Butler County Courthouse

A night watchman murdered in the 1860s reportedly walks the halls of this 1889 Second Empire courthouse between midnight and 1 a.m. The building also served as a temporary morgue during the 1913 Great Flood, and a 2022 paranormal investigation captured doors closing on their own and objects being thrown on the third floor.

Sometime in the 1860s, the night watchman of the old Butler County Courthouse was found dead in the Treasurer's Office. The initial ruling was suicide. Then someone noticed the safes were empty. The investigation shifted: this was a robbery, and the killers, some of whom had ties to county government and the new courthouse project, had staged the scene to cover a murder. When the current courthouse opened on the same site in 1889, staff almost immediately began reporting a figure walking the corridors between midnight and 1 a.m. The watchman, apparently, kept showing up for his shift.

The building was designed by architect David W. Gibbs of Toledo in Second Empire style, with Italianate features, Corinthian columns, and a mansard roof. Gibbs also designed the Wyoming State Capitol Building. The original structure featured a four-tiered, domed tower capped with a statue of Justice. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 22, 1981.

The courthouse has absorbed an unusual amount of tragedy for a county government building. On a night in 1912, a fire tore through the tower. Three Hamilton firefighters died when the clock tower collapsed, sending the massive bell crashing through each floor of the building. The fire destroyed the cupola, the tower, and the Goddess of Justice statue. Local architect Frederick Mueller rebuilt the tower with a new dome, though that dome was also removed in 1926 after a lightning strike. Then, during the Great Flood of 1913, one of the worst natural disasters in Ohio history, the courthouse served as a temporary morgue for ten days while flood victims were brought in for identification.

On July 23, 2022, the Spiritual Realm Paranormal Investigators (an eleven-member team founded in 2013 by medium Ashlee St. Denis) spent eight hours inside the courthouse. Their four sensitives reported distinct impressions on different floors: sharp abdominal pain and nausea on the second floor, anxiety and sadness on the third, dread and heaviness on the fourth. The basement produced nausea alongside intense electromagnetic field readings.

The physical evidence was more interesting than the emotional impressions. Doors on the fourth floor closed by themselves during the investigation. A hallway light turned off with no one near the switch. A flashlight was knocked off a table in the third-floor courtroom. Small objects, a paperclip and a thumbtack, struck a door from no identifiable source. When investigators asked questions aloud, a motion-activated ball responded by lighting up on command. Team member Brian Smith noted that "a true investigation is nothing like the ghost-hunting shows on television."

The sensitives also picked up on what they described as a possible shooting in the building. Courthouse employees have passed down stories about a shooting during a trial in the historic third-floor courtroom sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, though specific records haven't been confirmed.

Staff who work late continue to report shadowy figures in the hallways and footsteps in empty rooms. The building's history makes the reports hard to dismiss: a murdered watchman, three dead firefighters, days as a flood morgue. Few courthouses in Ohio have absorbed that much death within their walls.