Was Cincinnati's Music Hall built on graves?
- Rachel Dawn
- Feb 23
- 5 min read
Cincinnati’s Music Hall was built on top of thousands of unmarked graves
Welcome to Cincinnati Legends, a series where I, an artist who just moved to Cincinnati, draw and tell the story of urban legends and legendary landmarks.
You may know Music Hall as the performance hall and historic landmark that it is today but did you know that it used to be home to an Orphan Asylum and an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 unmarked graves?
Beneath the ornate halls and awe inspiring architecture lies a dark past and today, we’ll dive into the secrets that are quite literally buries under Music Hall.
From 1805 to 1855, the land where Washington Park and Music Hall now sit was home to the Episcopal & Presbyterian Burying Ground and Potter’s Field.
Friends of Music Hall describes Potter’s Field as the final resting place for “immigrants and paupers who had the misfortune of dying without identification or loved ones to claim their bodies”.
After a devastating outbreak of cholera that killed thousands, Cincinnati was in need of an orphanage. Over the space that is now that Music Hall stage, they built an Orphan Asylum, horribly referred to by neighbors as the “Pest House”.
For the next 20 years, the land around the asylum continued to be used as burial grounds for the homeless, orphans, victims of cholera, and an estimated 200 people who died in a steamboat explosion off the Cincinnati shore.
By 1855 the city had purchased the land that housed both cemeteries and planned to shut them down due to public complaints and the belief that vapors from dead bodies were causing cholera outbreaks.
Even then, the space was considered haunted. A Cincinnati Commercial article from August 1875 reads “Nevertheless, we hear of some uncanny places even in practical Cincinnati, where the dead render the lives of the living a burden to them. When the canal was cut through this soil, enriched with human remains and sown with human bones, about a hundred skeletons had to be removed and committed to the already overcrowded Place of Nameless Graves now covered by the buildings.”
Music Hall construction began in October 1876 and for the first time, the public witnessed the true extent of how many bodies were buried underneath. While we can assume some of the reports were sensationalized because people in the Victorian era had a pretty morbid fascination with death and dying, newspapers told stories of boxes crammed full with skeletons and body snatchers stealing bones to sell. Today’s archaeologists guess that there were about 18 boxes of human remains moved from the construction site and did say it was likely that a fair amount of bones were either removed or destroyed by onlookers, souvenir hunters, and medical students.
Reports from 1876 said the bodies would be reburied at Spring Grove Cemetery and you would assume that would be the end of the story. However, every major renovation of Music Hall that’s taken place over the century has resulted in the discovery of more bodies. And all those souls who have never been given a final resting place have been said to linger.
“Not a foot of ground lies unoccupied by moldering bones – human bones – which the ringed worms have long since tired of gnawing. It was, of course, natural enough that the ghosts disinterred from the bed of the canal, and the ghosts claiming kinship with the bones disinterred to make room for the elevator, should cease to rest.”
There are still Remains buried under Cincinnati’s Music Hall
Bodies have been found under Music Hall in 1876, 1927, 1988, and most recently, 2017.
The 1927 renovation uncovered an underground pit containing 65 graves was found by workman and coined the “Valley of Death”. In the same year, three coffins, dating as far back as 1831 were found in the area where they planned to build a new elevator. Reports say that rather than moving the bodies to Spring Grove they were given quote “a fitting burial in the pit of the new elevator shaft”.
Over 60 years later in 1988, after the bodies dumped in that pit were long forgotten, workers broke ground on a new elevator shaft, uncovering over 200 pounds of bones.
Finally, just 9 years ago, 6 more grave shafts and the arms and legs of 4 skeletons were found by workers checking for asbestos. An archaeological group assumed based on the incomplete skeletons that these bodies were not originally buried there, but rather moved there during the 1927 remodel.
Given the scale of Music Hall, and the lack of respect for the bodies buried beneath both throughout their lives and their deaths, it seems unlikely that all the remains have now been removed and reburied. Knowing that, it makes sense that there are many reports of restless spirits inhabiting Music Hall.
Is Cincinnati’s Music Hall haunted?
Reports of hauntings date all the way back to 1875, back when Music Hall was a vast wooden structure called The Exposition Building.
Around the time of the Exposition Building’s demolition and the construction of Music Hall, a night watchman shared his experience:
“The weirdest and strangest noises would occur at intervals all night. Rappings on the ceiling, under the floor, on the doors and windows, the sound of stealthy footfalls behind me, or of loud tramping before me; the crash of heavy timbers thrown from the ceiling, of glass dashed upon the floor, of heavy bodies being dragged over the planking –
“They never touch me, but I always know when they are around, by an icy chill, a thrill as of electricity”
“I have got used to it. So used to it that sometimes when people have really knocked at the door I didn’t open, because I thought it was only the dead that kept knocking, knocking, knocking.”
Friends of Music Hall gathered stories from former employees about their paranormal experiences while working there.
One employees came down and brought his little three-year old son Charlie with him. They went out on stage and Charlie was enjoying pretending like he was performing and all of a sudden he looked over and said ''Daddy, who's that man in the box?'' His father said, ''There's nobody in the box, Charlie.'' ''Yes there is. He's waving at me right now.''
A box office worker was working at the window one night and heard the bell indicating someone is at the window but there was nobody there. The buzzer kept going off, so he finally left the box office and went outside and didn't see anybody. He went back in, (it) kept ''dinging'' so he went back out again. At one point he was back in the box office, and he felt a tug on his shirt sleeve. He looked down and there was a little boy in period dress and a little cap -was tugging on him.
Sources: