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The Old Tavern

UNIONVILLE

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE ELECTRIC UTILITY LINES RUNNING TO IT and the paved road out front, The Old Tavern looks unchanged from when it first opened in 1798 as the Webster House inn. The white, saltbox-style building stands sentinel at an intersection in Unionville, diagonally across from an old cemetery. The four pillars, added in 1820, give the tavern something of a Mount Vernon look. It is said that they were added for the benefit of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been greatly impressed by George Washington’s home in Virginia and was passing through the area on his way to Boston for the laying of the Bunker Hill monument. If Lafayette; or Spencer Shears, the original proprietor of the tavern; or the nineteenth-century settlers heading west in their Conestoga wagons; or the soldiers of 1812 marching to the front; or the drovers herding cattle; or the weary stagecoach passengers traveling the Cleveland-Buffalo road; or the circuit court riders; or the runaway slaves fleeing to freedom via the Underground Railroad; could all return again to the inn, they would feel right at home.

Maybe that’s why some of them have returned. Or, perhaps, never left.

Crystal Ketron waited on us the day my wife and I stopped by The Old Tavern. We were acting on a tip we had gotten from one of the librarians in Ashtabula, who told us about the Canterbury Feast Murder Mystery event that the inn held regularly. The librarian said she had also heard stories about the inn being haunted, although she could offer no specific details. That was good enough for us. As Crystal filled our water glasses I asked her right away to tell me about the ghosts. I had found that such a direct approach would either earn me a look that clearly implies I’m crazy, or else the person would open up immediately, wondering how in the world I knew about them. Was I psychic?

I hit pay dirt with Crystal.

Mary and I were seated at a table in a large solarium-like room that was a later addition to the inn. We were overlooking the garden, at this time of year just beginning to show signs of life. It was late on a weekday afternoon. The only other customers in the inn were a group of blue-haired local ladies playing bridge beside a crackling fire in the next room, so Crystal had time to talk with us.

Even though she had only been working at The Old Tavern for less than a year, she had seen and heard a lot.

“Most of what I have experienced has been in the ballroom upstairs,” Crystal said. “A couple died in a fire up there many years ago, and now there’s an area, sort of an oval, in the middle of the floor where crazy things happen. There was a chair standing there all by itself when, for no reason, it just fell over. Things will always fall over or get knocked around in that spot.”

I could imagine the ghostly ballroom dancers knocking into the furniture that wouldn’t have been there in their own time and wondering what they had hit.

Crystal also said that she saw wine glasses slide off a hanging rack in the ballroom and crash to the floor, without anyone being around.

“And there’s the Crying Lady in the Webster Room, too,” she said, warming up to her role as tavern historian. “She was having an affair and when her husband found out, he came here and shot her and her lover dead.”

I thought about those ghosts while working through my salad and the corn fritter—originally called a dodger—appetizer served in maple syrup, a specialty of the house, and wondered what else might still be there. After all, The Old Tavern is the oldest tavern in continuous operation in Ohio. Its rooms would have witnessed much of the sorrows and misfortunes of the human condition over the centuries. No doubt those memories still lingered there, ingrained in its very walls.

When Crystal came back from the kitchen with our entrees she told us about some of the strange sounds she and others have heard in the tavern.

“In the basement you can sometimes hear a harmonica playing. I don’t know anyone who has seen him, but some people get a strong feeling that there is a little boy down there. The story goes that the boy was abandoned at the tavern and the owner let him stay there, doing odd jobs in return for food and shelter.

“Once, at Christmas, another waitress and myself heard Christmas carols playing and we didn’t know where they were coming from. Even with our own sound system turned way up we still heard them,” she said.

It’s not only human spirits who wander the tavern. Crystal told us about Diane, another waitress, and her brush with a ghost cat. Diane was working in the kitchen when she felt something brush against her feet. She looked down and was startled to see her shoelaces untying themselves. It wasn’t that they had already become untied; they were actually unknotting themselves before her very eyes. Another time, in order to test her ghost cat hypothesis, Diane crumpled a piece of paper into a ball—a great cat toy—tossed it casually on the floor, and left the room. When she returned awhile later she couldn’t find the paper ball anywhere. She finally found it on a counter in another room, wet and slobbered.

A ghost cat? Apparently so. Ghost literature is full of stories about animal spirits, especially cats. That makes sense; with nine lives a cat can make a hell of a lot of ghosts.

After lunch, Crystal said we could explore the tavern. From the porch dining room we stepped into a smaller dining room at the back of the inn. It was gloomy in there since it was not being used and most of the lights were off. The walls were painted light blue and were also papered in an old-fashioned quilt design. The ceiling was so low in this old part of the tavern that I could reach up and touch it without fully extending my arm—and I am not a particularly tall man.

A large mirror in an ornate gilt frame hung above the mantel over the fireplace. A colorful Easter basket filled with pastel-colored eggs sat on the mantelpiece. I approached the mirror, which reflected little besides the basket directly before it because of the darkness of the room. Some psychic researchers believe that mirrors, in some unexplainable manner, can act as conduits, called portals, between the spirit world and this world. Only a few days before, when Mary and I had stayed at Rider’s Inn in Painesville, the owner had told us how a huge crack had suddenly opened up in the wall of a room when a mirror owned by a long-dead mistress of the inn was discovered and hung on the wall. As I thought about that, I recalled the old tradition of covering mirrors with black cloth when someone in the house passed away. What inspired that tradition? Was the cloth supposed to block the portal, thereby preventing the spirit from returning to the living?

Crystal had told us that the mirror in that room was a portal for the ghosts roaming the tavern. I stood before it in the gloom, peering into its depths, trying to see beyond something I could not see. I had the weird sensation that I was standing in a flood of psychic energy. Were ghosts even now passing back and forth through this portal, coming and going like the old-time stagecoach passengers who streamed through the tavern so long ago? I took a picture of the mirror with no expectations of capturing anything. Later, when I downloaded the image into my computer, I noticed some whitish streaks in the mirror that I could not explain, but to be objective, flash photography on a reflective surface in low light could be the cause of the “ghost” in the image. Then again, maybe not.

Mary and I went upstairs to the second floor. We had the upstairs floor entirely to ourselves, since none of the rooms were in use and the tavern no longer offers overnight accommodations. The stairs were carpeted in an autumnal leaf motif. Gold patterned wallpaper adorned the walls, and a reproduction glass gas lamp hung suspended above the stairs.

The first room we entered was the ballroom. It was a large wood-floored room with a row of windows that looked out over the street. The first thing I noticed as I walked around in the room was that the old floor was uneven and warped. I felt like I was onboard a boat in a rolling sea. The boards creaked as I stepped on them. Even though the floor was uneven, however, I didn’t think that would explain a chair falling over by itself. The room was decorated in a medieval theme for the Canterbury Murder Mystery, with colorful flags and pennants hanging from the ceiling. Two wooden thrones sat on a dais at one end of the room. The festive décor effectively masked any sense of the tragic fire Crystal had spoken about.

Across the hall from the ballroom was the Webster Room. This was a small dining room designed for private occasions with a half-dozen or so tables. The room, which was papered in a cream-colored pattern and was much lighter than the ballroom, originally served as sleeping quarters for road-weary guests. A woman’s straw sunhat, bedecked with yellow flowers and blue ribbons, hung upon the door to the room and gave it a false sense of gaiety, since it was in the Webster Room that the enraged husband shot his wife and her lover. The mournful sobs of the Crying Lady can still be heard in the Webster Room, although the day that I visited she was quiet.

While Mary continued to poke around on the second floor, I discovered a staircase to another floor above. Unlike the stairs to the second floor, these stairs were narrow, the walls plain and un-adorned of any decoration. A simple iron handrail ran up one side, but what attracted me most was the comical ghost decal stuck over the light switch at the foot of the stairs. If ever there was a sign from the spirit world for me, that was it. I went upstairs.

From the first creaking step, I began to experience an odd, disturbing feeling, a sort of anxiety. I felt heavy, leaden, and by the time I reached the top of the stairs, it felt as though I was pushing through an invisible wall thick as molasses.

None of the floors up here were carpeted, and my footsteps echoed on the wide planks of the old wood floors. There was a room to my right, which I entered. I first came into a tiny anteroom. A large old chest lay on the floor. In a long open closet off that room hung vintage clothes. I crossed the anteroom and came into a corner room with an eclectic mix of furniture that seemed both old and modern at the same time. In this room was a battered old cupboard with some oil lamps standing on it; a sickly green plush easy chair, circa 1970; an oval braided rug; a side table with porcelain washbasin and pitcher; and an antique metal bathtub, a narrow, coffin-like contraption.

A half-wall separated the room from another just beyond it that contained a single bed in a wooden cannonball bed frame with a modern mattress upon it, no sheets; an old dresser; and a few strange odds and ends—a doll, a small oil painting of a woman, a pair of candlesticks.

I stood there between the two rooms, trying to make sense of the feelings washing over me. Despite the fact that light came in through the windows and the walls were painted a very pale green, it still seemed oppressively dark and depressing in there. My attention was focused mostly on that first room, and I had the distinct impression that someone was there, or had been there recently. Something about the coverlet thrown casually over the arm of the green chair made me think that it had just been in use, but by whom? And why? Those rooms were not exactly comfortable and I could see no reason why anyone would want to spend any time in them. As strange as the chair made me feel, there was something worse about the tub. Was it simply that it resembled a coffin, or was there something more?

The room was weighing down on me. I wanted to see if Mary felt the same thing, so I called downstairs for her to come up. She came up and entered the room. The first thing she noticed was the bathtub.

“What’s that?” she said. “It looks like a coffin.”

“A bathtub.”

“I couldn’t imagine taking a bath in that,” Mary said, “it creeps me out just looking at it.”

Bingo.

Mary is a scientist, one not easily impressed by “feelings” or “sensations,” one not easily “creeped out,” but there was something at work in that room that even got to her. We didn’t stay there much longer.

As we left the room and stood at the top of the stairs, Mary opened a door across from the room we had just left. It revealed an unfinished attic, piled high with assorted junk. We went back down to the first floor.

There is a gift shop on the first floor and I bought a book that talked about the history of The Old Tavern. In the book is a photograph of a blond-haired little boy sitting on a bench in the basement. Along the wall to his left are rows of canned and preserved foods arranged on shelves. He sits in the corner of the basement, the stones of the foundation wall behind him. He is wearing something like a jumper and his skinny little arms and legs are bare. His hands are folded in his lap and he looks directly at the camera with a calm and angelic face. The caption below the photo says the boy is unidentified. I wondered if he played the harmonica.

I also read in the book that the runaway slaves who stopped at The Old Tavern on their long journey to freedom in Canada not only used the tunnels carved out of the basement, but also a loft space accessed by “secret stairs.” Could the escaped slaves have used those upstairs rooms that seemed so foreboding to me? Are their spirits still there today?