In Brief
Two ghosts share Malabar Farm near Lucas, Ohio. In the Big House, where Bogart and Bacall married, a piano plays on its own and staff say the novelist who built it never left. Down the lane sits the farmhouse where Ceely Rose poisoned her family in 1896.
The Full Story
The Big House at Malabar Farm, a white Greek Revival mansion near Lucas, Ohio, has a piano that plays when no one is at it. The lights come on by themselves. Closet doors that were shut turn up open. The man who built the place, the staff say, never really left.
His name was Louis Bromfield, a Pulitzer-winning novelist who put up the house in 1939 and lived in it until he died there in 1956. For a few years it was one of the most glamorous addresses in Ohio. On May 21, 1945, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married in the front hallway, a three-minute ceremony with Bromfield standing as best man.
Years later, the Ohio Exploration Society spent a night inside. In a bedroom that had belonged to Bromfield's daughter Anne, they logged a cold spot, and an infrared camera caught a tall man in pants and boots in the doorway. Their recorders came back with 15 voices. Among the words: "Anne." "You're welcome." "I'm dead."
The celebrated haunting is the one with the movie stars. The older one waits just down the lane, in a plain farmhouse that stood here long before the park did.
In the summer of 1896, a 23-year-old named Ceely Rose lived in that house with her family. She had fixed on a young neighbor named Guy Berry, who wanted nothing to do with her, and she decided her family was the thing in her way. So she stirred arsenic rat poison into their food.
Her father, David, died on June 30. Her brother, Walter, died on the Fourth of July. Her mother, Rebecca, survived the first dose, suspected her own daughter, and was poisoned again. She died on July 19.
A historian named Mark Sebastian Jordan, who spent years on the case, put her motive in one line. "The only thing that really ultimately mattered to her," he said, "was getting what she wanted and everyone else be damned."
Ceely confessed, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and spent the rest of her life in the Lima State Hospital. She died there in 1934 and was buried roughly a hundred miles from the family she'd killed.
Both houses stand in the same park today, a short walk apart. A television crew came through in 2014 and investigated each one. The mansion keeps a famous man people are happy to believe never left. The farmhouse down the lane keeps the daughter who poisoned everyone else who lived in it.
