Athens, Ohio is a small town nestled in Southeast Ohio’s hilly, Appalachian landscape next to the Hocking River. Athens isn’t very far from the home of the Mothman is West Virginia, but seems to be far from everything else in Ohio. The landscape draws you into another time. Hills turn gold and red during the fall. Uneven cobblestone streets whine under the tires of cars. Colonial style brick buildings are scattered among a town where the biggest thing to happen in recent years was a Wal-Mart Supercenter. There’s even an old Victorian asylum that looms on a hill over the town, swallowing curious onlookers and amateur ghost hunters.
Sometimes I would forget I was in a college town.
Athens has been the home of Ohio University since 1804. During three quarters of the year students make up a majority of the population, and the population will triple during their annual Halloween celebration. Students flock there for Journalism, Film, and Physical Therapy classes; but mostly for the party atmosphere. There was a time when Ohio University was the #2 party school in the nation. It has fallen down the list, due to more crackdown by the Athens Police, but the spirit of the town hasn’t decreased. The atmosphere is lively with a constant energy. Students love the campus environment- there’s no other school quite like Ohio University. The townspeople of Athens love being hidden away from the world. Ghost hunters flock to the town to investigate many of the stories and spirits that swirl around Athens and the university.
Ghost stories? Spirits? In Athens? What would make Athens, Ohio so spooky?
There are many stories that students new and old share with one another. They all talk about the stain of a body that is located in the old asylum. They talk about the dorm room that was turned into a boiler room after a grisly suicide. They like to go out to find the 5 (or 10) cemeteries that make up the pentagram that surround Athens. And some will even wait outside of West State Cemetery to see if the angle statue will weep and flutter its wings. The town of Athens is full of stories that make ghost hunters and psychics believe that the town is a spiritual hot spot. But to understand why people consider the place to be so spiritual, you have to go back to the mid-1800s and to the story of the Koons family.
The Koons family lived on the highest point in Athens, a hill called Mt. Nebo. Legend says that Mt. Nebo was considered so sacred to the Native Americans in the area that they wouldn’t hunt or camp there. Maybe that could explain what happened to the Koons family during the mid-1800s. Johnathan Koons was an Atheist who spent most of his life trying to expose Spiritualists as frauds. After a seance held by a neighbor’s daughter, his mind was changed. All the questions he had mentally asked the spirits were answered by them knocking. He left the seance no longer a skeptic, and with a few new spirits of his own.
Soon after the seance, Koons and his family began to experience their own spiritual encounters. Most notably, Johnathan Koons would have bouts of automatic writing- where the spirits would take over his body and use him to communicate by writing. Out of one automatic writing experience, the spirits had told the family (or Koons’s eldest son, both stories are told) to construct a separate cabin for them and to fill it with musical instruments, toys, paper and pencils, and guns. There’s no word if the Koons family had put guns in there, but soon after the cabin and the instruments were supplied, music could be heard and pictures would be drawn without the aid of a human being.
The spiritual activity made the Koons family very popular. People would travel for miles by horse and carriage to witness the happenings for themselves. Many would later report that they could also hear the music and feel cold hands touching them. It even drew a doctor by the name of Dr. Everett out to the Koons home for an 18 day stay that led him to write a book called Communications from Angels where he wrote about the music and the drawings. The Koons home in Mt. Nebo was now becoming a popular spot for Spiritualists- but the Koons’ neighbors were growing more suspicious.
Even though the Koons family seances brought the message of God and they would never collect any money off of the seances, his neighbors were criticizing the family with being embroiled in Satanic activity. Six years after the first seance at the Koons’ home, the neighbors has set fire to their home, their “spirit cabin”, and drove the family out of Athens. Last heard, the Koons had left to begin spreading the word of God. Some claim the family went to Illinois, some claim no one knows what happened to them. Today Mt. Nebo is inaccessible to people since it is now part of private property.
Since the Koons’ family, nothing had ever been the same in Athens, Ohio. More and more spiritual occurrences were being documented as the town grew with Ohio University and the new asylum. These documentations are located on the fifth floor as the library, known as the “Spook Files”. It is safe to say that the Spiritualist Movement of the 1800s and the Koons family seances still seem to affect the town of Athens to this day.
Sources:
http://www.forgottenoh.com/GhostTowns/mtnebo.html
http://www.athensohio.com/whattodo/index.php?page=131&item;=673
