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Columbian House

WATERVILLE

TIME PASSES SLOWLY IN THE LITTLE TOWN OF WATERVILLE. At Columbian House it seems to have stopped completely. The three-story clapboard building sits at the corner of River Road and Farnsworth Road, the words “Columbian House” emblazoned across the triple door façade in letters two-feet high. John Pray, Waterville’s founder, built the structure in 1828, originally to serve as a trading post. It has been a prominent local landmark since then and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The inn’s many windows gaze sleepily out onto the street. They have seen a fantastic parade of humanity over the last 175 years that reflects the transformation of the rough and tumble old Northwest Territory into modern-day Ohio. Pioneers and traders, Indians and soldiers, peddlers and drunks, gamblers and politicians. The inn has seen them all.

“Even if you forget all about the ghost stories associated with Columbian House, the place is interesting and important from an historical point of view,” Tom Parker told me when I spoke with him on the telephone to arrange a visit with him. Parker, along with his wife, Peggy, and daughter, Meredith, owns and operates the inn.

But you can’t forget about the ghosts.

A framed 1995 article from the Toledo Blade, detailing the ghostly history of Columbian House, is proudly displayed on an easel in the front parlor. And what a history it is: a vanishing guest, two murders, and at least two deaths from cholera or other illnesses since the inn was first built. Is it any wonder that at least three ghosts are said to haunt the inn?

Although Columbian House no longer offers guest rooms, it does still operate as a restaurant, so my wife and I decided to combine our ghosthunting with dinner. When we arrived at six o’clock that evening the place looked dark and closed, but the hand-forged front door latch admitted us inside. I thought I heard a bell ring somewhere inside the inn when we entered, but no one came out to meet us.

We stood in the little front parlor. It was dimly lit compared to the bright August sunshine outside, and it took a few moments before our eyes were adjusted enough to clearly see the fireplace with its dark portrait of a nineteenth-century gentleman hanging above the mantel. In one corner, against the pale blue wall, stood an antique secretary, crammed with old books about Ohio and it’s history. An impossibly tall military hat with shako, all in black, stood at attention atop the secretary. A hand-lettered sign described it as a relic of the Toledo War, an 1835 border dispute between the new state of Ohio and the neighboring Michigan Territory. Bloodshed was averted in the comic opera war because Michigan and Ohio militias wandered hopelessly lost in the swamps of Perry County, Ohio, and could not find each other; Congress ultimately settled the dispute peacefully in Ohio’s favor.

A glass-topped wooden display case before the secretary held historic items discovered over the years at the inn. There were pieces of crockery and dinnerware, clay pipes, buttons, thimbles, pins, a knife, part of an Indian moccasin, assorted iron keys, hinges, bolts, and other unidentifiable objects.

Despite the nearness of the road the quiet in the little parlor was thick as dust, broken only by the creaking and groaning of the wooden floorboards beneath our feet. I heard indistinct voices coming from somewhere and ventured into the large dining room off the parlor.

I startled Meredith Parker as she came out of the kitchen.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. “My father told me you were coming. He’ll be here a little later to talk with you.”

The restaurant was just opening for the evening. Even though Mary and I were the only customers at the time, it was obvious that Meredith was preoccupied with her culinary chores. She did have time to tell us that there were several ghosts at the inn. She had seen one of them often, a little girl wearing a long, old-fashioned white dress.

“Sometimes she’ll be in the hall, or I might see her for a moment standing in the doorway,” Meredith said. “Objects will disappear and reappear later in odd places, or will move by themselves. I once saw a clothes hanger fly across the room by itself.”

As she spoke to us, she kept herself at an odd distance. I wasn’t sure if she was simply shy or if perhaps she thought we were ghosts.

She directed us to a sideboard in the dining room and a display of photos taken of customers at the inn. A bluish-white misty shape hovered near the patrons in the photos. As I looked at them I couldn’t prove whether or not the shapes were ghosts, but they were clearly anomalies that didn’t belong in the photos. One photo showed a smiling couple posing before a fireplace. A small Jack o’ lantern sat on the mantel behind the woman just to the right of her head.

“What are we supposed to see in this photo?” Mary asked.

Meredith pointed to the lid of the pumpkin. I noticed it was slightly askew.

“Just as this photo was taken,” she said, “the lid flew off the pumpkin and landed on the woman’s shoulder. What you are seeing in this photo is the moment when the top lifted off.”

I watched Meredith’s face as she told us these brief stories. There was nothing in her expression that made me doubt her. In fact, she seemed bored by telling these stories, as if she had told them a hundred times before, and maybe she had. Maybe for her, living with the restless spirits of the dead was nothing unusual.

We still had a few minutes before Meredith was able to seat us, so we roamed through the inn, snapping photos as we went. In addition to the large dining room we now stood in, furnished with old, charmingly scarred tables and chairs, there were other, smaller dining sections adjoining the parlor along the front of the inn.

A narrow staircase, each riser worn and bowed by the footsteps of long departed visitors, led to the second floor. Each step groaned as we headed upstairs.

We came up to a narrow hall. Here, the westering sun flowed into the hall from the windows in the three bedrooms, whose doors all stood open. The sunlight was warm and comforting, but something seemed out of place. A cord strung across each doorway barred us from entering the rooms but allowed us to view the antique furniture and accessories in them.

I turned to the corner bedroom.

A skeleton sat near the doorway.

Seated in a rocker.

Wearing a top hat.

Behind him, a second skull grinned from atop the fireplace mantel.

I thought of the nineteenth-century human ghouls who prowled graveyards, digging up skeletons and fresh cadavers to sell to medical schools. I wondered if these old bones relaxing in the rocking chair had been one of their prize catches. It was strange to think that at one time they had walked, perhaps danced. Did they still dance, rattling in the hall at night?

A crib stood in the corner of the room, a muslin canopy hanging above it. Meredith had said a little girl haunted Columbian House. Was this her crib? Did she still sleep there? Was she there now, peering at us through the bars?

We heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

Tom Parker emerged upon the landing and introduced himself to us.

A Tom Skerritt look-alike, Parker was a man with many interests. He was a successful contractor who was also an avid historian. He had a particular fascination with the history of the old Northwest Territory. Proprietorship of Columbian House was not so much a business venture for him as it was an outlet for his historical interests.

We stood talking in the sunny hall and he told us some of the haunted history of the inn. He pointed to the ladies’ room only a few feet from us.

“At one time that used to be a holding cell, used by the sheriff for prisoners in transit, but mostly occupied by the local drunk, who was often locked up there overnight. He’d always complain about being sick and bang on the door to be released. People ignored him, but one time he really was sick. In the morning he was found dead in the cell.”

Over the years, former owners and guests of the inn have heard desperate pounding on the door in the middle of the night.

There were more stories.

There was the cholera victim who died while staying at the inn and was hastily buried in a coffin too short for his body, the undertaker breaking the dead man’s legs to get the body to fit inside.

There was the guest who vanished from his room shortly after the inn was first opened. Thirty years later a local farmer admitted he had murdered the man—his motivation for murder lost to history—dragged his body down the back stairs, and buried it along the Maumee River. Authorities found the remains exactly where the farmer said they would be.

Suddenly, the sunny hall no longer felt comforting. Then I realized what seemed out of place when we first came up there. The staircase ended on the second floor. Where was the third floor?

John Pray had added the third floor in 1837. It was one huge room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and was unique for its time. It was a gathering place for people from all around the area and served as a ballroom, reception hall, and political meeting place. It was also the site of a murder. A man attending one such ball was stabbed to death there, perhaps by a rival for the hand of a local lovely. The next morning a maid found the bloodied body in a cloakroom on the third floor. His murderer was never discovered.

I asked Parker about the third floor. He pointed to a solid wood door that was padlocked shut. He said the third floor was only used for storage now and wouldn’t let us up to see it. Parker had some other business to attend to, so he let us continue our explorations by ourselves. I took a few more photos of the rooms, and then we headed downstairs for dinner.

We were seated at our table in the dining room, perusing the menu and wondering what tomato pudding, a specialty of the house, tasted like, when Parker came over. I noticed that, just as his daughter had done, he stood at the next table and spoke to us from that distance. There were so many ghost stories about Co-lumbian House, Parker said, that he had set them down on paper. He handed me a copy.

One story from the 1930s relates the experiences of Charles Capron—a former owner of the inn—with noisy ghosts. For several nights he heard footsteps on the stairs and on the second floor, but nobody was ever there. One night, after locking the front doors, he asked his handyman to sleep in one of the second-floor bedrooms. Once again, in the dead of night, the ghostly footsteps were heard walking in the hall. Capron jumped out of bed and threw open his door. At the same time, the handyman, who was also awakened by the sounds, flung open his door. The two men stood blinking at each other from opposite ends of the hall while the invisible guest continued to pace the floor between them. They heard someone descending the stairs and a few moments later heard a loud crashing sound, which Capron was sure came from a large mirror that hung in one of the rooms downstairs. That was too much for the spooked men, who retreated behind their respective doors. In the morning Capron found the mirror to be intact. Nothing was broken or disturbed.

Capron was the man who initially rescued Columbian House from destruction by the wrecker’s ball. In the 1920s the inn fell into disrepair and stood derelict for a few years. During that time, the residents of Waterville wanted to tear the building down, ostensibly because it was a safety hazard, but some said the real reason was that the house was evil. Perhaps that was what induced Henry Ford to host a Halloween party there in 1927. In any case, Capron purchased the inn and began restoring it.

The Arnold family, who owned the inn from the 1940s to 1993, reported a “presence” at the foot of the stairs, a strange feeling that something was there. Some of their longtime employees reported the same sensations.

During the Parkers’ ownership, several people have heard the sound of a child crying. As Parker was stripping one of the second-floor bedroom’s floors of a century’s worth of dirt and grime, he uncovered the name “Alice Carroll” painted in a childish hand on the floor. Is little Alice the crying ghost, the ghost that Meredith Parker has seen on several occasions?

“In the years that I’ve owned the inn, I’ve never seen anything unusual,” Tom Parker said, “but many others have. I’m open to any explanations of what’s been going on here for so many years. All I can say is, regardless of any physical evidence, Columbian House has a personality, a character, all its own, obtained from 175 years of use by many people.”

Later, when I downloaded the pictures I had taken at Columbian House into my computer, I was surprised to note an anomaly in one photo. The shot was taken from the head of the stairs on the second floor, looking down to the first floor. At the foot of the stairs appeared a small whitish orb of unknown origin. Enlarging the photo did not provide any clues to identifying the orb. I remembered that a member of the Arnold family had been frightened by a “presence” at the foot of the stairs. Was that “presence” now caught in my photo?