As a freshman at Ohio University, DJ Hill trekked to The Ridges with a group of friends, attempting to film some paranormal activity for a class project. For a few minutes, they filmed from outside a basement window of one of the buildings, but they didn't see anyone or anything particularly spooky and moved to a new location.
A few days later, Hill was editing the footage and noticed a pale figure in the foreground of the shot that hadn't been there before.
I don't know if it's a ghost caught on tape
but it's something said Hill, now a senior studying middle childhood education.
Hill is one of many who claim to have been spooked by spirits in the wooded area known as The Ridges, located just up the hill from OU's campus. The Ridges is the former home of the Athens Lunatic Asylum, where thousands of mentally ill patients lived, died and were buried between 1874 and 1993.
When you consider how many people died there and how they died and the circumstances of life and death I believe they left an impression
Hill said.
One patient in particular left a literal impression on The Ridges. Asylum patient Margaret Schilling, 53, went missing for almost six weeks before she was found dead in the locked and abandoned Ward N. 20, according to a Jan. 12, 1979, Post article about the discovery.
As legend goes, a detailed outline of Schilling's body remains in the building like a photo negative on the empty floor, and her ghost is said to haunt the mental hospital with loud screams.
A group of OU researchers, however, did a forensic study of the stain in 2008, proving that the outline on the floor was actually an acidic byproduct of the decomposition of Schilling's skin. The study was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences and became the subject of a 2009 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but it doesn't rule out all haunted activities at The Ridges, said project leader Dr. Glen Jackson.
What we really showed was that what some see as an eerie white stain isn't really authentic. It was basically drawn in acid
said Jackson, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. But we haven't disproved the probability of ghosts.
Many other ghostly legends surround The Ridges, particularly concerning the adjacent cemetery where many Civil War veterans and asylum patients are buried. According to hauntedathensohio.com, the gravestones have no names on them; instead, they are numbered. It is said ghosts often visit the area and witches hold séances in a strange circle of graves at one corner of the cemetery.
It is, however, important for ghost hunters to remember the history of The Ridges, said Beth Tragert, administrative associate at the Kennedy Museum of Art housed in Lin Hall, the former administration building for the asylum.
The people who lived here were real people with real stories
and those people still have family in town and around the area
Tragert said. I guess it's more respectful to consider it from that point of view.
Tragert said the museum's visitors often ask her if The Ridges is truly haunted or if she's seen anything spooky, and her answers are always no. The Kennedy prefers to address the history of the area through art rather than ghost stories, hosting exhibits such as the current Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
which includes images of abandoned mental institutions by photographer Chris Payne.
Still, many of the eerie occurrences at The Ridges remain unexplainable. When filming for his class project, Hill captured his friends knocking on the door to an abandoned building and hearing it knock back. The 15-minute documentary can be viewed on Hill's YouTube page, youtube.com/user/hillwrinkle.
Though Hill is still not 100 percent convinced ghosts exist, his videos of supposed paranormal activity speak for themselves, he said.
There were a couple of people that said
'There's got to be some explanation for that
' he said. Even though they didn't have one.
