In Brief
Three employees at Punderson Manor near Cleveland watched a man in lumberjack clothes hang from the dining-room ceiling for three hours, until sunrise faded him. But the ghost guests ask for by name is gentler: Pundy, the settler who named the lake and never left.
The Full Story
Three employees at Punderson Manor, a 1920s English Tudor lodge a half hour east of Cleveland, Ohio, once stood near the front desk and watched a man hang from the ceiling. It was the late 1970s. He wore the clothes of a lumberjack, and he turned slowly at the end of a rope in the dining room, now the lounge, his fingers twitching. They watched him for nearly three hours, until the rising sun thinned him out of the air and he was gone.
People tell that story about Punderson more than any other. But the ghost guests ask for by name is a gentler one. They call him Pundy.
Pundy is Lemuel Punderson, who came from New Haven, Connecticut in 1806 and settled by the big pond that still carries his name. He married, built a cabin, and died of malaria in 1822, 50 years before his wife did. Guests say he flicks the lights on and off; the staff treat him as harmless, almost a host. Wikipedia notes, flatly, that visitors "have reported over the years that Lemuel Punderson's ghost is haunting the place."
Not everything in the building is so kind. Room 231, the Windsor Suite, is the old tower master bedroom and the most-reported room in the lodge. A heavy fan once sailed across it toward a banquet manager. Doors open and slam shut on their own, the Jacuzzi fires up with no one near it, and guests feel the mattress sink as if someone has sat down on the edge of the bed. One woman lying there couldn't get up. "Get me off this bed," she told her husband. "They're holding me down and I can't move." He leaned over and lifted her with no effort at all. Another former employee woke to a bearded man in shabby old clothes at the foot of her bed; when she tried to shove him off, her foot went straight through him, and he stood and walked into the wall.
Two park rangers climbing the spiral staircase by the lobby felt the cold come down hard and heard a woman laughing somewhere down the hall. "For a second, it engulfed us," one of them said. "Then it quickly went down the hallway and stopped." On that same staircase, people describe a woman in an old-fashioned dress and a blue-gray cape, sometimes gathering children into her cloak before she dissolves into mist.
Lemuel Punderson died in 1822. The mansion guests sleep in wasn't built until the 1920s, a full century after he was gone, and he never saw a single room of it. He gave the lake his name and left long before the first guest checked in. They ask for him by name anyway.
