In Brief
At Prospect Place, a 29-room mansion in Trinway, Ohio, the abolitionist who built it as an Underground Railroad stop still walks the staircase. The barn is the hostile part. And in a house built never to burn, a ghost-hunting device answered with one word: Blaze.
The Full Story
The renovation crews who first went to work inside Prospect Place, a 29-room mansion in Trinway, Ohio, kept meeting the same man on the main staircase. People say he's George Adams, the abolitionist who built the house, and he's the gentle one. He turns up in the parlor too, where the air goes thick with cigar smoke and the room fills with the clink of glasses, as if a party were still running without him.
Adams put the house up in 1856 to keep a promise. He'd told his second wife, Mary, that he'd build her a castle. The Italianate mansion he raised had indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water fed by a copper cistern on the second floor, and ducts that pushed cooled basement air through the walls — decades before any of that was ordinary.
It was also a stop on the Underground Railroad. Adams and his brother ran a flour mill and a boat yard on the Ohio and Erie Canal, and their boats, coming back empty from selling flour in New Orleans, returned with escaped slaves hidden beneath the decks. The small room perched on the roof, the belvedere, worked as a lookout, and as a signal to people moving in the dark that they had reached somewhere safe.
The barn is where the house turns mean. Investigators call it the most hostile spot on the property, and report angry men's voices, heavy footsteps, an oppressive presence in the air. The story is that a slave catcher was hanged out there. Nothing backs it up — no court record, no newspaper — and one account that tells the tale admits there are "only rumours passed through the generations." It's still the place people won't stand in alone after the lights go down.
Then there's the fire. The first house Adams built on this spot never survived it. By long local tradition a bricklayer named George Blackburn set it ablaze to make more work for himself, though he was never charged. So Adams rebuilt, this time packing 2 inches of mortar between the floors to make the place nearly impossible to burn.
Generations later, paranormal teams have carried recorders and an Ovilus through those rooms. By their accounts, a fire alarm has gone off on its own and fallen silent the moment the host stepped into the room. And one night the Ovilus answered a question with a single word: Blaze.
In a house built so it could never burn.
