WAUSEON — After a few days away from work, John Swearingen, Jr., returned to the Fulton County Historical Society and was greeted by the spirit of a young boy he’s come to know.
He’s never seen the boy, and he’s never spoken to him, but he knows his name is Johnny. Years ago, Johnny, who was an orphan living in a Fulton County home, died, and now his spirit is one of dozens that live on at the Fulton County Museum, Mr. Swearingen said.
“That little boy is probably my favorite,” Mr. Swearingen said. “He thinks of me as dad.”
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For a fourth year, Mr. Swearingen and the historical society of which he is the director are offering Haunting History Tours in Wauseon. The tours were offered in the ’90s but were discontinued by a previous director. Mr. Swearingen brought them back, modeled after a tour he took in Williamsburg, Va., with actors depicting historical storytellers.’
“We’re trying to teach people who are coming to be scared, trying to make it educational,” Mr. Swearingen said.
Occasionally the tours are scarier than they are informational, so they’re not recommended for young children.
Four times in the last several years, psychics without prior knowledge of the hauntings have visited the museum, Mr. Swearingen said. Each time, the psychics have commented on the nearly two dozen spirits that linger there, often revealing more details about each.
The museum’s building, constructed in 1868, was originally Wauseon’s first high school. The building began to deteriorate in 1897, and the children were moved elsewhere. The next owner turned the building into a duplex, living in one half and renting out the other. One of the renters, Abigail, was a mail-order bride. She’s been known to haunt the upstairs, where she watches children playing at a nearby park. Medical issues kept her from having children of her own.
In 1905, the building became a hospital. Untold numbers of patients died there, especially during the devastating flu pandemic of 1918 and during tuberculosis outbreaks. The hospital closed in 1929.
“The hospital is where you went to die,” Mr. Swearingen said. “We have a long list of people we know passed away here.”
When Mr. Swearingen became the director in 2009, no one told him about the ghosts. His first experience with the museum’s supernatural elements came when he smelled cherry-flavored tobacco, which was smoked in a pipe by a man once in the building. Mr. Swearingen has kept a log of his paranormal encounters at the museum, making note of dozens of incidents.
In a room housing Native-American artifacts, a spirit has been known to push people who provoke and disrespect it, Mr. Swearingen said. In that room, video equipment shuts down.
Upstairs, the spirits of three children run the hall and in and out of rooms.
“I can feel them run through me,” Mr. Swearingen said. “It makes the hair on the back of my neck go up.”
All of the spirits in the home are friendly, generally, anyway. One man who lingers upstairs “is a little creepy. He likes to inappropriately touch young, pretty girls,” Mr. Swearingen said.
Because of his religious faith, Mr. Swearingen said he will not attempt to talk to the spirits. He added that it’s hard to know with whom he’d be speaking.
“You could be talking to a demon,” Mr. Swearingen said. “There are some nasty spirits that want to jerk people’s chains.”
For the past eight years, Jason Schneider, a Lucas County sheriff’s deputy, has worked with a team of other law enforcement officials calling themselves Lake Erie Paranormal to investigate paranormal activity in and around Toledo. They’ve never done an investigation at the Fulton County Museum but have been to dozens of businesses and residences looking for evidence of a haunting.
“I wanted to get into it to overcome a fear,” he said. “I really wanted to start learning about the unknown and haunted stuff. I was intrigued by it.”
Over time, the investigators have become more skeptical, believing that many occurrences can be explained by nature or science, but “we do believe there is something else out there. We’ve definitely experienced a lot of things,” Mr. Schneider said.
Only once in all of the group’s investigations has Mr. Schneider seen the apparition of a ghost — a small boy at a winery near Cleveland. It wasn’t until after that sighting that the team learned that, decades earlier, a child had died on the property.
The group is available to investigate any business or residence and can be contacted via Facebook.
The Fulton County tours are this Friday and Saturday and Oct. 30 and 31, leaving the Wauseon Depot every 15 minutes starting at 6:30 p.m., rain or shine, and lasting one hour. Tours must be booked and paid for in advance.
For reservations, call Mr. Swearingen at 419-337-7922 or email the museum@fultoncountyhs.org.
Other local haunted tours include the Wolcott House in Maumee and Fort Meigs in Perrysburg.
Contact Taylor Dungjen at tdungjen@theblade.com, or 419-724-6054, or on Twitter @taylordungjen.
First Published October 19, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
