The “Meeker, Ohio Review” was, as best as I can tell, a compilation of stories told by some of Meeker’s senior citizens in the mid ’60s and published in around 1973. While skimming through it a few years ago, this little paragraph caught my attention:<\/span><\/p>\n Marie told about the old Lapham brick [house]. Rev. Crabtree lived there on road 27, [and] some said it was haunted. [There] was a spot on the floor that could not be washed away. There were whistling sounds heard [and], as the story goes, that a packpeddler went in, but never came out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Obviously, the story interested me, and I was eventually able to track down a descendant\u00a0of the Lapham family, a guy named Mike Brewer. He told me that Arthur\u00a0Lapham, his great-great-great grandfather, built the house in 1837, and although it is still standing out on Marseilles-Galion Road West, it’s in poor condition.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for all of you hoping to hear a good haunted house story, Mike more or less dismissed that idea.<\/p>\n [T]he story is mostly myth. I know Reverend Marvin Crabtree’s daughter and grandson. She grew up in the house and assured me that the spot on the floor didn’t exist. Nor does she believe the house to be haunted.\u00a0She did say that the wind made strange sounds around the roof eaves.\u00a0As for the peddler myth, I have never seen any authenticating info.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Sawyer House<\/strong><\/p>\n One story that I’ve heard over the years\u00a0is that after President Harding’s wife, Florence Harding, died in Dr. Charles Sawyer’s house, her ghost began haunting\u00a0the place.<\/p>\n However, before getting to the haunted house part, let me\u00a0start with a few\u00a0facts about Florence\u00a0Harding’s final years: After President Harding died on August 2, 1923, Mrs.\u00a0Harding returned to Washington where she “bought a house and hoped to establish a social life.” However, as more and more scandals having to do with\u00a0the Harding administration began to come to light and her health began to fail,\u00a0Florence decided, at the urging of Dr. Sawyer, to return to Marion in July of 1924. Once she was back in Marion, she took up residence at Dr. Sawyer’s White Oaks Farm, which included both the White Oaks Sanatorium as well as the Sawyer residence on Bellefontaine Avenue. (For the record, a sanatorium was not a facility for\u00a0the\u00a0insane but rather for people needing long term care, usually for tuberculosis.)\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0After Dr. Sawyer himself died in September of 1924, Florence Harding “became increasingly withdrawn an ill” and died\u00a0on November 21st, 1924 from kidney failure.<\/p>\n Whether Florence Harding actually died in the house on Bellefontaine is unclear. In an article appearing in the August 21, 2010, edition of The Marion Star<\/em>, Sherry Hall, the education specialist for the Harding Home State Memorial is quoted as saying that Florence Harding did, in fact, die at the house. However, I also\u00a0got in touch with a guy named\u00a0Bill Watts. He was friends with Charles Sawyer’s grandson, Dr.\u00a0Warren\u00a0Sawyer, and told me, “It was only folklore that she died at the Sawyer house.” In fact, he went on to say that he’d always heard Mrs. Harding had died in one of the patient wards (or bungalows, as they were called) rather than the house on Bellefontaine. In an effort to sort out the location of her death once and for all, I actually got a copy of Mrs. Harding’s death certificate, which unhelpfully listed\u00a0the location of her death as “White Oaks Farm”. So as I sit here, I have no idea if\u00a0Mrs Harding actually died in the Bellefontaine Avenue house.<\/p>\n Of course, I also asked Mr. Watts about the haunted house rumors, and this is what he had to say:<\/span><\/p>\n I have been in that house hundreds of times, day and\u00a0night, in the basement, living room, kitchen and all over the upstairs during those years. I personally have never seen a ghost nor have I ever heard Dr. Warren mention a ghost in the house.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Like so many haunted house stories, this is one that has persisted as a word-of-mouth phenomena, and I can only imagine it has done so because it concerns such a\u00a0well-known Marionite who died in a historically significant home.<\/p>\n Sources: The Haunted House on Green Camp Pike<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This last story centers on\u00a0a rather mysterious\u00a0postcard.\u00a0In the course of researching other Spooky Marion stories, I’ve run across this card a few times. Presumably, it’s from around the turn of the century, since one of the cards I’ve seen was postmarked 1912. For a card that purports to show a picture of a haunted house, it’s actually a much better photo of the road (incorrectly written\u00a0as “Greencamp Pike”) with part of a house visible on the right side. Green Camp Pike, incidentally, later became Bellefontaine Avenue. <\/span><\/p>\n And for a long time that was all I had – a rather unremarkable postcard with a very tantalizing caption.<\/span><\/p>\n But then I got a break. A woman\u00a0Shelby Clarkston-Needham<\/span>\u200e was able to purchase one of these\u00a0postcards (as well as the original photo that was used to create it) at an auction of\u00a0the belongings of a man named\u00a0D. A. Brown. The only information I could find out about D.A. Brown was that he’d had a business in the 1950s on East Church Street servicing electronic equipment and had died in 1988. In any case, below the postcard was some additional\u00a0information, presumably typed by Mr. Brown about the house:<\/p>\n One final interesting piece of information about the postcard came from a “Growing up in Marion, Ohio” Facebook group member who said that the house had belonged to one of his ancestors, a guy\u00a0named John James Jones Jr. (how’s that<\/em> for alliteration?) who died in 1883. After Mr. Jones died, his wife moved out, and the house fell into disrepair. Eventually, stories began circulating that the house was haunted. Much as I would have liked a more dramatic story about\u00a0the origin of this postcard, this simple explanation also seems the most likely.<\/p>\n So there you have it. Three haunted house stories (kind of). If anyone out there has information to add about any of these places, feel free to drop me a line or comment below.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n -Josh Simpkins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As you can probably imagine, since starting the Spooky Marion site back in 2008, I’ve heard my share of local haunted house stories. Although I’ve known about the following three places\u00a0for years, I’ve always put off writing about them. It’s not that the stories about each place are actually little more than rumors – I […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all","category-ghosts-and-hauntings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089","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=2089"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2232,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089\/revisions\/2232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Lapham-House.jpg\")
![\"Marion](\"http:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/headline-750-wide.jpg\")
![\"Sawyer](\"http:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/grunged-up-sawyer-home-smaller.jpg\")
\nAmerica’s First Ladies: A Historical Encyclopedia and Primary Document Collection of the Remarkable Women of the White House<\/em>. By Nancy Hendricks. ABC-CLIO, 2015. p. 244.
\nAmerican First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacy<\/em>. Edited by Lewis L. Gould. Routledge Press, 2001. p. 256.
\nThe Marion Star<\/em>, November 21, 1924
\nThe Marion Star<\/em>, August 21, 2010<\/p>\n![\"Green](\"http:\/\/www.spookymarion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/postcard-final.jpg\")
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