Malabar Farm State Park

Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, is where Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall in 1945 in Pulitzer Prize-winner Louis Bromfield's Big House. The state park's darker draw is the nearby Ceely Rose House, where a 23-year-old poisoned her entire family with arsenic in 1896, and where Ghost Hunters investigated reported activity in 2014.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall got married in this house. May 21, 1945, right by the double staircase in the front hall. Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who built the place, is often described as having served as best man. The wedding photos show Bogart looking nervous. Bacall looked like Bacall. The house was already famous by then, a regular stop for Hollywood royalty: James Cagney, Joan Fontaine, Kay Francis. Bromfield's 19-room Greek Revival farmhouse, which he modestly called "the Big House," sat in Pleasant Valley surrounded by working farmland. It was glamorous and grounded at the same time. That combination attracted people while Bromfield was alive. The question is whether he ever actually left after dying here in 1956.

Tour guides at Malabar Farm State Park have their stories. One described leading a group through the upstairs rooms when a visitor interrupted to point out a tall man standing in the corner, nodding along approvingly. Nobody else could see him. The guide's best guess: Bromfield, pleased with the telling of his own story. Staff have reported flickering lights throughout the Big House, and a few claim to have seen Bromfield's ghost accompanied by the shapes of his beloved bulldogs. At the park's restaurant, servers deal with glasses that shatter on their own and doors that lock behind them when no one is nearby.

But the real ghost story at Malabar Farm isn't in the Big House. It's in a smaller farmhouse about a mile away that belonged to the Rose family in the 1890s.

In 1896, a 23-year-old woman named Ceely Rose poisoned her entire family with arsenic. Her parents, David and Rebecca, and her brother Walter all died. The motive, as far as anyone could piece it together: Ceely had developed feelings for a 16-year-old neighbor named Guy Berry, and her family disapproved. Whether they actively interfered or Ceely just believed they would, she put rat poison in the family's food. She stood trial but was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent the rest of her life at the Lima State Hospital for the Insane, where she died at 61.

The Rose house is now part of Malabar Farm State Park, and it has a reputation. Mark Sebastian Jordan, who wrote a book about the murders, has described the feeling of walking into certain rooms as "almost like walking into static." The house draws people who claim they can sense Ceely, her parents, or all of them at once. On nights with a full moon, visitors have reported seeing a woman's face peering out of an upstairs window.

Ghost Hunters filmed at Malabar Farm in 2014 for an episode called "Family Plot" on Syfy. The crew investigated both the Ceely Rose House and Bromfield's Big House, looking for evidence of the reported activity. Every October, the park's timber-frame barn hosts the Ceely Rose Play, a dramatization of the murders that's become a regional tradition. Two companion plays, "Phoebe Wise" and "Louie," round out a trilogy of local ghost stories performed at the farm.

The park covers over 900 acres of rolling farmland in Richland County. You can tour the Big House, hike the trails, and visit the Ceely Rose House. Bromfield's vision of sustainable agriculture is preserved alongside the ghost stories, which makes Malabar Farm one of the few haunted locations where the living legacy is arguably more interesting than the dead one.