In Brief
For more than 150 years the limestone dungeon beneath the Sandusky County courthouse in Fremont, Ohio sat sealed and forgotten. In 2013 the county reopened it for tours, and that is when the voices started, along with the motion alarms that go off at 2 a.m. over an empty hallway.
The Full Story
The Sandusky County Historic Jail in Fremont, Ohio runs guided tours down into a dungeon cut from solid limestone. Around 2 a.m., the building's motion alarm trips near the dungeon door, and every time, the security cameras show an empty hallway. Some nights whatever set it off climbs the first-floor courthouse steps. Other nights it is the fire alarm that gets pulled, with no one standing anywhere near it.
People keep seeing a figure in a brimmed hat on a bench on the first floor of the courthouse. On the tours, visitors say something unseen tugs at their hair and their clothes. One woman, looking back through a photo from her tour, found what looked like a man standing directly behind her. She had been alone.
None of it was happening while the dungeon was sealed.
The county carved the chamber out of bedrock in the early 1840s, after prisoners kept escaping the above-ground jails with their dirt floors and wooden barriers. This one was different: walls, ceiling, and floor of solid limestone, no windows at all. The men held inside saw almost no daylight, and the only light they got came from kerosene lamps. The first of them was George Thompson, a hotel employee who had murdered a young woman. On July 12, 1844, he was hanged — the first execution Sandusky County ever recorded.
The dungeon ran for more than a decade before the county closed it, the conditions judged inhumane. Then it was sealed, and for over 150 years nobody went down. The courthouse sits on top of part of it to this day. People who tour the chamber now describe the same thing. "It's like stepping through a time portal," one account runs. "It literally feels like you stepped back into the 1840s."
In 2013, the county reopened the dungeon for tours, and that is when courthouse staff started hearing voices and footsteps moving through the building with no one in it. They were the ones who called in a paranormal group, the Ohio Researchers of Banded Spirits, and the county describes what the investigators collected as "off the charts." The evidence is what turned the dungeon into the site of public paranormal tours.
For more than a century, nobody told a ghost story about the dungeon. Nobody was going down there anymore to tell one. The reports only started once the door was open again.
