Edwin Shaw Hospital

This former tuberculosis hospital operated from 1915 to 2009, with 246 patients buried in an on-site cemetery. Staff reported hearing meals being served in the empty cafeteria and children's voices in the corridors of the former orphanage wing, and a 2017 paranormal investigation captured unexplained breathing and tunnel noises before the complex was demolished.

The cafeteria at Edwin Shaw Hospital had been empty for years, but people kept hearing lunch. Trays clattering, chairs scraping across the floor, the murmur of conversation. Staff would open the door and find the room dark and vacant. It happened so regularly that employees stopped checking. The sounds of a meal being served in an abandoned cafeteria became just another part of working at the old tuberculosis hospital in Lakemore.

Edwin Shaw started as the Springfield Lake Sanitarium in 1915, built on a hundred acres overlooking Springfield Lake. Five Ohio counties (Columbiana, Mahoning, Portage, Stark, and Summit) pooled resources to construct a seventy-two-bed facility for $225,000, responding to a combined five thousand tuberculosis cases in the region. Summit County took sole ownership in 1920 after the other counties sold their interests, and the sanitarium was renamed Edwin Shaw Hospital in 1934 in honor of Edwin Coupland Shaw, a B.F. Goodrich executive who had served on the Board of Trustees since 1918.

The children's wing is where the story gets harder to read. Sunshine Cottage opened in 1922 as a one-hundred-bed annex for pediatric tuberculosis patients. The cottage had murals of fairy tale characters on the walls and maintained a schedule of rest and education alongside treatment. Many of the children housed there didn't survive. Two hundred and forty-six tuberculosis victims, including men, women, and children who died between 1915 and 1922, are buried in a small cemetery hidden on the hospital grounds. Children Services took over Sunshine Cottage in 1947 and expanded it into Sunshine Village in the 1960s, housing orphans and abused or neglected children until it closed in 1985.

Most of the reported activity centered on Sunshine Village. Staff and visitors described ghostly humming in the corridors, and the voices of children. Doors throughout the hospital opened and closed by themselves. Phantom footsteps echoed down hallways with no one in sight. In the wards that had housed tuberculosis patients, the sounds of coughing and labored breathing carried through rooms that had been empty for decades.

In February 2017, the Malvern Exploration and Paranormal Society investigated the facility before its scheduled demolition. The five-member team (Brandon Greavu, Jacob Andrews, Seth Richards, Christian Grimm, and Joey Crowl) reported heavy, human-like breathing coming from behind a closed door with no physical source on the other side. In the basement tunnel system connecting the hospital's buildings, they heard footsteps and small knocks from above and deeper in the passages. A loud bang, like something substantial falling over, echoed from further in the tunnels and sent the team running. They captured what they described as photographic anomalies. The Ohio Exploration Society had visited in 2004 but reported no activity during their time on the grounds.

As tuberculosis rates declined following the development of streptomycin in 1946, the hospital shifted missions. It added skilled nursing in 1961, alcoholism treatment in 1974, physical rehabilitation in 1977, and by 1986 a $6.7 million expansion made it Ohio's largest head-injury rehabilitation center. The facility also opened Challenge Golf Course in the early 1990s, described as the first golf course in the world designed specifically for people with disabilities. Operations at Lakemore ceased on December 3, 2009, when inpatient services moved to the former Fallsview Psychiatric Hospital in nearby Cuyahoga Falls. The entire complex was demolished in the summer of 2017. The cemetery with its 246 graves remains on the property, which Summit County has proposed repurposing for addiction treatment facilities.