquaintance the same benefit of the doubt that I am looking for from my readers. I still am fully satisfied that something may have happened on Caves Road that night, but I am not at all convinced that it involved a ghost train.
When I was a kid, I used to bike to Old River Cemetery in Novelty, just south of Chesterland on the corner of Chillicothe and Fairmount. The cemetery is split in two sections — the new half on the north side of Fairmount and the old half on the south side. Besides numerous graves and tombstones (some holding persons born in the very end of the eighteenth century), that part of the cemetery also has an historic chapel, a slightly less historic outhouse, and the imposing Nutt mausoleum.
I admit that when I was a kid, it was the mausoleum that frightened me most about the place. I’m sure that Nutt was probably a terribly nice person in his day, but the small house built for his remains was designed in a disturbingly austere and minimalist manner. The only word anywhere on the monument is “NUTT” written in all capital letters above the entrance, and there certainly aren’t any ornaments anywhere. Even worse, the mausoleum appears to have windows on the door — a perception that discomposed me considerably. When I finally once worked up the courage to peep into those windows, I soon saw that they looked on nothing but another sheer wall inside.
I was convinced for a long time that Nutt’s ghostly presence remained somehow at the cemetery, but now I believe that I was mistaken. Strange things used to happen in that cemetery when I was young and alone — whispers, movements in the corners of my eyes, and those terrifying cold spots that ghost hunters are so convinced betray the presence of spirits. They scared me at the time (and, in fact, inspired me to begin keeping my first ghost journal a few years later) but I was mostly able to chalk them up to ambient noise from the nearby river, mischievous squirrels, cool breezes, and so on. It was a sort of personal game that I pretended the place was haunted by Nutt.
Although I kept track of all sorts of minor haunting signs in the cemetery through 1996, it wasn’t until April 3, 1997, that I saw anything that truly convinced me that I was dealing with a spirit — and that it wasn’t Nutt. The oldest legible grave in the cemetery belongs to one Stephen Thayer, who was born in 1796 and died of unstated causes midway through the nineteenth century. Like most of the other graves from that time period the marker is a simple white stone, rather tall and thin. At the end of March 1997, I began to suspect that somebody had turned Stephen Thayer’s tombstone around so that the writing faced away from the road rather than towards it. Unsure of whether I may have just imagined it, I made a note of its orientation in my journal. On April 3, I made another note that it was quite distinctly facing in a different direction.
Stephen Thayer’s tombstone continued flipping for almost a month. In all, it reversed itself eight or nine times (depending upon whether you choose to count the first time that I didn’t properly record). Unlike most of the other events I’ve described here, this was a verifiable phenomenon that I was able to have confirmed by other witnesses. The local newspaper even did a story on the mystery, although they simply talked about the grave being defaced, which is not entirely accurate.
Most of the “flippings” were simple reversals that rotated the orientation of the tombstone by 180 degrees. The engraving on the tombstone would be facing towards the road one day, and then away from it on the next. One of the last occurrences involved the entire stone inverting — so that the writing was upside-down — which frightened me enough that I kept away from the cemetery a few days. None of the soil was ever noticeably disturbed, even though it was very muddy at that time of the year. No one was ever seen moving the tombstone and no evidence (footprints, muddy handprints, et cetera) was ever discovered to indicate that somebody had.
After about a month, that activity stopped and as far as I know the stone has remained undisturbed since then. I am of the opinion that objects inside the chapel may also have been moving at this time, but I can’t verify that. The door is kept locked and so I have never been able to go inside and take a comprehensive inventory of the place. It’s possible that the chapel may still see intermittent human use, which may account for some of the shifting objects, but that certainly wouldn’t explain the rotating tombstone. This being the Chester area (technically Russell Township, but close enough), it was immediately suggested that the rotations might have been part of some sort of satanic ritual. Although I commend the impulse that drives one to immediately accuse one’s neighbors of worshipping the Dark One, there doesn’t seem to be anything but speculation to back up this claim. Moreover, nobody has been able to describe for me exactly what this tombstone-rotating ceremony might hope to accomplish.
I know what happened at Old River Cemetery in 1997, and so do quite a few other people. What I don’t know — and what they don’t know — is why or how it happened. The simplest explanation I can offer is that it involved no human agency whatsoever but was instead an advanced physical haunting connected to a place that already had been suspected of housing a spirit presence. Incidentally, although the tombstones have all remained in their proper holes since 1997, the other small phenomena that I described earlier do continue to occur in the cemetery. It’s probably only a matter of time before the spirit manifests itself outright again.
This little story is based on something that was told to me by an old friend of mine who lives near the corner of Chillicothe and Cedar. One night in November of 2000, he heard an ungodly screaming sound outside past the edge of his wooded lot. Others in his family heard the same thing, and they all described it as a wordless and high-pitched cry. Apparently it sounded remarkably human, except near the end of each call when it tended to strangle into something more animalistic. It was late at night — a little after midnight, I think — and they all agree that it had a very chilling effect on them. After five or six minutes (possibly less), the screams stopped and didn’t begin again. At one point, the family had been on the verge of calling the police, but eventually they convinced themselves it was only an animal.
Eerie as the description was, it turns out they were correct — it was an animal. One of their neighbors a few houses down was keeping a few llamas penned in his yard (for wool, I imagine). Wild dogs had somehow gotten into the enclosure and had proceeded to tear both llamas to pieces — eliciting those frightened and disturbingly human screams. Incidentally, it seems likely that those wild dogs were the same pack that I observed up near Chester School the year before. They were also responsible for mauling a couple of housecats on my street (and probably every other street in the township) and menacing a few children. After the llama attack, the police promised to begin culling the wild dogs in the area. I haven’t heard anything about how successful they’ve been yet.
My ghost journal, I admit, is hardly yet tapped, but this is the end of the website for the time being. I have quite a few more of the juicier stories to tell — those involving the road children, Lady Cemetery, Jeffrey Dahmer, and a sprinkling of Mormon mysticism — but I promise to get to those shortly. You’ll just have to check back from time to time to see whether I’m lying or not. In the meantime, I leave you with a fond, “Mary has no blood.”
If you have comments, refutations, beratings, or additional stories, please email the webmaster direct at [email protected]