You may know the Heritage Village Museum in Sharon Woods as a living history museum. But while the museum may bring the past to life, if you ask Violet Shindler, the museum’s in-house paranormal historian and investigator, it’s also a home to those in the afterlife.
There’s a lot of history within the grounds of the museum. Thirteen historic homes and structures have been brought from around Ohio and reassembled on-site, bringing endless stories, historical moments and even some ghostly passengers along with them. During investigations on the premises, Violet says she’s encountered many things that can’t be explained away — footsteps when no one else is around, disembodied voices, strange smells and even full-bodied apparitions. As she led me out of the museum’s Hayner House library where we had our interview, she pointed to a staircase.
“That’s where I saw my first apparition here,” she says casually, describing a man in 1800s garb who was gone as quickly as he appeared.
Violet’s not the only one who has experienced the supernatural on these grounds. She says the staff’s stories are what prompted her to dig into the history of each house and building and record and document the spooky happenings. Each month, she also brings a group of people to the museum to conduct a paranormal investigation through her Spirits by Starlight ghost tours.
CityBeat recently sat down with Violet to talk more about her work with the museum, her Spirits by Starlight paranormal investigations and otherworldly occurrences she’s experienced that would be able to convince even the staunchest of skeptics.
CityBeat: What do you do at the Heritage Village Museum?
Violet Shindler: I am their in-house paranormal historian and investigator. I am the curator and creator of a program called Spirits by Starlight, which is a year-round, fully immersive program that invites guests into the Village for a fusion of a haunted history tour, where they learn the history of these 19th-century homes and buildings and the families who inhabited them, and then they do a live-time paranormal investigation using a full suite of ghostly gadgets.
And as part of my work here, I continue researching the paranormal phenomena here, working with the historians and the curators on staff and using our findings out in the Village to help continue curating these homes and deepening the way we teach [their] history and share [them] with the community.
CB: What’s your educational and professional background, and how do they work into what you do at Heritage Village?
VS: I possess two bachelor’s degrees: one Bachelor of Arts in theater and one Bachelor of Science in political science. I also possess my Master of Arts from New York University, and my background is primarily in documentary, ethnography and oral history.
I spent most of my university years traveling the nation, collecting stories, archiving them and then using those stories to create art … I’m obsessed with stories. I believe that we are the stories we tell, and I believe that storytelling allows us to generate and foster culture, create a sense of community and, here at Heritage Village, do a collective remembering of the past. That also allows us to engage in collective grief and to contend with how tricky the past is and how delicate, but important and inspiring, the lives of the people who were here before us are.
So I really approach my work here not only as a lover of all things paranormal and just a general oddball myself, but as an ethnographer and an oral historian and a documentarian looking to document, archive and study this phenomenon here at Heritage Village.
CB: How did you become interested in the paranormal?
VS: I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and as I was growing up, I performed every single summer with Fort Lauderdale Children’s Theater. When I was growing up, [the theater] was housed in the historic Parker Playhouse, which is a gorgeous, old, Art Deco theater … Parker Playhouse was home to many triumphs and tragedies of show business. Every summer, I remember hearing stories about everything from great operas debuting on that stage … to suicides happening from the catwalks to death by alcoholism in the dressing rooms to lavish parties being thrown in the grand foyer.
So I kind of grew up immersed in this milieu of history and ghost stories. I remember my directors telling us ghost stories, and I remember odd things happening in the theater. I remember disembodied voices; I remember knocks. I remember strange things with the lights. Now, keep in mind, it’s an old theater, and it could have old bones and faulty wiring, but it could also very well be haunted by the ghosts of the people who performed there, who possibly died there. Growing up with all of this around me I think really, if nothing else, fostered an appreciation for the paranormal in the world of the theater.
CB: What brought you to the museum?
VS: I had a friend who was involved with the Village, and she said, “We really need volunteers for our annual Halloween fundraiser.” I’ve spent my whole life reading tarot cards and oracle cards and palms as an amateur astrologer, so I said, “Well, I could come out and help.”
That first year, I came out and stationed in the Vorhes House out in the Village and read cards and palms and gave out crystals to thousands of kids and their families. … At some point during that first year of volunteering, I came into [the Hayner House] library and ended up in a series of conversations with Steve Preston, the executive director; Bethany Jewell, the marketing director; and Lauren Woods, the education director, about odd occurrences here.
I was attuned to something very early on. As soon as I got on the premises, I knew that there was something here. I could feel it in my bones, and I would have strange dreams in my early days here. And I started talking to them about it, and they all told me amazing stories about everything from disembodied voices to electrical anomalies to strange footprints and hand prints, odd-looking animals, all the way up to and including full-bodied apparitions.
And I said, “Let me start studying this. Let me amass a team; let me get some technology and let me spend some time here talking to the local community and studying this phenomenon.” And that first year, I dove in. I started investigating the Village pretty much all day and night, brought out all the ghostly gadgetry … and just started investigating all of these spaces with the guidance and the collaboration of the historians to inform my findings.
And then I opened a call for stories to the local community, and I said, “Anyone with a story about anything strange they’ve experienced at Heritage Village or in Sharon Woods, I’d like to speak to you.” And there was a real outpouring of people willing to share their experiences. I was able to speak to active and retired park rangers and Sharonville Police officers, guests of the Village, volunteers and staff going all the way back to the Village’s early days in the ‘70s and they all told me incredible stories about bizarre occurrences all across this Village.
CB: What have been some of your most memorable experiences from your investigations?
VS: In the early stages of curation, we were working with the SLS — structured light sensor camera. This camera casts a web of lasers out on a space and it measures infrared — light invisible to the human eyes but emitted by the human body at a background, ambient level. It measures motion and it measures thermal or heat, which, of course, the human body gives off a lot of heat.
When a human stands in front of the camera, they show up like a stick figure on screen. If there’s no human in front of the lens, you shouldn’t necessarily see anything. We were working with this camera in the Kemper Log Home. [It’s] the oldest of all of the structures here at Heritage Village. It was built in 1804 by Rev. James Kemper … He and his wife, Judith, raised 15 children here. They threw a housewarming party on June 4, 1804, to welcome the birth of their 15th and final child, Charles Kemper.
Now, we were working with this camera upstairs in the Kemper log home. We had this camera pointed at the doorway to what I thought was a closet, and a figure appeared in front of the lens. And the figure kind of grew and shrank until it became very still, and you could make out a head, a neck, two shoulders, a torso, two legs. And then it appeared to bend down and scoop something up off the ground, and its stick figure arms made a triangle across the top quadrant of its body. And that’s when we turned a light on to figure out exactly what we had the camera pointed at.
The camera has no internal light because that would mess up the sensors. And we realized we had the camera pointed at an artifact baby bassinet. So I said, “I’m very sorry if we’ve woken the baby and we’re going to go now.” And they disappeared. When I brought that story and that footage back to Steve Preston, he said, “Violet, that’s not a closet. That’s a bedroom. It’s the bedroom that was built for that 15th and final child, Charles Kemper.” It’s where Charles and his wife, Juliet, gave birth to and raised their baby, Helen Kemper, and when the Kemper log home made it here to Sharon Woods in millions of pieces, historians and architects had Helen Kemper’s drawings and writings of her childhood home to reassemble it to its former glory.
CB: What do you think makes up a spirit or paranormal presence?
VS: That’s a question that I have a lot of theories about, but I’ve never landed on one definitive answer. First law of thermodynamics: Energy can only be converted, never destroyed. The human body contains a lot of energy, and I think when our bodies are laid to rest and the heart stops beating, the energy that was the consciousness that bound the atoms together has to go somewhere.
So when we’re interacting with spirits, I often think that is the multiplicitous conversion of the energies of the people who are here before us but no longer have a body with which to contain that energy. I think the spirit world is really a reflection of the mortal one, but instead of one reflection, it’s like a funhouse of mirror reflections of the mortal world. And I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that there are demons or shadow walkers or these fantastical disembodied beasts roaming among us. … but I think, in a very real way, we are interacting with the people who lived in these spaces before us and who have chosen these spaces to return to because these spaces were significant to them.
Think about all of the spaces that are significant to you, and the kind of energy footprint you are leaving there and how, in a future world, people will still be interacting with you in a space that was once yours.
I do think there are different kinds of spirits or ghosts. … There are active and residual haunts, but I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think it’s a spectrum. I think you interact with some spirits who it’s like watching a moment in history be recorded and played back to you on a loop. It seems as though you were looking in on something, but they cannot look out at you, or they are not aware of you … Whereas, I think active hauntings have more autonomy and more self-awareness. I don’t think they’re bound to a space. I think they can roam, although I think they’ll choose a specific space to attend to because of the significance that space had for them.
They may know they’re dead. They may know time has passed, and they may, in some way, know who you are and what you’re here to do. … And I certainly think over time, they’ve become aware of me. My collaborator, Jonathan Brown, has an electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) that he caught on a tape recorder that was inaudible to the naked human ear. We were in the Kemper log home during a tour, and you can hear me open the door and step in, and then there are a dozen little childlike voices saying, “Violet. Violet. It’s Violet.”
CB: What kind of tools and techniques do you use during the Spirits by Starlight investigations?
VS: So Jonathan is really the technologist. … He’s just brilliant with the equipment. He’s built a lot of that equipment himself. But we do use the SLS. We use that in all the spaces we go in, and we scan every room for possible forms. I do want to say as we’re using [the SLS], we’re constantly rebooting it — pointing it at the ceiling, pointing it at the ground and doing everything we can to debunk any junk evidence and make sure that what we’re seeing is not just an equipment glitch. And if we’ve rebooted it … we scan the room and the same form still appears, we use that as a jumping-off point.
We also use a pretty amazing app called VOX. This is a radio synthesizer. It uses the magnets in my iPhone to measure magnetic interference, and if there’s a magnetic spike as it’s scanning through AM and FM stations, whatever is playing on that station at that moment, it’ll play through the speaker of my phone. We have turned this on in every space in this Village and had full, coherent and logical conversations with people.
We’ve tested a lot of different apps, probably 15 or 20 different apps, throughout this Village, and this is the only one that has stood up to the test. … The VOX is my favorite thing we work with because we’ve gotten names, we’ve gotten dates, we’ve gotten phrases that are just so relevant and pertinent to the spaces we are in, it is undeniable. We were working with this in the Kemper log home one night, and someone in the group said, “Is there anyone by the last name of Kemper here?” And, immediately, a woman’s voice came through that said, “Everyone.”
The Elk Lick Estate was once the home of U.S. Sen. Thomas Morris, who was a one-session senator for the state of Ohio, served in the 1830s and ran for vice president alongside abolitionist James Burney. He’s kind of a little-known revolutionary. We had this on in the informal dining room of the Elk Lick Estate, and I said, “Is there anyone with us tonight?” And a voice came through that said, “The senator,” and they cleared their throat, “I’m the representative.” … If you are patient with this and you really ask the right questions, you can get incredible feedback.
We also work with electromagnetic frequency finders because there are theories that electromagnetic spikes are potentially ghosts passing through the space. We work with REM pods, which are a form of electromagnetic frequency finder, but also motion detectors that will detect motion in a certain zone. We have set REM pods up in spaces where nobody was and they’ve gone off, so they’re detecting motion far away from where the group is moving around.
Sometimes we’ll bring out a pendulum; I’ll bring out a deck of [tarot or oracle] cards, or we’ll bring out dousing rods, which is a very old instrument of paranormal investigation. … We try not to limit ourselves. We rely primarily on the VOX, the SLS, the EMFs and the motion detectors, but we certainly invite guests on the tour to, if they have an idea of something they’d like to bring, to reach out to us. If it sounds good, bring it. We’ll give it a spin.
CB: Are there some houses in the Village that may experience more paranormal activity than others?
VS: There seems to be a unique energy around the Elk Lick house. I sat down with 12 active and retired lady rangers and Sharonville Police officers, who all told me the same story. When the Village first opened to the public in 1972, it was the responsibility of the rangers and the Sharonville PD to lock up the Village at night. They would roll through the Village, turn all the lights off, lock everything up and roll out for the night. All 12 of these ladies told me the same story about how they would go into the Elk Lick Estate, turn off all the lights, walk the perimeter, close the shutters, lock the door, walk down the gravel path and by the time they got back behind the wheel of their cruiser and turned around, all the lights would be on, the shutters would be open and the door would be ajar.
It spanned a multi-generational pact not to enter the Elk Lick Estate. These are park rangers — many of whom were former or active police officers. Credible, reliable sources who all believed that this house was truly so haunted that they shouldn’t go in it. … Everything in the Elk Lick house — feedback on the SLS, disembodied voices, footsteps above us when there’s no one upstairs, lights going on and off, the whole gamut of paranormal activity — we’ve experienced it in that house.
In the Hayner House, because the administrative offices are here, this is probably the space that sees the most action. My colleagues here have told me stories about smelling fresh-baked bread when there’s no one baking in the kitchen, hearing music coming from the far corners of the house, hearing footsteps upstairs that sound like a man in his work boots.
At the Vorhes House … sometimes, if you sing, a woman will sing back to you. And in the Chester Park train station, which Chester Park’s train station used to greet travelers from all across the nation who were coming out to Chester Park amusement park, which was very successful through the majority of the 1800s up until the Great Depression shut it down. … [Chester Park] would bring people from all corners of the nation into Cincinnati through Chester Park Station. … I’ve been investigating in there and heard over the VOX, “All aboard! All aboard!” And I’ve also heard carnival sounds, and we’ve heard train whistles. So all of these spaces are active in their own way.
CB: What do you think is the biggest misconception about paranormal investigation?
VS: A lot of people seem to think that any interaction with anything other than a mortal is a demon or some sort of shadow walker or evil shape-shifter. That sounds awesome, but it’s just not true. I would love to see something walk up the wall and on the ceiling. I would love to see a 10-foot shadow person peek around a corner at me, but in all my years of investigating, that’s never happened.
What I have seen are the full-bodied apparitions of people who look like people from the past. I’ve had conversations with people about their favorite dress or their favorite Christmas tradition, or they’ve sung their favorite song for me. I’ve had laughter and the flickering of lights, little footsteps, strange smells. The biggest misconception is that it’s all evil and wicked. My experiences indicate that it’s all really just a reflection of the mortal world. It’s all the echoes of the people who were here before us coming back to the places that they loved and the places they identified with — to the homes they built where they raised their families and the churches they were married in and the train stations they traveled through on their grand adventures.
Violet says the Spirits by Starlight tours are sold out through February 2026, but the remaining dates for 2026 have been announced and ticket links will go live on Nov. 1. All are welcome on the tours, whether you’re a believer or skeptic, and the $35 ticket price goes directly to the museum.
“Every single dollar that Spirits by Starlight makes goes toward keeping these homes open and accessible for mortals and phantoms alike. So buy a ticket to Spirits by Starlight and feel good that you’ve made a $35 donation to Heritage Village Museum and its effort to keep history alive for this region and for this amazing community,” Violet says.
Learn more about the Heritage Village Museum and Spirits by Starlight here.
