A Haunted House or Just a Rumor?

Please note: A expanded version of this story appears in our book Haunted Marion, Ohio.

After shooting Dosha, Miller Herman reportedly picked her up and told her, "Goodbye sweetheart. Well, I got you this time."
After shooting Dosha, Miller Herman reportedly picked her up and told her, “Goodbye sweetheart. Well, I got you this time.”

An article that appeared in the Marion Daily Star on March 25th, 1921, had the titillating headline “Many People Flock to Haunted House.” However, it’s probably a better example of how gossip spreads around small towns than it is a legitimate ghost story.

The genesis of the story was a murder that occurred at a house located on the southwest corner of Creston Avenue and Niles Street in 1919. This story, appearing in the March 3rd, 1919, edition of the Star, described how Miller Herman, heartsick over having been rejected by Dosha White, showed up at her mom and dad’s house and shot both Dosha and her new suitor, Lee “Pat” Patterson. Dosha later died from her injuries while Lee survived. When Miller turned the gun on himself, it was Dosha’s mother who, surprisingly, grabbed his hand and diverted the shot so that Miller only succeeded in grazing his scalp.

After the crime, Herman ran back to his house not far from the White residence. When police showed up a short time later, Miller didn’t protest his innocence but instead willingly went to jail where he made a full confession a short time later.

Herman's photo as it appeared in the 1921 Marion Daily Star.
Herman’s photo as it appeared in the 1921 Marion Daily Star.

Herman’s crime, while shocking, was nonetheless not especially brutal or hard to understand. The man was jealous and angry, so he thought he’d get revenge on his ex and her new boyfriend.

Still, that the house where the murder occurred became known as “haunted” is probably due more to rumor than to the accounts of people who actually lived in the house. In fact, the man who owned the house – the White family had apparently moved out some time before – seemed baffled by the attention his residence was receiving. He was quoted as saying, “[I’ve] never heard of the house being haunted. Other families never complained about it, not even the Whites.”

Was the house really haunted? The truth, as with so many ghost stories, will probably forever remain a mystery.

UFOs in Marion, Part I

Anybody who hangs around Marion long enough is bound to run into someone who seems to be from another planet entirely. But what about the real thing? Has Marion been visited by UFOs? Several eyewitness accounts would seem to support this notion.

Flying Saucers?

On January 27th, 2001, a story appeared in the Marion Star about a local named Mike Ulery who claims he saw a UFO flying near his place on Davids Street. About the object, he said, “It wasn’t blinking or anything. It was just a bright white light moving across the sky.” Intrigued, he got in his wife’s car to follow it but found the car was nearly out of gas. He followed it west for a little bit before deciding he’d better turn around.

Of course, skeptics might be inclined to think that Mike had been – to paraphrase George Thorogood – hanging with his pals Jack Daniels and Jimmy Beam, but a report filed by a Marion County Sheriff’s deputy seems to substantiate what Mike saw. On the same evening at approximately the same time, the Star reported, “[The deputy] saw a bright light in the sky and didn’t know what it was. [He then] followed it for 10 minutes before it disappeared in the sky above Hardin County.”

An article appearing the Kent News-Journal the next day quotes Perkins Observatory director Tom Burns as saying that what Mike Ulery and the deputy saw was actually Venus. “Every time Venus gets this close to earth, we get calls like this. If people look up at that thing for long enough, it does appear that it’s moving.”

Mike Ulery isn’t the only Marion resident who claims to have seen a UFO. In a roundup of sightings listed on the web site ufoinfo.com, Steven J. Neely, along with his son Doug and his son’s friend Kyle, reported that they saw a “cigar shaped” and “very shiny” object flying at an altitude he estimated to be between 3,000 and 5,000 feet on June 14th, 1998. Given the fact that the three were at the Marion Fish and Game Club target shooting when they saw the UFO, one can probably safely assume that they were also all sober that day.

Crop Circles?

In August of 2006, farmers in northern Marion County and southern Crawford County discovered a number of crop circles in their cornfields. However, the large number of empty beer cans found near the circles and the fact that the circles looked, according to an article from the September 9th, 2006, edition of the Columbus Dispatch, more like “misshapen eggs” suggest that the damage was the result of earth-inhabiting numbskulls. The crop circles convinced absolutely no one that aliens had visited the cornfields around Kirkpatrick. Instead, the “aliens” only succeeded in ruining a bunch of corn and p&%#ing off a bunch of farmers.