The Warehouse on the Canal in downtown Canal Fulton, Ohio, is a building known to be rich in history and hauntings. I signed up for a tour last October to check it out and to see if it rivaled the very haunted Perkins Stone Mansion I had visited two weeks earlier in nearby Akron, Ohio. Spiritual presence is supposedly so powerful at the Warehouse that the Discovery Channel has come there twice in the past to film paranormal phenomena.
The presentation began in a large but cozy room that resembled a dining area in a lodge. The guests seated themselves at the small round tables. Their faces were intermittently illuminated in the quivering glow of candlelight being cast from numerous wall sconces. Shadows seemed to dance seductively across the room. This added further intrigue to the already eerie atmosphere. I learned some of the people had traveled a long way to be here tonight, in both body and mind. A bar was set up in the back of the room, serving coffee, tea and the house specialty “Hop-Frog Apple Grog,” a delicious concoction of apple cider, cranberry juice, whiskey, rum and at least three other ingredients we won’t disclose so as to secure the originality of the drink.
As I sipped on the Edgar Allan Poe inspired grog, I learned about the building and what drew me here tonight. The Warehouse started out in 1906 as a furniture company that also made caskets. By 1918, the pandemic flu was ravaging the United States and many parts of the world. People were dying faster than they could be buried. The basement of the Warehouse served as a mortuary from 1916-1936. Bodies were literally stacked on top of each other… and they weren’t all dead.
The old embalming area is said to have the most spiritual activity. There were photographs on display in the adjoining gallery showing many, many spirits in the embalming room. One picture showed them all lined up, as if to pose for a group photo! Some of the spirits who haunt the building are known by name, according to our tour guide Susanna. There’s Nate, who had Down syndrome, Sunshine, an African girl and Joe, the bartender.
On this particular night, we had a medium named Helen with us. We were told Helen is a high-level medium who can communicate with spirits to get them to interact and assist the living. She has worked with law enforcement all across the country to help provide leads in crimes and find missing persons. She claims she can hear spirits like a faint buzz from a radio or TV. Strong spirits come through in human form. Helen can also see the spirit behind everyone. She told me my guardian angel is named Alice.
Dowsing rods were handed out to all of the participants on the tour. We were informed that dowsing rods date back to ancient Egypt and were even used more recently to find land mines in Vietnam. The candlelight flickered around us as we were instructed to stand up from our seats for a lesson on how to properly use the rods.
You are supposed to stand with your arms out in front of you, holding an L-shaped metal rod in each hand. Your elbows should be slightly bent and away from your body. It’s important to keep your thumbs off the rods as you hold them at a slightly downwards angle of ten degrees. Then, you ask a question out loud. The rods may answer by pointing in a certain direction. I’ve seen them move left, right, inward and apart. Sometimes they swing around and point directly back at you.
The dowsing rods experiment had marked the beginning of the ghostly evening which would come to last almost four hours. At $25 per person, it was more involved and took a much longer period of time than the tour at Perkins Mansion. I would discover that it was well worth every penny.
The tour participants were led downstairs into the mortuary. My fully charged camera battery was draining rapidly, perhaps due in part to an intense invisible force field. The atmosphere was much different in the mortuary. Although the furnace was on, it felt cold … and desperate. The basement was divided up into separate areas. The largest area was arranged like a funeral parlor. Rows of chairs were lined up facing an archaic coffin. We were told not to disrespect the coffin or fool with it in any way or else Lester, the dominant spirit, will not be happy. He has been known to punch people who knock on the coffin and mock it out. In spite of Lester’s temper, legend has it he keeps bad spirits away. I wasn’t sure if I was comforted by this information or alarmed.
Lester is actually the spirit of the former undertaker and guardian of the casket. Behind the casket was a bed and to the left of it was an antique mirror in which people have claimed to see things other than their own reflections. Meanwhile, a doll sat in a nearby chair, silently monitoring the crowd with her glassy eyes.
Another area of the basement is where the vortex is found. We were told it runs counter-clockwise. It was outlined on the floor. Many members of the tour stepped into it. I was one of them. I was disappointed that I didn’t feel any energy. I was hoping good vibrations would rise up from the floor and cure my plantar fasciitis. Regardless, the vortex still made me a believer. It turned out the energy was on the wall, not the floor. I wasn’t aware of this until I got home and studied my photographs on the computer. I had miraculously captured a very distinct image of a man’s face on the wall. Could this be Nate? I was relieved he looked like a pleasant ghost, not an evil one. It almost looked like he was laughing. Perhaps he had gotten into the apple grog upstairs!
A third room had a type of cellar door through which the bodies had been dropped and dumped during the deadly flu outbreak. In this dungeon-like room, the tour guides killed the lights and turned on some sort of laser grid to detect spirits. We were instructed not to move. I photographed a few orbs but nothing spectacular.
The most energy in the entire building seemed to be concentrated near the casket in the first room. This is also the room in which Helen removed negative energy from three earnest volunteers. It didn’t appear their negative energy had anything to do with the warehouse, however. I think they had come here with it. In retrospect, I regret not stepping forward. Maybe with the help of Helen’s healing hands I could’ve become more of a free spirit again.
The second part of the tour took place outside. Sunshine haunts the area behind the Warehouse because that’s where her body was found. The building and alleyway across the street are also haunted. Another murder took place there, possibly more than one. We were led on foot to numerous other neighborhood buildings in the numbing October air. We passed a ravine in which I photographed a ghost mist that drew attention from other guests on the tour.
Before long, we ended up back at the Warehouse. I was glad to get out of the cold. We sat down at the bar but Joe the ghostly bartender was not working tonight. It was probably just as well because my camera battery was now officially dead and I wouldn’t have been able to get a picture of him anyways.
I didn’t feel like I had interacted with any spirits on this night, unlike the evening at Perkins Mansion two weeks ago. It was there that I had felt something ice cold and very fleeting touch just the tip of my finger near a staircase. I remember jerking my hand away but there was nothing there, nothing there at all.
The Warehouse on the Canal was a warmer experience than Perkins. Nothing felt menacing in any way. The tour was brought to a close back in the dining area. Helen told us a story about a little girl who was terminally ill and had contacted her because she really wanted to see the warehouse. However, she died before she could make it. The girl came to Helen in an apparition after death and reassured her that everything was OK.
I remember reciting, “Nothing can follow me home” as a precautionary measure before getting into my car for the drive home. I also remember thinking about Alice, my guardian angel who was behind me tonight. I wonder what she thought of the experience.