43
Tales from the Valley’s crypt make ghost watchers believe
Photo
The former Wick Mansion on the Youngstown State University. The mansion now houses the YSU Center for Student Progress. Staff say the building is the home of the ghost of Mary Hitchcock Wick.
By ELISE FRANCO
An employee at the former Wick Mansion said she’s seen what she believes to be a ghost.
Stories are just stories, though, unless someone can give a first-hand account of a paranormal experience.
Here’s one about a lonely ghost:
Now home to offices of Youngstown State University’s Center for Student Progress, the former Wick Mansion was built in 1906 for George Dennick Wick, founding president of Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., his wife, Mary “Mollie” Hitchcock Wick, and their two children.
On April 15, 1912, as the Titanic sank to the bottom of the ocean, George Wick sank with it. His wife and daughter lived, and Mary was convinced her husband had made it as well. She spent several days in New York waiting for him before returning to her home in Youngstown.
Mary Wick died in 1920, and legend says she may still roam the halls of her mansion, awaiting George’s return.
Shannon Reesh, coordinator of supplemental instruction and individual intervention services at the CSP, said she’s a believer.
She said the experience that stands out the most happened one morning as she prepared to begin her work day.
“It was about 7:45 a.m., and we open at 8 a.m., and I believe I was the only one here at the time,” Reesh said.
She said she walked up the staircase to her second-floor office. As she rounded the corner, she saw what she said appeared to be the figure of a woman.
“It kind of stopped me in my tracks, and I walked to the top and said, ‘Hello,’ because I thought there was actually someone there,” said Reesh, who’s worked for CSP for three years. “I was kind of dumbfounded at first, but I feel like I saw that person very clearly.”
She said she wasn’t frightened, just surprised, and is open to the possibility that spirits exist.
“It didn’t really freak me out, just kind of took me back ... It doesn’t seem evil or anything,” Reesh said. “You just get kind of an eerie feeling.”
YSU senior Andrew Berry said he’s also experienced the unexplainable when it comes to the former Wick Mansion.
Last October, after Berry and three colleagues of YSU’s newspaper, The Jambar, spent a night ghost hunting on campus, they walked past the mansion.
“We took some pictures of [Wick Mansion], and we thought that maybe we had some inconsistencies, like lighting and shapes that shouldn’t have been there,” he said. “There was one picture where there was no flash, but the whole building was lit up.”
Berry said seeing that photo was enough to scare the whole bunch.
Hours before, they braved their way through Kilcawley House, a campus dorm, and Sweeney Hall, YSU’s administration building.
Berry said Kilcawley House supposedly became haunted after a janitor hanged himself in a stairwell.
While Berry said he didn’t experience any ghostlike activity, one of his co-workers, Chelsea Pflugh, reported, in a Jambar article about the experience, that she went back to the dorm alone and wasn’t so lucky.
“I run back to Kilcawley alone ... In the elevator, the button for the sixth floor has a glowing red dot. Eerie, and I can’t shake it. The entire time I’m ... by myself I feel like the janitor is following me. The elevator even stops on the wrong floor,” she said.
In Trumbull County, strange things have happened at the Cort-land Opera House — where a former property owner might be keeping watch.
First built as a Methodist church in 1941, the opera house, on Park Avenue, has a long-standing reputation for being home to the ghost of Solomon Kline, the man who bought it in 1881.
Talk of Kline’s presence in the opera house began in the 1980s when a member of the Cortland Bazetta Historical Society was cleaning up after a meeting. He said he heard a crash from the main hall, but when he went to check on what he thought was a stack of fallen chairs, nothing was out of order.
Several other occurrences, all involving people who share Kline’s last name, have led historical society members and locals to believe he’s picky about whom he haunts.
Members have said they think Kline is simply coming back to check on his opera house.
“He’s not a nasty ghost; he’s a very happy person,” said Di Matijevich, historical society member and manager of the opera house.
Even so, she said she hasn’t crossed paths with Kline and hopes she never does.
“I manage the building, so I am there all then time, and I’ve never seen anything,” she said. “For all the years I have worked there, Solomon and I have never met.”
There’s also an alleged residential ghost at Warren City Hall, said to be haunted by the banker/real estate magnate who had the structure built in 1871. Henry Bishop Perkins hanged himself from the railing in an attic of his office building next door to city hall — now the office of the city law director – in 1903.
One former mayor, Hank Angelo, previously told The Vindicator that he remembers that a city employee was so unnerved after seeing what she believed to be Perkins’ ghost that she quit the very same day.
The woman said she had seen a man — with white hair and beard, wearing an old-fashioned coat and bow tie — walk down the steps that lead to a foyer. A portrait of Perkins, with white hair and beard and wearing an old-fashioned tuxedo, now hangs in a glass case at the bottom of that staircase.
Coincidence? The city employee didn’t think so.
Other unexplained instances, such as a cleaning woman’s purse being moved from a table to the floor or chairs being moved away from a table in the mayor’s office, have also been reported.
efranco@vindy.com