Murders In The Hollow
There is, rather was, a rumor circulating that a house outside of town was the scene of several murders back in the middle of the last century. We heard about it as kids but as we got older we learned that, according to the elders in town, the events never happened and we should never, ever talk about it. Of course they made a few of the more rebellious of us not only talk about it but we decided to investigate it for ourselves.
The story said that the murders took place in a farmhouse out on Akron-Peninsula Road out by Wetmore Road. Back in the day it was all private property but in the late 1980s it became part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
A friend of mine and I took our motorcycles and drove out one afternoon. When we got to the spot…at least close to the spot…we parked and went into the woods on foot. We didn’t really have the location of the house but we heard enough to make an “educated” guess.
We wandered around for about five hours and didn’t find anything then, in the seventh hour; we looked down in a valley and saw the foundation of a building. It didn’t look the big from the crest but once we got to the bottom we found the foundation to a house with at least four rooms. At the end of the foundation was a fireplace and chimney that showed that the house was at least two, maybe three, stories. A closer look at the foundation showed that the building didn’t die of old age…it was burned and the fire must have been extreme from the char marks.
“What in the Hell is that,” I asked. There was no noise or anything like that. It was more of a feeling than anything else.
“I have no idea,” my friend said as he held his arms to his chest. “I don’t like this feeling.”
I hadn’t noticed but my arms were up on my chest in pretty much the same position as his. “It feels hot and cold here,” I said. It was impossible for it to be cold. When we left the house it was somewhere around 80 degrees and it hadn’t changed much…except when we got here. The temperature change was hard to ignore but we moved to the edge of the clearing and settled down for the night.
Then it started. The first thing was floating pairs of whitish yellow orbs starting flying around the entire valley. It wasn’t just one or two pairs…we were watching hundreds of them. They never got close to either of us….staying about fifty feet from us but a couple stopped in flight almost as if they were looking at us trying to see what we were doing.
The next thing was we heard voices coming from the foundation. There were four, maybe five, distinct voices. They were young, very young and they were a mixture of boys and girls. The voices didn’t seem to be in pain or anything like that. Rather they sound like a bunch of kids playing with laughs, giggles and shouts of happiness. One thing we both heard were a couple names…Ruth and Ezekiel. I knew, from my Catholic school days, that those were names from the bible.
“That has got to be the wind through those pines over there.” My friend said as he pointed to the woods on the other end of the valley.
“What about the names and the laughter,” I asked.
“Our minds must be playing tricks on us,” he said as he sat up.
“How could both of our minds be playing tricks on both of us,” I ask with a touch of sarcasm in my voice but just as I expected he just turned away from me and, I assume, he went to sleep. Me, I wasn’t the least bit tired so I just laid there looking at the stars and the waning crescent moon until I dozed off sometime around 4:00 a.m. I guess but I did not have a good night sleep.
The next morning the two of us packed up what few things we brought with us…yes, we even cleaned up the Bud Light cans we emptied the night before, and we got back on our bikes and headed back to town, with a couple notes I took when we first got there.
It only took us about 25 minutes to get home. I got home first. My friend made sure I got in the door and then I heard him rush off. Instead of staying there I got back on my bike and rode into downtown to the Summit County Hall of Records to see who the last people who lived on that site. A stop there and another stop at the Summit County Tax Office let me find the information I wanted. The person who owned the property was a doctor…Dr. Anthony B. Paine…a local surgeon who, according to the hall of records, died in 1872.
The public library was my next stop. I know that they had census records all the way back to the 1830’s so I knew that they might be able to help. They were. According to the 1870 census Dr. Paine lived on the property with his wife and their four kids…two sons and two daughters. After that I went down to the archives and found out that Akron didn’t have a newspaper but Cleveland did…the Cleveland Register.
“That’s a good thing,” I said out loud as I stepped over to the computers and started my search. It took a while and I felt like I skipped lunch but I knew I had to find the information and there it was…a headline that read, “Akron Doctor Killed in Mysterious Fire.” The story was short basically giving just the facts and a list of the dead. I wrote down the information and left for the day.
I was at home. My wife and kids had left for the week. I think it was something to do with a family get-together or something like that. I never went. They didn’t like me and I didn’t like them so why go. The one and only thing I did was think…think about the man and his family and the more I did the more I wanted to know the truth.
The next morning I called my friend and told him to call off work. We were going back out to the site and see what we could find. He got to the house around nine in the morning and we set off as soon as he walked in the door.
It didn’t take us long to stop at Steak & Eggs on Market St. get a couple sandwiches, coffee and a donut for each of us, fill the tank and get out to the woods.
We got there. The sun was shining and there was no chance of rain. So, we parked the car and set off.
The trail was still there from the day before so we found the site, the ruins and our campsite. We set up a tent and started looking around. We started around the foundation. The area inside was covered with weeds, grasses and flowers. Other than that there were straight lines of flagstone but, after searching, I found a break in the wall. I probed with a sharpened stick and found a void under the gap.
“Hey, come and look at this,” I yelled to my friend who came running. Shining a flashlight into the void I saw a flight of steps leading down into what I could only think was the basement of the house. “Let’s go,” I asked with a bit of trepidations. He nodded and, after we cleared out a decent sized opening we went down.
It was dark. There wasn’t enough light to see no more than a couple of feet in front of you. We both turned on our lights and saw a large room with walls and shelves filled to the top with old pots, pans, three pronged forks and a cauldron over by a place that looked like the fire pit my neighbor had in his backyard. There were several tables throughout the room. It was hard to tell what they were ever used for and to tell the truth I didn’t want to know.
Looking some more we found some bodies in the corner of the room. Their decay wasn’t much at all…they looked as if they had just recently passed on. I looked carefully at each one. One was a woman of maybe twenty year, a child who was five or six if he was a day and a man with a muscular built and showed signs of a very hard life. They all had a couple things in common. They were all black and they all had marks on their wrists and ankles as if they had been bound.
“I’ll bet they were slaves down somewhere in the South,” I said.
“Then what are they doing here,” my friend asked.
“I heard that the Underground Railroad ran through this area. They taught us in school that a long time before the war northern whites help the slaves get to Canada.”
“That early,” he asked
“Yeah, I am not sure of the year but it started sometime in the eighteenth century,” I said remembering some piece of trivia I picked up somewhere.
We spent about an hour down there finding what was out in the open to find and reading whatever writings were lying around. Most of it was just notes about who came through and their medical problems. According to the notes there were about 50 or 60 people come through and they said that every one of them was sent to a house in Cleveland so they could cross the lake into Canada.
It was a huge treasure trove that no had seen in almost two hundred years so we didn’t touch anything preferring to leave them for the Historical Society we would be contacting when we got home.
The minute we got outside we were met by a scrawny guy with a long black and grey beard. He was dressed in brightly colored clothes like the kind we used to see when we watched old movies about gypsies but the thing we noticed was that he was pointing a gun at us…a big gun so we became very submissive very quickly.
“What in the hell are you doing here,” he asked as he pointed the gun first at me and then at my friend. We both stood completely still and silent. “I asked what in the hell are you doing here and I want to know now.” I heard the click showing that the trigger had been set.
“We heard a lot of stories about this place and we just wanted to check them out,
I said as I tried to stay as calm as possible. “We did not plan on hurting anything and we meant no disrespect to you or anyone.”
“You want to know the truth,” he asked as he lowered the gun. “Most come up to find the bodies or perform satanic rituals.” He laughed just a little. “You would be surprised how many naked people I have chased out of here.”
We felt a little more relaxed although it was pretty much impossible to feel totally safe when you are facing a stranger with a gun.
“I can imagine,” my friend said. “Once a place gets a paranormal reputation it is hard to keep the nuts away.”
The man smiled and stuck out his hand in friendship. “My name is Dooriya Stachnev. My family has lived on this land since the end of the 18th Century.” He pointed with pride to a cabin, more like a shanty, on the edge of one of the nearby ridges. “That is my home. Come with me and we will share a beer and I will tell you the history of this land.”
That sounded good to me and my friend. We weren’t going to get shot today, we were going to learn what we came here for and we were going to get a cold beer on top of it. When you added that to everything we had just seen and it was turning out to be a pretty good day…except we had to climb up the side of that valley but…then again…there was beer wasn’t there?
We got to the house about a hour later. I was surprised because it wasn’t as bad as it looked from below and you could see the whole valley from the porch.
“Come in, sit down and relax,” Stachnev said with a big smile. He went to the kitchen and brought back a couple Labatt Blues. “Here my friends,” he said as he handed us the cans. “I have a tale to tell.”
We took our beers, went out on the porch and settled down for what we knew was going to a long day with a lot of beers.
“Like I said my family moved here in the 1700’s just before Ohio became a state,” he said. “The doctor moved down there a few years later…around 1815 according to what I have been told.”
“That sounds about right,” I said. Then I ask Stachnev where he heard the story.
“The story has been passed from my father’s father’s father’s father and I was told of it when I was a child.” He smiled, took a long sip of his beer and continued as if I hadn’t interrupted him.
“Dr. Paine moved here from Alabama,” he continued. “He told my family that he was tired of the slavery and racism down south so he figured that Ohio might be a place he would like.
The first thing he did was open an office for not only those who lived in the city but also those who wanted a life in the woods. That was my family. Being Gypsies they weren’t welcome in a lot of cities so they settled here and lived as farmers.
Anyway, a few years after he moved in there were a long of former slaves going to him for medical treatment. It wasn’t until much later that my family figured out that he was helping them to get to Canada. The thing was that they arrived during the day. The woods were a lot closer to his house then but no one ever seen them leave. Another thing about visitors at his house…the neighbors weren’t allowed down there. If they were sick…he went to their house and that was firm, no one in the area saw how he lived. Hell, there were a few who got shot at for being too close.
One day one of those slaves showed up and, they were followed by a pair of southern boys who were looking for the path of the railroad. When they got there they ran away screaming. In the house were dozens of bodies. Not one of the slaves who came for help made it to the next ‘station’. They were all stored in the basement. My family said that there were a lot more slaves than that went to the house. My grandpa told me that he heard that there were times when 8 or 9 slaves would come at a time.
The doctor must have known what was going to happen next. My family wasn’t sure how it happened but they saw the results.
It was strange that the law would listen to two slave hunters but a few hours after they left they came back with the law and a lot of the people from Akron who followed just to have something to do. By the time they got there the house was an inferno…far beyond anything the people there knew how to handle. So, they just stood and watched.
The smoke was dark, black and hovering just above the ground. A number of the people there got sick and had to be carried back to town but once the fire ended the sheer terror was just beginning…the doctor’s wife and kids all burned to death in the fire. His body was found nearby, his head split in half with a grimace my grandpa said was something his grandfather would never forget. There were the bodies of three slaves in the basement and a mass grave north of the house near the tree line. According to the story more than one hundred slaves ranging in age from newborn to 70 years old were found out there. By the way…they never tried to find the doctor’s killer. I guess they figured that he deserved it.
They had a priest come out and bless the ground and have it declared hallowed ground. None of the bodies, except the doctor’s wife and kids, were moved. They were buried in a marked graved somewhere in town but nobody knows where.
Ever since that day there have been pairs of light that float around the site. They say that those are the eyes are the eyes of the slaves who died at the doctor’s hand and the voices are the children, both slave and the doctor’s playing in the fields.
That is the story I have been told and the story I will share with anyone who is interested.”
I thanked the man and went back to my car. When I relayed the story I was told by researchers that the lights were just mating fireflies and the voice were the wind blowing through the trees.
Me, I prefer the story that gypsy told me…it is a lot more fun that fireflies and besides that…How can you see fireflies in the winter…
