In Brief
The Sedamsville Rectory above the Ohio River in Cincinnati has a rap sheet: a priest killed by a train in the lore, a dog-fighting ring in the basement on the record. National ghost crews come for the growling. The priest who blessed it says nothing's there.
The Full Story
The doors at the bottom of the basement stairs in the Sedamsville Rectory are scored with scratch marks, and the people who go down there report growling, barking, the whimper of a dog. The rectory sits on a steep hill above the Ohio River in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the sounds line up with what the room was once used for.
In the 1980s, while the old priests' house stood empty, someone ran an illegal dog-fighting ring in that basement. That part isn't lore. When Ghost Adventures investigated the building, the crew turned up dog-fighting records tied to the property.
The rectory went up around 1891 to house the priests of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the parish the German Catholics of Sedamsville had organized in 1878. It served the church for a century, until the parish closed in 1989. Four levels, more than 6,000 square feet, red brick and original woodwork and a front porch looking down the hill.
The signature ghost is a clergyman. As the lore has it, a priest named Father Donald MacLeod was struck and killed by a train near the rectory in the late 1800s, on his way to comfort a dying woman, and is seen along the tracks in his collar. No record of him has ever surfaced — no death notice, no diocesan file, nothing to confirm the man ever lived.
Ghost Adventures filmed an episode here in 2012, and the crew brought in a priest, Father Jack Ashcraft, to bless the house on camera. Partway through, one of the men renovating the building, Tim Brazeal, caught the smell of something burning. He grew sick and then aggressive, and walked out, telling the priest he did not want him in the rectory at all.
The people closest to the building are the least convinced. Ashcraft said flatly that he did not believe anything was going on in the property; what the show sold as an exorcism, he said, was a routine house blessing. The owner, John Klosterman, says he won't believe a ghost story until one comes up and bites him. And a man named Chris Caine rented the place from 2006 to 2007, lived a full year inside it, and felt nothing.
The investigators who only stay a night come away differently. Dave Spinks got a scratch on his face within ten minutes of walking in. And on the back of a colleague, the marks that rose up while he was inside crossed into the shape of an upside-down cross.
