The Miamisburg Cemetery Ghost: a Woman in White Fired On by an Armed Crowd

Miamisburg sits near Dayton, Ohio. In 1840 the town council bought ground in the eastern part of the town for a burial place. About four acres. It held a Potter's Field section and was still in use in 1882. Today that land forms the park north of the old Carnegie Library, at Central Avenue and Fifth Street. Locals came to call it Library Park. It is now Veterans Memorial Park, and the Miamisburg History Center stands there.

March 1884. Every night at 9 o'clock, people said, a woman in white appeared in the Village Cemetery. Witnesses described her posture with strange precision. "Head inclined forward and hands clasped behind." She moved among the graves as if lost in thought. She floated.

The crowds grew. The Huntingdon Journal of Pennsylvania reprinted the dispatch. "A thousand people surround the graveyard in Miamisburg town, near Dayton, Ohio, every night, to witness the antics of what appears to be a genuine ghost." Town officials and "hundreds of prominent citizens," the report said, all testified to having seen her.

Then the town ran out of patience. The Frederick Daily News of Maryland carried the story on 27 March 1884. "Last night several hundred people, armed with clubs and guns, assaulted the spectre, which appeared to be a woman in white. Clubs, bullets, and shot tore through the air in which the mystic figure floated without disconcerting in the least."

The report said the figure was not disturbed. The next day, townspeople began opening graves.

The people of Miamisburg turned out en masse and began exhuming bodies. They believed the ghost was a young lady "supposed to have been murdered several years ago." Later retellings name her as one of the Buss family. The wire copy spelled it "Vuss." The remains of that family, three people, were the first to come out of the ground.

No source names the victim. No record of a murder has surfaced. In time every burial was moved to Hillgrove Union Cemetery on East Central Avenue. Genealogical records suggest that removal was gradual, carried out partly by families and partly by the city, and they make no mention of a ghost.

No hoax was exposed at the time. Writing on strangehistory.net, which places Miamisburg among the nineteenth century's ghost riots, one commenter argues that crowds firing live ammunition point to genuine belief. Anyone parading in a sheet would have been risking their life. The ordinary explanations are easy to list: a prankster in white, mist in the graveyard, crowd suggestion, a sensational wire service. No source has been found that argues any of them for this case. Still, the numbers read like press inflation, and the names arrived garbled in reprint.

The story survives through Chris Woodyard's The Face in the Window: Haunting Ohio Tales and through Jannette Quackenbush, whose retelling recalls crowds who would "watch her walk from her grave night after night." Dayton Unknown claims the site "set a record for the most ghost sightings in one location in Ohio." Modern accounts say she was last reported in the 1980s. Local investigator Dave Miller visited the park in 2018 and again in 2020.

In October 2023, Miamisburg Parks & Recreation and the Dayton Metro Library led a ghost walking tour through the park. The listing remembered a spectral lady in white, floating among the headstones. And the townspeople who tried to drive her away with clubs.