Editor's Note: This story is the fourth in a five-part series exploring the haunted tales of Athens. The Post's culture staff writes from one person's point of view and journeys through coffins, ghost stories and The Ridges to declare fact from fiction.
The tale of the five area cemeteries forming a pentagram around Athens was the first haunted Athens story I heard as a freshman. And I have listened to the tale repeated by believers a dozen times since. This one must be true, I thought.
I headed back down Court Street to the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, 65 N. Court St. I went straight to the well-worn spook file from a back-of-the-room file cabinet and shuffled through bad photocopies and sheets of notebook paper of illegible handwriting.
My research produced the names of not only the five points of the pentagram but also of 12 different Athens area cemeteries. According to October 1978, 1995 and 1996 Post articles and the Fall 1973 issue of Athens Magazine, they are: Simms, Peach Ridge, Hanning, Hunter, Slaughter, Cuckler, Haines, Zion, Cutler, Mansfield, Augustine and Snowden cemeteries.
Some articles reported either Simms or Hanning cemetery as the 13th most haunted place on earth and cited a British Society of Psychical Research as the source of the information.
Bewildered, I called R.J. Abraham, former instructor of the Haunted Athens Communiversity classes, who now teaches periodic workshops about the legends.
A total of 270 cemeteries actually exist in Athens because families would bury their dead on their own property, Abraham said.
He wondered why the W. State St. cemetery was not part of the formation, which is one of the most haunted cemeteries on earth, according to the British Society of Psychical Research.
Abraham theorized that the legend began after the 1975 Wilson Hall suicide of a superstitious student.
Someone just plotted these cemeteries and it formed a pentagram
Abraham said, and Wilson Hall was right smack dab in the center.
I hung up the phone and headed over to Alden Library's archives where Doug McCabe, curator of manuscripts and self-proclaimed skeptic, pulled out a 1947 Athens County map and an alphabetical listing of area cemeteries. Scanning the page, I found small pencil marks on the map next to the names of five cemeteries.
The cemeteries graphed out not a pentagram, but a lopsided-square.
Realizing that my research was producing no conclusive results, I called the last place that might be able to answer my questions: the British Society of Psychical Research.
Across the Atlantic, a British voice with the refined accent of a BBC commentator answered my call.
We never rank places. That's just not what we do said Peter Johnson, the secretary of the society. We do publish research and fund it.
At my persistence he checked the files to see if the society had ever conducted research about Athens, Ohio.
No such record existed.
But there are plenty of records on hand about The Ridges ... TO BE CONTINUED
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Archives
Emily Patterson
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Zion Cemetery sits eerily quiet Wednesday afternoon, two days before Halloween. Zion is one of the five cemeteries that supposedly form a pentagram, with Ohio University's Wilson Hall in the center.
