{"id":1467,"date":"2014-03-30T16:46:19","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T14:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2019-02-09T13:37:33","modified_gmt":"2019-02-09T11:37:33","slug":"the-real-story-of-the-mongoloid-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/?p=1467","title":{"rendered":"The Real Story of the Mongoloid House"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ve heard a Mongoloid House story or two growing up, too.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\""Shooting
“Shooting the loop\u201d entailed driving in a loop along Marion\u2019s uptown streets. In the late \u201960s, 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.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This was how I introduced the chapter about the local legend known as the Mongoloid House when I wrote Haunted Marion, Ohio<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span> back in the fall of 2010. I still think it\u2019s 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 \u2013 there are just too many loose ends.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s no longer the case, though.<\/p>\n

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 \u201860s. We eventually met in person at Ralphie\u2019s 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\u2019s as complete of a story as we\u2019re likely to hear on the subject.<\/p>\n

Oh, and one more point I should make clear: the Mongoloid House is not (and was never) located on Salem Road. That\u2019s a different Spooky Marion story!<\/p>\n

That said, I will turn this story over to Harry:<\/p>\n

Shooting the Loop<\/b><\/p>\n

I was born and raised in Marion. Graduated in \u201968 from Harding. At that time in Marion, the social life of young people centered around the \u201cloop\u201d. The city had just introduced the one way street system uptown, and this made \u201cshooting the loop\u201d possible. We would go uptown to mingle with the opposite sex, listen to rock n\u2019 roll, street race, drink beer. We\u2019d pull up in front of the Isaly building and hang out until we got chased off, and then we\u2019d 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\u2019s. It\u2019s where CVS is now, across from the Stengel True museum. People would line up for blocks just to drive through Frisch\u2019s parking lot. And if you found a place to park, you were all set. We didn\u2019t 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\u2026 Anyway, this new social scene is what eventually led to excursions out to the Mongoloid House.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Smith Place<\/b><\/p>\n

I remember first hearing about the Mongoloid House around \u201967 or so, although at that time no one called it that. Instead, people just called it the\u00a0Smith place after the family living out there. I had a rock n\u2019 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\u2019d ever heard any of the carryings\u2013on out at the\u00a0Smith place on <\/b>Marseilles-Galion Road. At that time, I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWhat are you guys talking about?\u201d One guy said, \u201cIt\u2019s this farm house out on Marseilles-Galion Road. We go out there and drive up and down in front of it. Sometimes some guy\u2019ll come out and chase you in his car. Sometimes he\u2019ll even shoot at you. You\u2019ve never been out there?\u201d Now, what in the world we found intriguing about going somewhere where I could get shot, I don\u2019t know. In any case, we all agreed that we would meet at Frisch\u2019s that night and ride out there. At the time, I had a \u201965 Barracuda. It wasn\u2019t very fast compared to some of those muscle cars guys were driving at the time, but it\u2019s what I could afford.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0uptown, 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\u2019t keep up. As everyone else\u2019s taillights were disappearing in the distance, my friend Joe said all of the sudden, \u201cHoly Jesus, get your ass moving \u2013 he\u2019s right behind us!\u201d I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the moon glinting off of the grill of a car. He didn\u2019t 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\u2019s where the term \u201cFlash\u201d came from. Even now, when people talk about the Mongoloid House, they often talk about \u201cFlash.\u201d 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\u00a0Smiths 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.<\/p>\n

The Stories They Told Each Other<\/b><\/p>\n

The farm house at the time looked pretty dilapidated \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

According to one of the guys I worked with over at Fairfield, people had started going out to the\u00a0Smith place because of another story \u2013 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 \u2013 rust \u2013 seeping out of the ground water. I went out there during the day once and could see that\u2019s 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<\/i>] 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: \u201cHey, let\u2019s go out to the Mongoloid House.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although I never actually saw them myself, the\u00a0Smith\u00a0family supposedly had a couple of \u2018mongoloid\u2019 children. That is to say, other people claimed to have seen kids with physical features typical of people with Down\u2019s syndrome. That\u2019s the origin, as far as I know, of the unfortunate name, and it stuck.<\/p>\n

There were other rumors, too. I heard that the family had a baby that had died and the mother couldn\u2019t accept the baby\u2019s 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\u2019s and crazy as hell. He claimed \u2013 and I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s true \u2013 but he claimed he got all the way up to the window and looked in it, but there wasn’t a coffin.<\/p>\n

\"This
This barn is the only structure still standing on what was once the Mongoloid House property on Marseilles-Galion Road.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Other Incidents<\/b><\/p>\n

And then there was the night Jack Hancock got his car shot. He had his dad\u2019s Buick Century. For a long time, I had a photo of Jack pointing to the bullet hole in the fender [laughs<\/em>]. And of course that story got around town, too.<\/p>\n

Another time Dave Musolf was sitting with his girlfriend and me one night at Frisch\u2019s, and he said, \u201cI\u2019m gonna go out there and let \u2018em have it.\u201d 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, \u201cOh my God!\u201d But nothing ever resulted from it.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

At that time, they were turning license plate numbers over to the sheriff\u2019s 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, \u201cIf we catch you going out there again, you\u2019re going to jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

I replaced the Barracuda with a brand-new bright red \u201969 Mustang sex machine. [laughs<\/i>] I was uptown with it one night, and a guy I knew \u2013 I can\u2019t remember who \u2013 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\u2019d wait for ten minutes before heading back to pick him up. On my way back, I saw something that I hadn\u2019t seen before: There wasn\u2019t one set of tail lights behind me \u2013 it was more like six! Suddenly this \u2013 it looked like a tree stump with its roots still attached \u2013 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 \u2013 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\u2019t worry about my friend. That was the last night I went out there for awhile.<\/p>\n

Everything Changes<\/b><\/p>\n

I believe the Smith family eventually moved across Route 98 to a new house. I\u2019m 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 \u2018Smith\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

In August of \u201969, I got drafted. My dad had the Mustang fixed, and we sold it because I couldn\u2019t make the payments on army pay. I got to come home on leave that Christmas. Just for old time\u2019s sake, I took my dad\u2019s Ford and decided to go for a drive around town.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWell, there are cops everywhere uptown now. And there\u2019s no place to hang out \u2013 you can\u2019t even park at Isaly\u2019s anymore. If you do, the cops are right on you and write you a ticket.\u201d Marion had started cracking down on that whole scene.<\/p>\n

So then I pulled up to go into Frisch\u2019s, 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 \u201cback way\u201d to Frisch\u2019s. But the neighbors had started complaining about all of the traffic, so the city made it one way going west. Inside, Frisch\u2019s had hired rent-a-cops to run off people who weren\u2019t there to eat. Needless to say, nobody was hanging out there any more.<\/p>\n

Finally, I thought I\u2019d go out to the Mongoloid House, but there was nothing going on out there, either. Nobody\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Smith 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 \u2013 said it was private property. I was wearing my uniform, and I think that\u2019s why he wasn\u2019t so hard on me. I shipped off to Vietnam in January of 1970.<\/p>\n

Looking Back<\/b><\/p>\n

Looking back, I\u2019m 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\u2019d 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\u2019d 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\u2019s been such a long time. In any case, that\u2019s the story of the Mongoloid House as I remember it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ve heard a Mongoloid House story or two growing up, too. This was how […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all","category-local-legends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":48,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2641,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions\/2641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}