The Real Story of the Mongoloid House

Everybody in Marion County knows about the Mongoloid House, right? As a kid growing up in the 80s, I remember my dad scaring us with stories about a house out in the country where strange people lived. There’s a good chance you’ve heard a Mongoloid House story or two growing up, too.

"Shooting the loop” consisted of driving in a loop along Marion’s uptown streets. In the late ’60s, the loop generally (though not always) followed the route highlighted above. Over the years, the popularity of shooting the loop in Marion has waxed and waned.
“Shooting the loop” entailed driving in a loop along Marion’s uptown streets. In the late ’60s, the loop generally (though not always) followed the route highlighted above. Over the years, the popularity of shooting the loop in Marion has waxed and waned.

This was how I introduced the chapter about the local legend known as the Mongoloid House when I wrote Haunted Marion, Ohio back in the fall of 2010. I still think it’s a good introduction to the story. However, in the rest of the chapter, a lot of the details surrounding the Mongoloid House (including its location) are murky to say the least, and I was never really happy with the story as it appears in the book – there are just too many loose ends.

That’s no longer the case, though.

In the fall of 2013, a man named Harry Titus sent me a long e-mail about his experiences at the Mongoloid House back in the late ‘60s. We eventually met in person at Ralphie’s where he laid out a clear, compelling and, most importantly, first-hand account of not only the Mongoloid House but of Marion’s youth culture at the time. I think it’s as complete of a story as we’re likely to hear on the subject.

Oh, and one more point I should make clear: the Mongoloid House is not (and was never) located on Salem Road. That’s a different Spooky Marion story!

That said, I will turn this story over to Harry:

Shooting the Loop

I was born and raised in Marion. Graduated in ’68 from Harding. At that time in Marion, the social life of young people centered around the “loop”. The city had just introduced the one way street system uptown, and this made “shooting the loop” possible. We would go uptown to mingle with the opposite sex, listen to rock n’ roll, street race, drink beer. We’d pull up in front of the Isaly building and hang out until we got chased off, and then we’d pull up in front of A-1 cleaners and hang out there until we got chased out of there, too. The most popular place to hang out was Frisch’s. It’s where CVS is now, across from the Stengel True museum. People would line up for blocks just to drive through Frisch’s parking lot. And if you found a place to park, you were all set. We didn’t really have drugs in Marion at the time. We were really late in getting into marijuana, even. We were still very innocent in the late 60s as far as that goes. To think that one day there would be a heroin problem in Marion… Anyway, this new social scene is what eventually led to excursions out to the Mongoloid House.

The Smith Place

I remember first hearing about the Mongoloid House around ’67 or so, although at that time no one called it that. Instead, people just called it the Smith place after the family living out there. I had a rock n’ roll band at the time, TC and the Turks, and while we were rehearsing on day, my brother-in-law, who was a deputy sheriff, stopped by and asked me if I’d ever heard any of the carryings–on out at the Smith place on Marseilles-Galion Road. At that time, I’d never heard of anything going on out there. But that tells me now that the sheriff was already aware of the situation out that way.

Right out of high school, I got a job as a design trainee over at Fairfield Engineering. I thought I had it made. I was making $9.10 an hour, which was more than my dad made after working 30 years at the Shovel. Anyway, one day at work, I happened to overhear some of the other guys talking about going out to the Smith place. Finally, I said, “What are you guys talking about?” One guy said, “It’s this farm house out on Marseilles-Galion Road. We go out there and drive up and down in front of it. Sometimes some guy’ll come out and chase you in his car. Sometimes he’ll even shoot at you. You’ve never been out there?” Now, what in the world we found intriguing about going somewhere where I could get shot, I don’t know. In any case, we all agreed that we would meet at Frisch’s that night and ride out there. At the time, I had a ’65 Barracuda. It wasn’t very fast compared to some of those muscle cars guys were driving at the time, but it’s what I could afford.

Today Pole Lane Road just ends in a ‘T’ with Marseilles-Galion Road, but at that time, this was the location of the north entrance to the Scioto Ordinance Plant. The paved entrance was still there, so it was a convenient place for kids to gather. The night we went out there, six or seven cars showed up.

My buddy Joe jumped in the car with me, and down we went, along with all of the other cars. We drove back and forth in front of the house and nothing happened. I was starting to think the whole thing was just a joke on me. Finally, we gave up and decided just to go back  uptown, all of us hauling ass down Marseilles-Galion Road just as fast as we could go. I fell behind everybody else because my Barracuda just couldn’t keep up. As everyone else’s taillights were disappearing in the distance, my friend Joe said all of the sudden, “Holy Jesus, get your ass moving – he’s right behind us!” I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the moon glinting off of the grill of a car. He didn’t have his headlights on, but I could see he was right on our bumper. And worse than that, there was another guy in the passenger seat leaning out the window with a shotgun. There were some empty beer bottles rolling around in the car, and my buddy Joe started throwing them at the car behind us. And then, just like that, the car was gone. Just before he disappeared, he flashed his headlights on and that’s where the term “Flash” came from. Even now, when people talk about the Mongoloid House, they often talk about “Flash.” What the guy was really doing was turning on his lights so that he could see one of the lanes that cut into the fields. Those lanes are what the Smiths used to get in and out of their fields from Marseilles-Galion Road with their tractors. But they used these same lanes to appear and disappear out of nowhere on nights when kids were out there raising hell. That was the first of many experiences I had out at the Mongoloid House.

The Stories They Told Each Other

The farm house at the time looked pretty dilapidated – in fact, it look haunted. It was painted grey, had a steep-gabled roof and a big wrap-around porch. There was a big, creepy-looking barn in back of the house.

According to one of the guys I worked with over at Fairfield, people had started going out to the Smith place because of another story – kind of a ghost story. The story going around at the time was that a kid had died in a car crash out at the intersection of Marseilles-Galion Road and Route 98, and on the spot on the road where the kid had died, there was supposedly a bloodstain that never went away. That was the story at least. Well, people started driving out there to see that. I think it was just iron oxide – rust – seeping out of the ground water. I went out there during the day once and could see that’s what it really was. But it was a good story to tell a girl and maybe get her to go for a drive with you out in the country. [laughs] So that story about the blood is what got kids driving out there, and the Smiths started to get tired of all of these kids hot rodding up and down the road. Well, the Smiths started chasing them off, and that only made the situation worse. Every time they would run some kids off, these kids would drive back to town, tell all of their friends about it and even more kids would drive out there. This was going on every night, all summer in ’68. It was something to do: “Hey, let’s go out to the Mongoloid House.”

Although I never actually saw them myself, the Smith family supposedly had a couple of ‘mongoloid’ children. That is to say, other people claimed to have seen kids with physical features typical of people with Down’s syndrome. That’s the origin, as far as I know, of the unfortunate name, and it stuck.

There were other rumors, too. I heard that the family had a baby that had died and the mother couldn’t accept the baby’s death, and so she had a coffin on the table in the living room. That story was very prevalent. And some of the kids decided they were going to sneak up to the house and look in that window. Dave Musolf was one of those people. He was a friend of my brother’s and crazy as hell. He claimed – and I don’t know if it’s true – but he claimed he got all the way up to the window and looked in it, but there wasn’t a coffin.

This barn is the only structure still standing on what was once the Mongoloid House property on Marseilles Galion Road.
This barn is the only structure still standing on what was once the Mongoloid House property on Marseilles-Galion Road.

Other Incidents

And then there was the night Jack Hancock got his car shot. He had his dad’s Buick Century. For a long time, I had a photo of Jack pointing to the bullet hole in the fender [laughs]. And of course that story got around town, too.

Another time Dave Musolf was sitting with his girlfriend and me one night at Frisch’s, and he said, “I’m gonna go out there and let ‘em have it.” And he was packing a .38! And so off we went to the Mongoloid House. Next thing I knew, Dave stopped at one of the lanes and fired off a few shots. I remember thinking, “Oh my God!” But nothing ever resulted from it.

On another night, we were out there running up and down the road in my Barracuda. Just to show I was as brave as everybody else, I decided to drive into one of the lanes. As we were on our way out of there, this log came flying down in front of me. I ran over it and the engine died. It was a hot summer night, and my windows were rolled down. The next thing I knew, I was looking at some guy in bib overalls who was carrying a shotgun. There wasn’t anything strange about him, though. I mean, he was just a normal-looking farmer type. I was expecting to get screamed at and shot, but he was calm and reserved and told me that they would like to be left alone. He said he had my license plate number, and if I ever came back, there would be problems. I did finally get the car to start, and we got out of there.

At that time, they were turning license plate numbers over to the sheriff’s department, and the sherriff was calling those people in and reading them the riot act. It got to the point where just about everybody going there got called in and told something along the lines of, “If we catch you going out there again, you’re going to jail.”

I replaced the Barracuda with a brand-new bright red ’69 Mustang sex machine. [laughs] I was uptown with it one night, and a guy I knew – I can’t remember who – wanted to ride out to the Mongoloid House and get a look in the window. So I drove past the house, dropped him off at the last lane and drove down to the Kirkpatrick Methodist Church. I had told my friend I’d wait for ten minutes before heading back to pick him up. On my way back, I saw something that I hadn’t seen before: There wasn’t one set of tail lights behind me – it was more like six! Suddenly this – it looked like a tree stump with its roots still attached – this thing came flying over the fence and landed on the road right in front of my brand new car. I swerved around it, but as I was coming back up onto the road, there was this guy standing in the middle of the road with this huge spotlight, and he was shining it right in my eyes trying to blind me. I headed straight for it. The guy who had been holding the spotlight went flying down into a ditch, and I ran over his light – just smashed the hell out of it. Messed the front of my car up, too. But I kept driving and suddenly there was a cable stretched across the road! They had it pulled too high, though, and so I slid right under it. It did take the spoiler off the back of my car. But I just kept right on going. From that time on, I didn’t worry about my friend. That was the last night I went out there for awhile.

Everything Changes

I believe the Smith family eventually moved across Route 98 to a new house. I’m pretty sure this is what happened because they drove AMC Rebels, and I would see their Rebels parked at the new place on the other side of Route 98. The mailbox at the new place also had ‘Smith’ written on the side of it. So the farm house we knew as the Mongoloid House sat there abandoned. (Years later, I happened to drive out there one day, and I noticed that the old house was practically falling over. It was leaning and just ready to collapse. A few years later, it did just that. For a long time, all you saw was the roof sitting flat on the field with all the rest of the house crushed below it.) However, some kind of caretaker lived in a modular home on the property.

In August of ’69, I got drafted. My dad had the Mustang fixed, and we sold it because I couldn’t make the payments on army pay. I got to come home on leave that Christmas. Just for old time’s sake, I took my dad’s Ford and decided to go for a drive around town.

Now the first thing I noticed was that nobody was really shooting the loop anymore. The police had started cracking down. I got ahold of some of the old guys, and they said, “Well, there are cops everywhere uptown now. And there’s no place to hang out – you can’t even park at Isaly’s anymore. If you do, the cops are right on you and write you a ticket.” Marion had started cracking down on that whole scene.

So then I pulled up to go into Frisch’s, and I realized the city had changed the direction of Washington Avenue! See, we used to head down Prospect Street and turn left onto Washington and take this “back way” to Frisch’s. But the neighbors had started complaining about all of the traffic, so the city made it one way going west. Inside, Frisch’s had hired rent-a-cops to run off people who weren’t there to eat. Needless to say, nobody was hanging out there any more.

Finally, I thought I’d go out to the Mongoloid House, but there was nothing going on out there, either. Nobody’s running up and down the road. It was wintertime, and I could see the snow was undisturbed going into the lanes. Nothing. The whole scene had changed. Everything was different.

My theory is that the police crackdown uptown and the fact that the sheriff was threatening to prosecute the kids who were raising hell out on Marseilles-Galion Road had an effect on kids driving out to the Mongoloid House.

That night I drove out there to the Mongoloid House, I had a run-in with the caretaker who lived in that modular on the Smith property. I pulled into one of their lanes and got stuck in the mud. The guy came out and asked me what the hell I was doing, and I told him I was just turning around. Of course, he knew better than that, but he went and got the tractor and pulled me out anyway. He just told me not to come back anymore – said it was private property. I was wearing my uniform, and I think that’s why he wasn’t so hard on me. I shipped off to Vietnam in January of 1970.

Looking Back

Looking back, I’m appalled at the way we behaved out there. We would drive by their house, speeding. We would drive by their house and honk our horns. We’d do whatever we could to get them to come out. In fact, our goal when we went out there was to get them to chase us up the road. That was the brass ring. Sometimes, as we were on our way out there, we’d see other people speeding in the other direction with one of those Rebels chasing them. I do know that in the end the Smith family was getting a lot of sympathy from the local community around there. I think that people are wiling to talk about it now because it’s been such a long time. In any case, that’s the story of the Mongoloid House as I remember it.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *