Spread Eagle Tavern & Inn

Olevia Nicholas hanged herself from her third-floor bedroom window at this 1837 Federal-style tavern in Hanoverton after a failed acting career in New York. Guests in the Jefferson Room report sheets pulled off the bed at night, freezing showers for male guests, and rattling doorknobs in empty hallways.

Olevia Nicholas came home to Hanoverton with a broken heart, moved back into her third-floor bedroom at her family's tavern, and hanged herself from the window with a bedsheet. Guests who sleep in that room, now called the Jefferson Room, keep waking up to find their sheets pulled off the bed.

The Spread Eagle Tavern sits on Plymouth Street in a village so small you could miss it driving through Columbiana County. Will Rhodes built it in 1837 using canal workers who'd lost their jobs in the Bank Panic. They knew what they were doing. The building is one of eastern Ohio's best surviving examples of Federal Period architecture, with three floors, twelve fireplaces, raised-wood window casings, and carved mantels designed from pattern books by the architect Asher Benjamin.

The Nicholas family took over the property around 1870. Olevia, one of the daughters, left for New York City to pursue an acting career. When her fiance abandoned her, she returned to the tavern depressed and, according to her sister Grace's diary, increasingly unwell. Grace wrote extensively about Olevia's decline. The story ended at the third-floor window.

Staff say Olevia has a preference. She doesn't care for men staying in her old room. Male guests report the shower turning freezing cold without warning. Both men and women wake to the sensation of covers being slowly tugged away. Doorknobs rattle in the middle of the night as if someone is trying to get in, though the hallway is always empty.

She's not the only presence. An eight-year-old girl, believed to have died in a fire at the building next door sometime in the 1800s, has been spotted running through the halls. A previous manager described her as playing "like she doesn't even know she's dead." If you want the best chance of experiencing something, staff recommend the Van Buren suite over the Jefferson Room.

The building's history goes deeper than its ghosts. During renovation, the owners discovered an underground tunnel running beneath Plymouth Street. Nearly every building on this block was part of the Underground Railroad, and the Spread Eagle was no exception. Enslaved people hid in a secret upstairs room accessible only through a second-story window, then traveled by canal boat to Canada. The reinforced tunnel is visible in the basement.

Across the street, the oldest home in Hanoverton (built 1817) once belonged to Dr. James Robertson, the only doctor in the county. He smuggled bodies from the local cemetery through an upstairs window at night to study anatomy. A table he used for that work eventually ended up at the Spread Eagle property (it's now at the Hanover House across the parking lot).

Owner David Johnson has said "every neighbor on this street has a ghost story." Given what happened on Plymouth Street over the past two centuries, that tracks. The Sandy Valley Masons organized on the third floor in 1863. Local folklore places Abraham Lincoln's stagecoach at the front door. The guest rooms are named for presidents: Jefferson, Van Buren, Lincoln.

Downstairs, Gaver's Rathskeller has 12-foot vaulted brick ceilings and hand-chiseled stone walls. Upstairs, Olevia's room has fresh flowers and a bedsheet she apparently considers optional.