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Heritage Village Museum's Haunted Village Offers Slight Frights for the Whole Family

Kids can trick-or-treat through the village, brave a haunted house and trail and eat lots of candy.

Sep 25, 2023 at 11:38 am

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Photo: Provided by Heritage Village Museum

Heritage Village Museum's Haunted Village

You can explore a haunted village this spooky season at the Heritage Village Museum in Sharon Woods. The last three weekends in October, the Heritage Village Museum will transform into an otherworldly 19th-century village that offers slight frights for the whole family.

At the Haunted Village, your kids can trick-or-treat through the town, meeting ghosts, witches and even a fortune teller along the way. And, if you dare, you can brave the Elk Lick Haunted House; meet critters at the creepy, crawly zoo and trek the expanded haunted trail.

New this year are the black widow spider’s house, a resurrectionist and an interactive curiosity shop. There will also be singing pirates, a ghostly train tale and an abridged telling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

For some less spooky options, partake in the maze or crafts and games. There will also be balloon art and face painting, which will go perfectly with your family’s Halloween costumes. Plenty of candy will be available, but the village will also have a concession stand open for snacks.

Study: Of the States, Ohio Has the Third Highest Number of Ghost Encounters: With a ton of creepiness lurking throughout Greater Cincinnati, we could see how we, and Ohio at large, could be the perfect place for a haunt.

You can buy tickets online in advance for $12 per person, or $15 at the door. Museum members and children 2 and under can get in for free, and annual family memberships can be purchased online for $65 a year.

The Haunted Village is the Heritage Village Museum’s biggest fundraiser of the year, with proceeds helping them maintain their 13 historic buildings and provide educational programs. It runs on Fridays and Saturdays Oct. 13-28 from 6-10 p.m. The entrance closes at 9 p.m.

You can find the Haunted Village in Sharon Woods behind the Sharon Centre (11500 Lebanon Road, Sharonville). More info: heritagevillagecincinnati.org.

Slideshow

The Creepiest Places in Greater Cincinnati

Over-the-Rhine’s Underground Beer TunnelsIf you dare to go beneath the city, you’ll find a labyrinth of beer tunnels that once belonged to F&J Linck Brewery. While nothing knowingly nefarious happened down there (except maybe a bad batch of beer here and there), the tunnels under the streets of Over-the-Rhine, which were used to keep beer cool before refrigeration, are eerie and tomb-like. You can see them for yourself on the Hidden Caverns or Ultimate Queen City Underground tours through American Legacy Tours.

Dunham Recreation Center Complex1945 Dunham Way, WestwoodThe land that we know today as the Dunham Recreation Center Complex used to be the site of the first municipal tuberculosis hospital in the United States, and an eerie feeling still hangs over the area where the arts center is today. According to records from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Medicine, in 1879, Cincinnati Hospital (now UC Health) bought what was then the Guerley Farm in order to relocate its small-pox isolation house. A hospital was constructed on the farmland and named Branch Hospital for Contagious Diseases. Almost 20 years later, the branch hospital saw the transfer of 15 tuberculosis patients from the main hospital, transforming it into a space to care for victims of TB. As tuberculosis cases grew, so did the hospital campus. More buildings to house patients were added, as were lodging for nurses and doctors; sleeping porches, which doctors at the time thought helped improve TB symptoms; an occupational therapy building; and a preventorium and school for children of TB patients.But what is perhaps the creepiest aspect of Dunham isn’t that it used to be a hospital for victims of what, at the time, was a very deadly disease, but rather what lies underneath all the buildings to this day. Former recreation center employee Kenny Riddell told WCPO in 2015 that the disease was too advanced to be treated by the time many patients sought care, and Dunham was the place to go to die. To keep patient morale up, he said, the bodies would be removed from the hospital via underground tunnels that led to an incinerator where they would be cremated and their belongings would be burned. The tunnels still exist today, but they’re not accessible to the public and some parts are entirely sealed off. But if you spend enough time in the arts center, one of the last remaining buildings from the hospital era, recreation center employees say you may just see something…or someone.

Price Hill’s Potter’s Field4700 Guerley Road, West Price HillWe can’t talk about Dunham without mentioning the historic potter’s field just up the road from it, which may be part of the reason that land was chosen to become a hospital for the fatally ill. Historically, a potter's field was the name for any grave site meant to house the remains of poor or unclaimed people. The Price Hill potter’s field was used as a cemetery for Cincinnati’s poor, transients and criminals from 1849 to 1981. It’s believed that upward of 20,000 people were haphazardly laid to rest there, although it's impossible to guess an accurate number. The site was used until it became so crowded that graves were dug to a depth reportedly as shallow as 18 inches. The newly deceased were stacked on a previous generation, and the oldest part of the site contains three layers of bodies. Years of neglect and overgrowth hide many unmarked graves or markers with the barest of details, but a plaque along Guerley Road identifies where it stands.Those in the potter’s field may soon get the burial they deserve, however. In April 2022, the National Park Service awarded Price Hill Will and Cincinnati Parks nearly $35,000 in funding through the History of Equal Rights (HER) Grant to restore it.

Music Hall1241 Elm St., Over-the-RhineEven if you don’t believe in ghosts, you can’t deny the beautiful but unsettling nature of Music Hall, especially considering the southern part of the building was built over a potter’s field and bones have been discovered during various excavations on-site. Those who have worked in the building late at night have reported many instances of paranormal activity, including things like hearing a singing woman; seeing apparitions of guests dressed in old-fashioned clothes; angry, disembodied whispering in the elevators and feelings of being watched.

Darby-Lee CemeteryCan be accessed from the Bender Mountain Trail, 6320-6468 Bender Road, Delhi TownshipWest Siders, you may have heard of Fiddlers Green Road, but have you heard the legend of Fiddler’s Green? (Which actually has nothing to do with that particular road.) It goes back to the Darby-Lee family of Delhi Township, members of which are buried in a small graveyard at the top of Bender Mountain – the only known, remaining family cemetery in Delhi. Patriarch of the family Henry Darby was rumored to have been part of the Underground Railroad. The legend of Fiddler’s Green goes that he would sit up on the ridge of his property overlooking the Ohio River into Kentucky. When it was safe for those fleeing enslavement to cross the river and come up the ridge to his home, Darby would light a lantern with a green flame and play his fiddle. On some nights now, you can supposedly see an otherworldly green glow from the cemetery and hear the strains from a fiddle being played nearby.

Glencoe RowWhile Mt. Auburn's Glencoe Row was demolished in 2013, there was a time when this abandoned street of row houses looked like a scene straight out of an apocalypse movie. An attempt was made to renovate the homes of the former historic district in the early 2000s, but a lack of funding killed the project.

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Katherine Barrier

Katherine Barrier is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s journalism program and has nearly 10 years of experience reporting local and national news as a digital journalist. At CityBeat, she oversees the digital and social media strategies, edits web and print content and writes for the dining and arts...

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Heritage Village Museum's Haunted Village Offers Slight Frights for the Whole Family