The following article is from page 8 of the October 22, 1876 edition of the Cincinnati Commercial. Music Hall is built over top of a burial ground where the city's poor, suicides, and unknown strangers were buried. As soon as graves were excavated for construction, allegedly, ghostly activity appeared in Exposition Hall (also known as Saengerhalle)—a temporary wooden structure that was used for everything from the May Festival chorus to the Republican Nation Convention.
This article is mentioned in John B. Kachuba's Ghosthunting Ohio, as well as shown in part in CET's documentary Music Hall: Cincinnati Finds Its Voice. Both of these, as well as the article, are available at the Cincinnati Public Library. The article is availble in microfilm form at the main library. According to Kachuba, the below article was written by Lafcadio Hearn but I didn't see a name on it.
If you enjoy this check out the October 29, 2006 WVXU interview with employees of Music Hall.
Gossip About City Ghosts
The site of the late Exposition Building, now being excavated for the erection of the Springer Music Hall, affords, in the number of human skulls and portions of skeletons daily exhumed from it, abundant food for the spectral fancies of the people who placed faith in the familiar stories about ghosts haunting the old frame edifice.
It does not appear that the ghosts troubled anybody until after a large number of the yellow bones for which they hold a certain spectral affection, had been dug up in making way for the erection of an elevator in Exposition Hall. Those bones were simply packed into a barrel and stowed away in a convenient part of the building, apparently much to the discomfort of their invisible owners. For skulls and thigh bones and vertebrae had been hopelessly jumbled up in that barrel, so that no one save a most expert articulator could have sorted them out properly. From that hour shadowy people wandered restlessly through the creaking halls by night, hiding in dark corners, stealing behind pillars, and creating queer crepitating noises under the dim roof. The night watchman in charge of the building was greatly annoyed by these mysterious sounds. Whithersoever he went within the edifice by night, the sound of stealthly footsteps followed him; when he stopped they ceased, when he moved again they also followed,—timid feet, invisible, intangible, tireless; and the loose plank that uttered a hollow groan under the watchman's foot, never failed to respond with a gentler moan to the ghostly tread behind. There were strange knockings, too, at all hours of the night—knockings seemingly for admission. But when the door was unbarred and opened, none stood without in the night shadow, nor did the snow in the winter midnights show the print of feet. Sometimes sounds of mocking laughter broke the silence; sometimes strange whispers, faint and thin as whispers falling on the drowsy ears of dying men in the sick rooms; sometimes loud echoes, as of heavy bodies falling in the darkness from the roof to the hollow flooring above the ancient place of graves. Yet no one who ran, lantern in hand, to the place of these inexplicable sounds ever discovered their origin. Dogs brought into the building whined to be let out, and followed their masters with ever sign of abject terror—eye balls wildly protruding, and ears laid back. The invisible folk seemed restless in all weathers, winter and summer alike, but the disturbances seemed slightly aggravated in character by a moist atmosphere, as though the rattling, pattering, murmuring of Voices of the Rain without compelled the dead to increase the volume of ghostly sound within that it might become audible to the ears of vexed mortals. During fetes and balls, indeed, no mysterious sounds were heard in the building, whether that the strong magnetism of a great living assembly and the crash of brazen instruments crushed all spectral forces into quiescence, or whether that the ghostly power—faint as a faint summer breeze—weak as the flower which so slowly opens its heart to the sun—vainly strove to make itself felt even by an organized effort of extraordinary vigor. The former supposition seems to receive some support from the conduct of the ghosts immediately after such entertainments at Exposition Hall; for just so soon as the last guest had departed, and the last light had been extinguished, the poor souls manifested their impotent indignation by a more than ordinary unpleasant concatenation of noises—not as though they had been struggling to oppose earthly with unearthly sounds, but as though they had escaped from temporary imprisonment and oppression.
From the fact that they never exhibited themselves in any visible form to the watchman, it was long supposed that these eerie folk lacked power to manifest themselves. But there are people who visited the last Expositino willing to testify otherwise. One morning, a certain exhibitor beheld a lady standing before his booth—a lady so strange of aspect that he involuntarily regarded her with peculiar curiosity. She seemed tall and fair and young, clad in a pale dress of fashion long—forgotten, and wearing her hair flowing loose, uncovered by hat or bonnet. He approached the white figure, prompted by a desire to catch a glimpse of the features bent over the case, but ready to mask this purpose by politely placing his knowledge of the wares at the stranger's service. But as he stepped forward, the figure became diaphanous, faint, serial, finally invisible, and a chill as of December winds passed over him. The tall woman had been sepultured under the yellow clay below the planking upon which he stood; and the worms had formed the wedding—rings of Death about her fingers half a century before.
And now this rich yellow soil, fat with the human flesh and bone and brain it has devoured, is being disemboweled by a hundred spades and forces to exhibit its ghastly secrets to the sun. About the excavation you may observe at intervals large dry goods boxes, some open, some nailed up; and if you peer into those yet open you will behold small Golgothas therein—mingled piles of skulls, loose vertebrae, fibulae, tibiae and the great curving bones of the thigh. All are yellow, like the cannible clay which denuded them of their fleshly masks; light as decayed wood; crumbling like tan—bark under the fingers. Take up the skull; it weighs but a few ounces; knock two together—the clear, dry sound of well—preserved bone will not follow. The skulls sound like decayed cocoa nut shells when thumbed together. All the bones are yellow, save the teeth, which still gleam whitely. Few of the smaller bones remain; none of those forming fingers and toes; no complete skeletons are exhumed. Most of the skulls are broken, crushed, crumbled in; there is no "scentless and delicate dust" remaining to pinch between the fingers,—it is a damp decay, a sort of moist necrophagy; and of the coffins only the outlines remain in the soil. One tuft of red hair has survived the jaws of the grave, and has been thrown in loosely with the bones; for to what skull it once belonged can not now be guessed.
"They have not yet struck the graves where they are the thickest," observed Captain Wilson yesterday. "Wait till they strike under the old North Hall."
The crowds gather thickly about the excavation, and watch each new discovery with ghoulish interest. Bone after bone as soon as thrown out is turned over with a scientific application of kicks; ragamuffins brandish femora with disgusting exultation; dirty fingers are poked into empty eye sockets; jaw—bones are experimentally hammered with heavy canes; ribs crack in pitiful remonstrance to reckless feet; and tobacco juice is carelessly squirted among the decaying skulls. "Alas! poor ghost!"
Without a force of police at the excavation, such things can not be avoided, for it is impossible at present either to keep the crowd from entering the grounds, or to keep some from being mischievous after entering. When driven away from one spot they return to another; and by night there come medical students to steal the poor skulls.
It is likely that the ghosts will be driven away from their old resting places merely because some of their bones are removed therefrom? Who dare guess how deeply that soil is permeated with the substance of the dead? Who can say whether the perturbed spirits will follow the dry goods boxes which contain only a small moiety of their moldering skeletons; or whether they will prefer to haunt the spot on earth which absorbed the protoplasmic life that erst belonged to them; or whether, multiplying themselves by ghastly self division, like spectral polypi, they may not haunt obiquitously the site of their ancient graves, the place of their second burial and the locality whereat the yellow soil now carted away by speculative contractors, shall be duly dumped?
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