Nestled in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood, right across from the West Side Market, is the West 25th train station on the corner of Lorain and Abbey Avenues. It’s one of the city’s busiest rapid transit stops.
But before this site was a public transportation hub, it was a fire engine house.
And as the rumor goes, a haunted one at that. It was built on a cemetery.
"In 1904, they tore it down to build a new firehouse on the site, and that's when they rediscovered the cemetery," said William Krejci, a local historian and author. "They uncovered caskets underneath it, and they opened one of them up. According to the newspaper article, there was a doctor and a dentist who lived in the area, and they examined the remains, determined it was a woman about age thirty. She still had red hair clinging to her scalp."
Once the bodies were uncovered, they were moved to another cemetery.
Or, at least most of them were.
Right: Google Maps
"Well, I guess they didn't move everybody," Krejci said. "So it's possible there may still be very there very well maybe people still buried there because Gehring Avenue now extends across it."
Most of those remains were relocated just a few blocks away to Monroe Street Cemetery: one of the oldest burial sites in Cleveland, dating back to 1836.
Among those moved here from their original resting place was a Revolutionary War veteran and a 22-year-old mother who died in childbirth.
"Benevolent she lived, virtuous she died, now lies at rest, her infant by her side," reads Adeline Pelton's epitaph, engraved in weathered sandstone.
The headstone's material is a key identifying feature to tell the difference between the older graves from the newer ones; they're made of sandstone instead of marble.
"These were done before the opening of the or right around the time of the opening of the Ohio and Erie Canal," Krejci said. "So we were at this time just transitioning from sandstone to marble, which we can now bring in a lot easier because we can bring it here by boat."
The idea that some other bodies remained trapped, forgotten and rotting below a fire house naturally lent itself to stories of paranormal encounters among the firemen, who described slammed doors and rattling window, restless horses, or even skeletal hands grabbing them.
Here’s what one told the Cleveland Leader in 1903:
“I was on watch between 12 and 2 o’clock in the morning. When I went down into the basement to look after the heater, I reached the bottom of the stairs and was about to light the gas, when I was startled by hearing a voice which sounded gruff say, ‘What time is it? I went upstairs, and getting one of the other fellows, descended into the basement again. We expected to find a man sleeping in the cellar, but to our surprise when we lighted the gas, the basement was empty. There was no chance for anyone who was hiding in the cellar to escape by the windows, as they are very small, high up from the floor and barred. The only entrance into the cellar was by the stairway, but no one could have gone out that way as I was at the top. The peculiar sounding voice seemed to come from a box where we kept shavings. I have never been able to figure out my experience."
Hauntings aside, these forgotten cemeteries are not uncommon across the region, or even the rest of the East Coast.
Krejci wrote the book Buried Beneath Cleveland: Lost Cemeteries of Cuyahoga County. It tells the story of this and other burial grounds that were relocated to make room for urban sprawl across the county, more than 60, by Krejci’s count, using old maps and title transfers documented by the county recorder to identify those sites.
"Some people find it a particularly spooky subject and I understand why," he said. "But I find cemeteries by and large as a place of tranquil reflection, statuary. The monuments are really quite beautiful."
But most important are the stories, he said. Because beyond the eeriness, beyond the tales of ghosts, there’s real people whose lives Krejci doesn’t want to see forgotten.
"These cemeteries don’t exist anymore," Krejci said. "Their graves, there is almost no trace whatsoever. Their monuments are gone, their names have been almost completely erased from history. So I say this; they don't have a headstone. Let this book be their headstone. Let the stories that it tells, let that be their epitaph.
"Give them that, give them their dignity back."
