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Michael McLeod
Ok a little nostalgia column/ghost story for your enjoyment as we put the wailing Marley's ghost spirit of this year out of its misery and move on to 2021:
As a boy walking home from Immaculate Conception grade school back in the day, traveling east for a trek of about ten or 15 minutes depending on whether or not I got into a snowball fight or other assorted misadventures along the way, I passed by the church, the rectory, the convent, then Christine O Neill's house and Carla Johnson's house - had the hots for both of them, creepy little perv that I was - and the home of Doctor Hughes, whose obviously Catholic, rhythm-method family featured a full complement of, like, ten offspring or thereabouts. (correction: according to dave they topped out at 15) Certainly enough to put together a decent touch-football game.
Just next to the Hughes house and just before getting home to dear old 580 E.N. Broadway, I passed a vacant, bedraggled, yet still-majestic Victorian style mansion that stood on the northwest corner of Broadway and Indianola. We called it the old grey house and it had been abandoned for years after an old man who lived there alone died and surely maintained a spectral presence there as befitting what certainly looked like the very picture of a haunted house, complete with a suitably spooky tower feature. Bet he was pissed when my little sister Ellen threw a rock through one of his windows, as i was when, under questioning, she blamed it on me. Not hardly. I wouldn't have had the nerve. Once I ran up on the front porch and knocked on the door in broad daylight but that was the extent of my bravado. I never mustered the gumption to go inside to explore. Some kids obviously did though, and as I understand it the house was pretty well vandalized by the time a fire broke out inside. It was subsequently torn down.
So here's the coolest part. The house may or may not have been haunted but we have a bona fide family story that was just brought to my attention, which is that in the heyday of that old house, my staunch Catholic grandmother, Olga Wittenmeyer, whose husband was an old-school general practioner with an office adjacent to the parlour of their mansion on Main Street near a Catholic church whose name I no longer clearly recall (St. Anne's?), went to a SEANCE there! This would have likely been in the 1920s, when it was a fad. Nice to think that Columbus town was hip to it. I'd love to be able to become a time travelling ghost myself and go back in time to see that scene. Great setting for it.
Now there is just a big boring office building on the site.
The reason all this comes up is that when my mother died years ago I inherited a stack of books, four of them, filled with "Columbus vignettes" -- a compilation of sketches and stories about old Columbus buildings written in the 1960s by a Dispatch columnist/artist name Bill Arter. I just ran across them while cleaning out my office and discovered, to my surprise, a story about the old grey house.
Arter wrote that it was built in 1890 when there was nothing anywhere near what is now the bustling Clintonville intersection of East North Broadway and Indianola -- well, nothing besides a single small railroad station and open country filled with maples and oaks and whatever critters ran free on that landscape before we paved paradise and put up a parking lot. He also wrote that its original owner was a law librarian and Christian Science practitioner. I'm thinking he was the dude who was into the seance thing.
There is still a house from roughly that same era about a block away on East North Broadway near the railroad tracks, on the south side of the street just before the underpass. In my memory it is painted green but that may no longer be true. Once occupied by a family named Gulick, it looks much the same as it did when I was young, at least on the outside, but was converted decades ago into, sigh, another boring office building.
And that's the last time you'll have to put up with me this year.
Happy New Year everybody.
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