Cincinnati Music Hall hauntings

Music Hall stands at 1241 Elm Street in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. It opened on 14 May 1878. Maps show a public burial ground at 14th and Elm by 1819. An 1830 map marks a potter's field on the block. A Civil War military hospital stood here too, and a wooden hall of 1870 that became the Exposition Hall.

The first stories came from the Exposition Hall's unnamed night watchman. He told the Cincinnati Commercial of "Rappings on the ceiling, under the floor, on the doors and windows." Footsteps. Timbers crashing. Something like bodies being dragged. In the Main Hall, a man marching and dragging a musket. A medium said it was a soldier, possibly from the military hospital.

One snowy night, loud knocking came at the front doors. No one was there. The fresh snow held no footprints. "…I thought it was only the dead that kept knocking, knocking, knocking." He never saw them. He felt them, as an icy chill. "They never touch me, but I always know when they are around."

22 February 1987. About 12:30 a.m. Security guard John G. Engst was taking three caterers down by elevator from a party in Corbett Tower. The women had heard music earlier. Then he heard it. A music box, playing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." The music stopped in a hall beside the elevator, then started again inside it. "The music was still there and I'm starting to tingle now." For about two weeks he could not go near the first-floor shaft late at night.

An exhibitor at a business fair saw a young, pale woman in old-fashioned clothes beside his booth. He walked toward her and felt a rush of cold air. She became transparent, then vanished. Kitty Love, 21 years on the hall's private police force, hears footsteps, slamming doors and music at night. "You go to that place and then you hear it coming from yet another place."

In the 1990s a three-year-old named Charlie was playing on the dark stage. He looked toward Box 9. "Daddy, who's that man in the box?" His father saw no one. "Yes there is. He's waving at me right now." Cincinnati Opera's Patricia K. Beggs tells the story. Pops conductor Erich Kunzel put it simply: "They are definitely in this building, some sort of spirits."

The dead never stayed buried. Graves turned up as the foundations were dug in October 1876. Lafcadio Hearn wrote about the bones in the Cincinnati Commercial on 22 October 1876, and author John B. Kachuba says the dead "soon began to make themselves known." In 1927 a trench under the south wing opened 65 graves, the "Valley of Death." In May 1988 more than 200 pounds of bones surfaced in a new elevator shaft, and the Hamilton County coroner looked into possible foul play. In 2016 more graves appeared under the orchestra pit.

Ghost Hunters visited in 2014 and claimed a girl's voice saying "Mommy" and a man waving from the balcony at 3 a.m. In June 2016 photographer Matthew Zory caught translucent figures in long exposures, though he does not believe in ghosts.

Sceptics have their answers. Facilities engineer Ed Vignale Jr. put some of the strange sounds down to the hall's acoustics, and mentioned a musical greeting card found at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Volunteer Marie Gallagher has seen and heard nothing in 25 years.

Today Friends of Music Hall and the Cincinnati Arts Association run guided ghost tours through the building. As Vignale puts it, "There is definitely something strange going on here."