Cincinnati Music Hall

Built on top of a pauper's cemetery, Cincinnati Music Hall has yielded human bones during every excavation since the 1870s, including 207 pounds of remains found in an elevator shaft in 1988. The late Cincinnati Pops conductor Erich Kunzel described the spirits as "basically quite friendly" after working alone in the building at 3 a.m.

"They are definitely in this building, some sort of spirits," the late Cincinnati Pops conductor Erich Kunzel once said. "If anybody thinks I'm nuts, come here at 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning." Kunzel spent countless nights at Cincinnati Music Hall working on programs and believed the spirits were, in his words, "basically quite friendly." That's a generous read on a building constructed on top of a mass grave.

Music Hall sits on the site of a former Potter's Field, a pauper's cemetery for unclaimed and unwanted dead. An 1830 map shows the south structure built directly over it. Before that, the site also served as an orphan asylum and a Civil War military hospital. Human bones have been found every time anyone has dug into the ground here. When the predecessor Exposition Buildings were constructed in 1875, workers digging an elevator shaft uncovered, according to architect George Roth, "more than a barrelful of skulls and bones." Those remains were placed under the floor in another section of the building.

The discoveries kept coming. A 1927 expansion uncovered three coffins, which were reburied in the basement. That same dig revealed 65 additional graves in a section workers took to calling the "Valley of Death." In May 1988, 207 pounds of bones encased in concrete were found in an elevator shaft and transferred to the University of Cincinnati for anthropological study. The bones trace back to multiple eras: Potter's Field burials, victims of the Moselle steamboat disaster of April 25, 1838 (a boiler explosion that killed over 150 of the 250-300 passengers aboard), and possibly patients from the military hospital.

The ghost reports go back to the Exposition Buildings era. A night watchman in 1875 documented his experiences for the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper. He described "the weirdest and strangest noises," including rappings on the ceiling, under the floor, on doors and windows. He heard "the sound of stealthy footfalls" and "the crash of heavy timbers." One snowy night, loud knocking came from outside a door, but when he opened it, there were no footprints in the snow. He described an "icy chill" and goose flesh sensations. The activity ceased during Exposition events and returned when the building went quiet.

Modern accounts follow similar patterns. Employees report hearing music from empty rooms and closed wings. A medium once claimed the sound of a man "marching and dragging a musket" across the wooden floor was a soldier from the military hospital. Patricia Beggs, the Cincinnati Opera CEO, relayed a story from the 1990s: an employee brought his three-year-old son Charlie to the empty hall. The boy looked up at Box 9 and asked, "Daddy, who's that man in the box?" When told no one was there, the child insisted, "He's waving at me right now." Box 9 was the regular seat of conductor Jesus Lopez-Cobos.

Night watchman John Engst, who worked at Music Hall for years, documented a different kind of encounter. He heard unexplained music coming from the elevator shaft on the first floor. The physical sensation lasted nearly two weeks: "my whole body tingling," he wrote in a handwritten account.

The Travel Channel named Music Hall one of America's most terrifying places. Ghost Hunters featured it in a 2014 episode. The Cincinnati Arts organization offers official ghost tours and paranormal investigation nights with electromagnetic field detectors, digital thermometers, and ion field monitors. The bones beneath the building belong to people no one claimed in life, and the building keeps reminding everyone they're there.