The Norwood Haunting
by Steven Miller
I was out camping this weekend, and my friend Nate told the following purportedly true (warning: spooky) campfire story. Since it is still close to the Halloween season, I will share the account given to me without any exaggeration of facts, but with some thematic adjectives added. It was a cold, dark, autumn evening and we were circled close around the campfire in the middle of the woods in Brown County state park…
Nate moved into an old house in here Cincinnati a few months ago. We don’t have a perfect history in our county’s auditor’s site, so with houses older than 100 years, we don’t know exactly how old they are, but it was probably built around 1870. Nate lives alone. Ever since he moved in, he has been occasionally hearing sudden and loud noises coming from above - thump… thump… THUMP… He describes it as a 170lb person stomping around in his attic. One friend who was also out camping with us was over at his house in the guest room, and she reported that she also heard weird noises and that her purse spontaneously fell off the chair in the middle of the night, waking her up. At this point, several of our friends around the fire confirm that they, too heard such noises. Many are too scared to return to Nate’s house.
At this point in the story, I’m thinking “ok, it’s probably acorns landing on the roof, ventilation expanding, or some other common cause of weird noises”, even though Nate (a professional handyman) is adamant it’s not simple old-house noises. So, after a few weeks of the creepy noises, Nate decides to go look more carefully in the attic. Squirreled away, hidden in a low, dusty corner of his dark attic he finds something. It’s a framed and decorated US Navy WW2 uniform, missing a name. Nate swears that he felt a “presence” looking over him as he discovered the uniform. At this point, Nate shares a picture on his phone of the uniform, and other friends who have already been involved have obviously seen it before. Nate decides that he ought to treat this artifact with the utmost respect, a haunting notwithstanding.
Nate contacts the previous owners, who lived in the house for 17 years. They deny any knowledge of the uniform, and do not mention anything about a haunting. Nate mentions to us sitting around the fire that he researched property law regarding hauntings, and that there is precedent in some states that requires the disclosure of a haunting, but Ohio is not one of them. Seeking more information, Nate finds a WW2 historian online and meets up with them to discuss the uniform. The expert (unaware of any ‘haunting’ narrative) says that this is a uniform used by B2-bomber squadrons in the Pacific. This could have been same uniform that was worn by the pilots of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nate has donated the uniform to a local museum. One of our friends at the campfire that night told her story about going to Nate’s and burning sage. She climbs up the rickey drop-down ladder into the dark attic. Nate pointing out the corner where the uniform was discovered, she feels that she is being watched by an other-worldly force. In the corner of the attic, crouched low, she burns the sage over where the uniform used to lay. The spicy smell fills the attic, and they say a few prayers. That was just a few days ago. Nate is hoping the spirt can finally find some rest. Personally a non-believer of ghosts and just a few days after Halloween, I couldn’t help but suspect that I’m having my leg pulled. Most of my friends around the fire seem to accept the haunting as real, having been to Nate’s and witnessed a disturbance for themselves.
It strikes me as odd how sometimes it can feel like suddenly everyone is aware of a concept that I had never previously heard about, then it starts showing up everywhere. Have you even had a friend use a word you did not know, then you start to hear it every day? That’s how I felt about all my friends suddenly believing that ghosts or hauntings are real. After mentioning this point, Nate tells us where he lives - mound view drive. This is the location of known Native American ceremonial mound
By coincidence at a silent auction I attended a few weeks back, I was talking with an archeologist who specializes in Native American history. His job is to work with engineering firms on infrastructure projects in order to inform them how to avoid disrupting ancient artifacts and historic locations. The archeologist was telling me about this mound that he lives by, the same mound that I would later find out my friend Nate lives next to. Archeologists have found ancient artifacts buried around the mound that have been traced to origins from all over the Americas, suggesting that Cincinnati was a trade center for ancient Americans. He goes on to report that recent evidence obtained by collecting sample artifacts from other, known trading centers around America is now suggesting a different history. Artifacts were found to travel to this mound, but not away. This mound may not be a trade center after all, but rather a holy site, where thousands of years ago ancient, Native American pilgrims traveled, leaving tribute artifacts.
I don’t know what to make of all this. Watching horror movies, I find myself criticizing the protagonists for not running away sooner. But how could Nate really leave? He has to stay unless he intends to sell the house for a loss. Could it be possible that Nate could fall victim to a paranormal attack, and it would be explained away as a home intrusion, mental illness, or accident? It’s a strange coincidence on many levels, and calls into question how much do we, as humans, really know about our world, and its history.