The giant skull of Ghost Hill

FREDERICKTOWN — I was casting about for something spooky to write about for the season, especially since I didn’t have a big series to run this October, but I didn’t find much when I perused newspaper reports from a century ago in Knox County.

Turns out that Halloween then wasn’t much different from now, except perhaps in scope. 

Editors complained about the overflow of tacky Halloween decorations in the Mount Vernon stores, and the social columns reported costume parties and haunted house displays.

One such display was set up by some Mount Vernon teachers for their students. It involved students climbing up a ladder and into a second-story window of the teacher’s house.

The children would then follow a rope that stretched from room to room through the house, where creepy decorations and the occasional jump scare would wait for them. In the final room, they found a fortune teller. Why do I imagine that the teacher was probably giving fortunes like “I foresee you studying diligently for next Monday’s math test!”

A more intriguing story did finally pop up in my search, though it in fact had nothing to do with Halloween:

On Saturday, July 23, 1921, some laborers led by a contractor named Grubb were working near the Fredericktown-Levering Pike, just north of Fredericktown. It isn’t clear exactly what the laborers were doing, though it sounds as if the work was directly involved with the pike, today known as Waterford Road. 

Considering that the discovery Contractor Grubbs and his workers made was on the structure known as Ghost Hill — several hundred yards away from Waterford Road today, according to Google Maps—the locations don’t seem to pan out. But there’s probably a good reason for that, which we’ll come back to momentarily.

Grubb and company had already dug up a few bones (!) while working on the pike, and merely set them aside in a pile. More startling and newsworthy, apparently, was the discovery of two skulls. The skulls were found along the bottom edge of the hill, possibly buried in sitting positions. 

They were found about two feet beneath the surface of the hill, portions of which the workers were apparently cutting away. Under eight to twelve inches of topsoil was a layer of gravel, and the skulls were found beneath that. It isn’t clear from the article in the Democratic Banner whether or not additional bones were found and/or removed. 

It may simply be that the skulls were found in the area excavated for the road and that the digging stopped there and went no further. The workmen did note to the newspaper that there were spots between the gravel and topsoil layer were evidence was found of ancient campfires, ashes, and charcoal.

One of the two skulls was either already broken in the ground, or broken by the excavation. It appeared to be of average size, though its age suggested that it was a Native American burial and not something more recent. The other skull, though, was not average. 

The article notes: “One of the skulls is abnormally large, indicating that the person who had owned it in life had been almost of giant proportions.

The teeth especially were in a good state of preservation. The skull was in unusually good condition, much better that the second, which was more or less broken.”

The two skulls were found close to each other.

This makes for yet another historical record of the discovery of a large skeleton associated with a structure thought to be a Native American mound, built by either the Adena or Hopewell Moundbuilders.

This mound is only a half mile away from the Rowley Mound, on the south side of Fredericktown and in a much better state of preservation. 

Other indigenous earthworks originally at the top of the ridge between these two mounds were leveled as Fredericktown was built in the early 1800s.

But aside from the point identified on Google Maps, the location of the (in)famous Ghost Hill — more on that, below — remains uncertain. As recently as 25 years ago, when Chris Woodyard put out her fourth collection of Haunted Ohio ghost stories, she referred to the hill as “elusive,” and cited an article by Nancy A. Black in the Knox County Citizen which said that when the author attempted to photograph the alleged site of the hill, her film was ruined twice. 

I have no idea what source Google is using for its location, and any description of the hill in relation to the Kokosing River is highly subjective, thanks to the extensive gravel quarrying around the river over the last hundred years, which has changed its course. Does any of the hill actually remain at this point, or was it, too, quarried away?

The Levering Pike (Waterford Road) came into Fredericktown by joining what is today Salem Avenue.

Today there is a lane known as Simons Avenue which runs between the alleged location of Ghost Hill and Salem Avenue. Immediately north of the hill site is the South Bay of the gravel quarry. 

Google Maps cites Ghost Hill as being in Middlebury Township, yet the Fredericktown-Levering Pike came in on Salem Avenue, which is in Wayne Township. These locations are hundreds of yards apart.

If these workmen were digging out part of Ghost Hill as part of the work on the pike, does this suggest that the Google Maps location is off?

Well, yes and no. Since this clearly needed inspection, I trekked to Fredericktown one recent morning and put my feet on the ground and eyes on the horizon.

What I found was that virtually nothing but a stump of the once-mighty hill remains, mostly tucked out of sight behind the houses on Simons Avenue and the Marathon station on Zolman Road. There’s just enough of a rise left to show that part of the hill was once there.

But then I drove over to Fredericktown’s surviving mound for comparison. Rowley Mound sits on the south side of Mound Street, on the south side of town. Or, more accurately, it could be said that Mound Street cuts into and goes over part of the mound, built to amplify the top of the hill.

It’s hard to tell exactly where the human-built mound stops and the natural hillside begins, but it is clear that the mound once overflowed the current city block that cuts into its sides.

Historical sources tell us that there were also originally earthworks atop the ridge where the Fredericktown square now sits, which would have been in a direct sight line from the top of Rowley Mound.

If Ghost Hill was anywhere near as large as Rowley Mound, then it may once have covered a much larger footprint than what remains. It would have been in an ideal position to be see from the earthworks that once stood on the square. To my mind, it seems like what the Moundbuilders once had here was a series of sites. 

Their use no doubt included sacred purposes, but I can’t help but wonder if they were also part of a long series of mounds along the Kokosing that could have doubled as signal hills, using smoke and fire to communicate up and down the valley.

There is a rise further up Zolman Road, still along the edge of the river, that could once have served as a further signal point. In age before modern communications, such signal points would have been crucially important.

Examining the site of Ghost Hill’s remnants and comparing it with Rowley Mound, I’m inclined to think that the original mound structure was much larger. What the turnpike workers were almost certainly doing was taking advantage of the mound as a source of gravel a relatively short distance from the road.

As the Fredericktown-Levering Pike was a major road out of the north side of town, the workers were likely putting gravel on the road, which wasn’t paved until much later.

The original Moundbuilders found the Kokosing River to be a great source of gravel — just as later industrial sources would as well — and used gravel as a key building element of the mound. These later road workers just saw the hill as a convenient source for gravel. Further gravel quarrying also cut into the hill, forming South Bay.

Most intriguingly of all, if the hill extended further to the south and west than its remnants do today, then it is very possible that the bulk of this mound stood approximately where Simons Avenue does today. 

The spot where the skulls were found, and additional bones were apparently left behind and reburied, was along the bottom of the hill. This burial spot may today be someone’s house.

I’m not sure how thrilled Simons Avenue residents will be to find out they may be living on an American Indian burial ground, but it certainly wraps up our story with a suitably spooky chill.

A note about the name of Ghost Hill. I was first told about that hill while I worked at the Mount Vernon News, where I heard it whispered that the name came about because of some poor sap who witnessed a Ku Klux Klan rally there many years ago and mistook the hooded terrorists for ghosts. 

I don’t know if the story is true or not, and I’ve not been able to come up with any documentation of it, though if others know of any, please give me a heads up on social media.

The casual use of the name in the 1921 article suggests that it was so well ensconced in local knowledge that the editor could use it without more specific description. 

Regional Klan activity did not peak until around the 1920s, so it may be that the name actually predates the hate group and has more obscure origins, or it may be that Klan activity got an earlier start in Knox County than other areas of Ohio, and the name is a direct result of the rallies.

These fragmentary stories leave a lot of questions. Did the workers simply rebury the other bones they found? What became of the skulls? Lacking preservation, did they decay and fall apart soon after? Or is there some chance they are still sitting around, forgotten, in someone’s attic or barn?

The giant skull would be a critically important artifact if it could be located today, for proof is lacking for the numerous surviving stories of giant bones being found in many native earthworks. But like so many other rumored remains, it stays just out of reach on the fringes of recorded history.

This story is remarkable for its comparatively late date, but if none of the artifacts were documented and preserved, then it is as lost to history as any of the 19th-century reports of giant bones.

Hoax, exaggeration, or genuine lost prehistory? The verdict remains out, and may never come back in, though we can always keep digging for more information. I know I’d much rather associate this hill with honored native remains and vital communication than with the hateful rabble-rousers of a later day. Such antics were a desecration of a sacred site, and deserve nothing more than scorn. 

My dream is that, piece by piece, we may yet recover more pieces of the deep history (and prehistory) of the site, something inspiring, profound, and worthy of celebration no matter the season of the year.