In Brief
The Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio kept a ghost long before it kept books. In 1915 a student named James Thurber heard footsteps circle the dining-room table and run up the stairs, and turned the night into a famous comic story. The house still reports the sounds.
The Full Story
The Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, at 77 Jefferson Avenue, owes its most famous ghost story to the boy who once slept upstairs. In 1915, James Thurber — a student at Ohio State, years before he became a New Yorker humorist and cartoonist — woke to footsteps circling the dining-room table below him, then running up the stairs toward his door. He got up to look. No one was there.
He turned the night into "The Night the Ghost Got In," collected in his 1933 book My Life and Hard Times, in which the narrator hears something "walking quickly around the dining room table" at 1:15 in the morning. Thurber moved the address in the printed story so he wouldn't frighten whoever was living at 77 Jefferson next.
The ground beneath the house has older reasons to be uneasy. Before the Queen Anne Victorian went up in 1873, the lot held the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum, which burned in November 1868; 6 women in nearby rooms died of smoke inhalation, though the retellings round it up to 7. Decades later, in 1904, a downtown jeweler named Thomas Tracy Tress died in an upstairs bedroom from a gun he believed was unloaded. His Knights Templar funeral was held inside the house days afterward.
The house then slid through a long decline as a music school, a beauty shop, and a boarding house, and faced demolition in the 1970s before it was restored and reopened in 1984 as a literary center and museum. The same building that now hosts author readings also books paranormal teams for overnight investigations, and Syfy's Ghost Hunters once filmed an episode here called "It's Time to Get Touched," after an investigator felt something tap his shoulder. Staff and visitors report a broken clock that once chimed loudly enough to send an employee out of her chair, picture-frame glass shattering, dogs growling at particular furniture, and a man standing behind people in a mirror. "I don't believe in ghosts," interim director Kathy Matthews said in 2025, "although I kind of wish I did."
The third floor is a writer-in-residence apartment, where visiting authors sleep for weeks at a time. In 2022, a local reporter spent a night alone up there and heard a faint creaking begin around 9:30, drifting between the kitchen and the hallway, until it was coming every 10 or 20 seconds for half an hour, and then it stopped. Asked whether he could account for the sounds, he said: "Do I have an explanation for them, though? Also, definitely not."
