So around this time last year was my first time hosting the Ghost Walk by myself. I had been to so many of them and also ghost hunted the main building so often at this point that the stories were second nature to me, however, I was still painfully nervous. I never got over my fear of talking to people solo and public speaking, well, that is like so much more awful to me.
So I was terrified as one is when having to put on a little voice amplifier and walking around a bustling little town dressed as if it was Halloween in September but I was also really excited because like I’ve mentioned before - this is what I was made for. This is the perfect encapsulation of my special interests and I just feel so honored and lucky to be doing it.
Well, I go through the tour with these people and I tell them the history and all the while I weave in the spooky tales that I’ve experienced (or others, depending). I bring everyone to my favorite spots: the girl in blue’s grave in the cemetery, the old medical college in the town square, and Dr. phrania chesboro’s house. There are others those are just my big 3 stories.
The girl in blue is so tragic and a main draw of the tour. People do podcasts on her. She’s got a lot of mystery and I always feel her presence on the tours. It’s when I start to enter the cemetery I feel like an extra person joins the tour and then leaves us at the gate again when I go on. The medical college story is both terrifying and fascinating in equal parts. Dr. Chesboro’s house is a big draw to me. It used to be the local bank in recent years but later was purchased by the library as an annex with no plans yet on what will happen to it. I’m trying to ghost hunt in there so bad. I feel like I am being called to it and in a weird way this town has always called me. In fact, when I was first looking for a home Willoughby was my main focus but I got less house for my money there so Painesville it was. I am still grateful I chose Painesville in many ways - it has its own haunts and ghosts that I’ve grown fond of.
That first night in front of Phrania’s house I talked about the experience the bank security guard had where he swore he heard children laughing and saw a shadow of a young boy run up the stairs. How he told my boss he would not go back into that building and on nights when he had to guard - he sat out in his car all night.
I talked about Phrania and how she was one of the first female physicians. How they were not as accepted at the time but how she made a huge difference in the lives of the people of Willoughby. She was a great doctor, so much in fact that one of the patients built her this freaking house. I waved my hand at it, for my drama. Can you imagine bring so good at your job that someone builds you a house? That house is so sturdy in fact it is still standing today 115 years later?
I talked about how on the last ghost walk I was on, I walked up to the doors and looked through the windows where you could see the interior stairs leading up the the second floor straight on. I was filming and talking to our ghost hunting friend, Rick, about how I was so excited to get in there to investigate. As I looked again at the stairs and away from my phone I saw a shadow of the bottom half of someone legs walking down the stairs.
I looked at Rick and asked, “is someone in there?”
“No,” he replied, “it’s empty. Why did you see something?”
“Yeah I saw a person coming down the stairs but then the legs disappeared- Oh! I was filming. Shit! I hope I caught that. Damn that was cool as hell.”
I did, in fact, not catch the legs on camera.
Dammit.
But it was still cool as hell.
I was telling the group about this during the ghost walk and as I was talking I told them to take photos and film - maybe they’ll be lucky.
Well, after the tour someone stopped me. This lady pulled out her camera and showed me a photo in it you can see what looks to be the faint outline of someone’s body/face looking out the second story window where they had seen a curtain move as I spoke. They took another and it was gone. Now I don’t give much credence to photo evidence. There is a lot that can happen to light that can cause the camera to be tricked but I showed it to our friend who runs the ghost walks.
She said, “you know it’s weird. I saw a picture of phrania once when she was much older - it looks like her. She probably just wanted to know if you were telling her story right.”
