The Hamilton County Courthouse has a rich and somewhat scary history. In search of a Halloween story, WVXU sought out resident courthouse historian, Judge Melba Marsh, who was willing to relive some of her fears and take the station on a tour.
But first, some backstory...
Three courthouses have burned to the ground over the course of Cincinnati's lifetime, and it seems many of the stories of ghosts and hauntings past have taken up space in the current building, according to the Hamilton County Law Library.
Here are a few:
The morgue
We enter the south courtyard, now enclosed, and used a judges' parking lot. Marsh explains night guards have heard running when there isn’t any. It’s also the site of the old morgue and the place where a prisoner was killed while trying to break out.
“We’ve had someone who wanted to do a paranormal activity in this area. We’ve never allowed it and we thought, 'Why invite problems?' " asks Marsh.
The area is not too far away from an elevator that Judge Marsh despises. She calls it the “riding coffin.” But after a quick and somewhat joking scream, she gets on and we travel to the seventh floor to see the old jail. “Jack,” as it’s called, was open from 1919 to 1993. Very little has changed since the last prisoner left.
The old jail 'Jack'
Marsh says besides maintenance people, she is probably the most regular person who comes up here — about every two to three months.
“I don’t go into the hole,” says Marsh, pointing down a long hallway to an area that used to be used for recreation. “I just don’t like the feel of it. It’s not open air. It’s dark and I don’t like dark, clammy places.”
The judge recalls one incident when she went up there to retrieve some papers and a thread spool fell from the ceiling in a room she hadn’t entered.
She doesn’t go as far as calling the old jail haunted.
“Very eerie. Because if you stand here and you think about it, it hasn’t changed since the last prisoners were here and this is what they saw.”
The law library
Guards routinely walk through the law library at night, using only their flashlights. This is where more than one has heard ghost typewriters, papers shuffling and seen books on the floor that nobody remembers putting there.
High up on the wall, Judge Marsh points to a couple of dark fingerprints which nobody can remember dusting. “We keep records. If we dusted for prints, we would know who they belong to. Now here’s another strange thing about these prints — they have been scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. Why do they keep coming back?”
One explanation could be there was a jail break in 1972 and the prisoners came through the library, but that was on the other side of the room, not this side.
