From eerie clapping to bizarre writing on the wall, here’s the true story of The Pataskala Ghost
It was a cool, autumn evening in 2021. Rob and Pam had spent the day rehabbing their new, Pataskala home, just as they had done most days since buying the fixer-upper almost two years earlier.
Rob started a fire in the small, stone pit that had come with the house. The two relaxed and enjoyed the warmth of the nearby flames. Deciding to capture the tranquil moment, Rob took his cell phone from his pocket and snapped a photo of the fire. A quizzical look came over his face.
Handing the phone to his wife, Rob said, “Look at this.” “What is that?” Pam asked, holding the phone closer and squinting at the screen. “You doctored this, didn’t you?” “How could I doctor it? I just took the picture and handed you the phone.” “Oh, wow!” That was about all Pam could utter.
The couple’s little dog Rascal growled in the direction of the fire. Occasionally taking a few steps toward the pit, he would bark, then run back and cower at the feet of his owners.
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Though there was no good explanation for what Rob and Pam saw on the phone screen, a whole series of strange incidents they had encountered at the house began to make a little more sense to them – that is, insofar as supernatural occurrences make any sense at all.
Rob and Pam, both in their mid-60s, married in 2019. Pam moved in with her new husband at his home in Hilliard. But soon, they began looking for a place a little farther from city lights and the incessant traffic … one they could enjoy during their retirement years … a home with a larger lot and maybe a few more trees. The mid-‘70s ranch house, next to a dead-end street just outside Pataskala, seemed to fit the bill.
The price was certainly right. But having been vacant for a year or more, the place needed work. Rob and Pam figured they could do much of it themselves. They spent every available hour cleaning, painting, performing small repairs and making plans for the larger remodeling jobs they would assign to contractors. At night, they slept in a camper Rob had parked beside the driveway.
The home’s previous owner, a widow named Karen, had died of cancer at a hospice center in early 2018. Her sister eventually decided to sell the place “as is,” using a real estate agent and ads on Facebook. But as Rob and Pam soon learned, there may have been other reasons for their new home’s “below market” price.
“It was just kind of creepy,” Pam said. “A lot of the owner’s belongings had been left behind. The attic was full of random stuff like diaries dating back to the 1800s, things related to President Kennedy and his assassination and just a bunch of junk. And a lot of it had been eaten by mice.” They found clothing and other items you would associate with a young boy, though no boy had lived there for at least 35 years. Many of the interior rooms had doors with combination locks on the outside. And in one bathroom, someone had scribbled “Happy Birthday” on the wall above the toilet.
“And then all these neighbors started coming over,” Rob said, “telling us about all the weird deaths associated with the house.” One of the stories involved a tree trimmer who fell onto the paved driveway while cutting branches of a tall tree near the fire pit. “When that happened,” Pam added, “the family’s little dog ran into the street and was run over by a car.”
The stories kept getting more bizarre. They learned that in 1985, the previous owner’s husband, also named Rob, left the house one morning for his job as a high school principal. When he failed to show up, co-workers called his wife, who asked police to look for him. Rob’s car was discovered at a motel a few miles away, and in one of the rooms, they found his body. He had taken his life by overdosing on pills. As far as anyone knew, Rob had no personal problems that might have led to his suicide. His widow and their seven-year-old daughter Abby struggled to carry on.
In 1994, tragedy struck the family again. Abby, now 16, had taken to sneaking out of her bedroom at night – sometimes to see her boyfriend, sometimes to just pal around with her best friend, Jamie. On the night of September 25th, Abby and Jamie climbed out through a window and stepped into a waiting car driven by Abby’s ex-boyfriend, Bobby. But Bobby was not there to kiss and make up, as Abby had hoped.
Instead, the 16-year-old boy drove the two girls to his house, where Bobby’s vindictive mother and another young couple helped Bobby murder his ex-girlfriend and Jamie. Hoping to hide the bodies and any evidence of the crime, the four dragged them into a nearby barn and burned it to the ground. Bobby, his mother and the other couple were caught, tried and convicted.
That left Abby’s mother, Karen, as the lone surviving family member to maintain the home. When she died in 2018, her sister inherited the property.
“And then when we bought it,” Pam said, “we just started noticing these strange things happening. This was even before the neighbors came over to share their horrible stories.” Pam and Rob would return to Hilliard for a few days at a time, in between visits to work on the new place. “We would check every door and every light before we left,” Pam said. “And then when we came back,” Rob added, “we would find the lights on and the back door open. We couldn’t figure it out.”
“There were several times,” Rob said, “when I would walk into a particular bedroom at night and hear a loud ‘clap!’ right in front of my face. But nobody was there.” “And Rascal?,” Pam added. “Our little dog hated this place. Every chance he got, he would head back to the camper.” All of these unexplained occurrences seemed to come to a head on the night Rob started the fire and took the picture.
The couple looked closer at the photo on Rob’s phone. There, behind the fire, was the ghostly image of a person – possibly a man. He was standing, looking to his right, with a flat head, sharply angular facial features and a crooked smile. The apparition’s right hand appeared to be lifted in a “devil’s horn” or “rock on” salute. The left arm was bent at the elbow, his left hand held a few inches from his chest and casting a shadow on it. He was wearing what looked like a robe with buttons up and down the front.
This is the image that made Pam think her husband had manipulated the photo. This may have been what drove Rascal crazy. It certainly caused the couple to wonder, “What the hell is going on here?”
Strangely enough, the one-time appearance of the ghost-like image marked the end of the pair’s bizarre interactions with their new home. Lights that were turned off now stayed off. Locked doors remained locked. And except for one isolated occurrence, the “clapping” that Rob occasionally heard in front of his face stopped. Even Rascal seemed to be warming up to the place. Pam doesn’t know why, but she believes the “ghost” or “spirit” was saying, “Goodbye” to her and Rob that night by the fire pit.
Four years after their “visitation,” the couple are still working on their new place. But they’ve completed enough of the rehab to trade in the camper for a real bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. At night, they can step outside and see stars in the sky. The only sounds are those of the crickets and leaves rustling in the wind.
Today, Rob and Pam are convinced that, despite the odd deaths, the strange occurrences and the “ghost,” they are finally at peace with a home in which they hope to make many happy memories over the years to come – just the two of them and, of course, Rascal.
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