We’ve all heard that Cincinnati Music Hall is haunted.
Tales of ghost sightings or spooky sounds late at night. Of bodies buried beneath the building.
It’s true that there are bodies under there, at least.
Nameless graves
The venerable Music Hall sits on hallowed ground. As seen on an 1819 map of Cincinnati, the land below the southern portion of Music Hall was once a Potter’s Field, a place where paupers and unidentified bodies were buried.
The city purchased the lot west of Elm Street, north of 12th Street, in 1818 for a public burying ground, then placed the Cincinnati Orphan Asylum there to accommodate the upswell of orphans due to the cholera epidemic in 1832. The building was also a public infirmary and a “pest house,” where patients with infectious diseases were kept, then the temporary home of the Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum.
Exposition Hall was built on the site in 1870 to house Cincinnati’s annual industrial expos and German saengerfest choral festivals. Construction crews disturbed the graves, fueling rumors that the building was haunted.
Lafcadio Hearn, the former Enquirer reporter reputed for his ghoulish writings, wrote of “The Restless Dead” for the Cincinnati Commercial in 1875:
“Not a foot of ground lies under the Exposition Building unoccupied by moldering bones – human bones – which the ringed worms have long since tired of gnawing,” Hearn wrote.
The Potter’s Field had originally extended beyond the bed of the Miami & Erie Canal, Hearn said. “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.”
Among the nameless were the casualties of the steamboat Moselle disaster in 1838, when the boilers exploded as it departed from Fulton, east of Cincinnati’s riverfront. Body parts flew through the air, crashing into houses. The remains of the victims were gathered and buried together.
“It was, of course, natural enough that the ghosts claiming kinship with the bones 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,” Hearn wrote.
Music Hall replaced Exposition Hall, and when the site was cleared in 1876, more bodies were unearthed and re-interred in Spring Grove Cemetery.
In 1927, the bones of 300 skeletons found during Music Hall renovations were placed in a wooden box and buried beneath the elevator shaft. Those bones were rediscovered in 1988 and became part of an anthropology study at the University of Cincinnati. More remains found under the orchestra pit in the 2016 renovations were buried in Spring Grove.
Left behind
Across the street, the current site of Washington Park at 12th Street between Elm and Race streets, there were other graveyards – the Presbyterian Burying Ground and Episcopal Burying Ground.
This was outside the residential section of town at the time. But as the population spread out, neighbors weren’t keen to have bodies buried so close to where they lived.
That was because people didn’t know what caused illnesses. Before germ theory was widely accepted, the prevailing theory was diseases such as cholera were caused by miasma, or “bad air” from decaying bodies.
So, about 1855, the city purchased the Presbyterian and Episcopal grounds to transform the area into a park. Notices were placed in the local newspapers asking for families to pay to move their loved ones’ remains to Spring Grove Cemetery, established in 1845 as an idyllic rural graveyard.
But not everyone had family in the area, so many graves were not moved. The stones that remained were laid on the ground and covered with three feet of dirt while Washington Park was built on top of them.
During the renovation of the park in 2010, crews uncovered dozens of graves. The remains were reburied in Spring Grove, while countless others are still underneath the park. Since no burial records for the graveyards are available, there is no way to know how many, or who they are.
Notorious resurrectionist
Grave robbery might be another reason for the dead to be restless.
Body snatchers, known as resurrectionists or ghouls, supplied corpses for medical schools throughout much of the 19th century. It was illegal, but the schools were in dire need of bodies for students to study anatomy and dissection, so they turned a blind eye to how they were obtained.
William Cunningham in Cincinnati was a notorious professional resurrectionist who plied his trade in corpses from about 1855 to 1871. He was called Old Man Dead or The Ghoul, but most folks knew him as Old Cunny, a contraction of his name as well as a nod to his cunning and elusiveness.
Everyone in town knew Cunny and what he was doing, but he mostly got away with it. Newspapers reported stories of his activities.
“To have ever seen Cunningham is to retain him in your memory for a life-time,” The Enquirer wrote in 1870, “for that ponderous yet gaunt frame; that villainous bald head, fringed about with silvery gray that strong marked face, corrugated with age and crime, a canine mouth, from the corners of which slowly trickles the generous saliva, impregnated with the juices of nicotine, and that shuffling gait, caused by a broken leg received from a charge of buckshot, constitutes a tout ensemble sufficiently striking to make a very vivid impression.”
A Cincinnati physician familiar with Cunny’s business told that he didn’t need to open the graves to get the bodies. He dug a two-foot square hole above the head of the coffin, broke through the lid, then fastened hooks with strong ropes under the arms and pulled the body out.
He then transported the body on his wagon by dressing up the corpse in an old coat, vest and hat and sitting it up in the buggy seat with him. Whenever the body drooped near a passerby, he’d slap the face and say, “Sit up! This is the last time I am going to take you home when you get drunk. The idea of a man with a family disgracing himself in this way!”
The Enquirer reported that an American Express agent opened a suspicious package Cunningham was sending to a doctor in Kansas, only to find a body inside. The company told Cunningham to remove the body.
“Oh, is that all,” the resurrectionist replied when he saw the police were not involved. He said he had shipped more than 100 bodies through the American Express that summer. Cunningham made $20 to $30 for each corpse.
Before he died in 1871, Cunningham had the foresight to sell his body to the Medical College of Ohio for $50. His skeleton was placed on display in a cabinet, arranged to be sitting on a tombstone with a spade in his hand.
It took a major scandal to finally put an end to grave robbing.
John Scott Harrison, the son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison, died in 1878 and was buried in Congress Green Cemetery in North Bend. A family friend, Augustus Devin, had died the week prior and was buried nearby, but it was soon discovered that his body had been stolen.
Harrison’s son John checked the Medical College of Ohio on Sixth Street for Devin’s body, but instead found the nude corpse of his own father strung up in the school’s cellar.
The outrage led to Ohio finally enacting an anatomy law that allowed for the legal acquisition of unclaimed bodies “for the purpose of medical or surgical study of dissection,” in 1881.
Additional sources: Cincinnati Curiosities blog by Greg Hand, “Cincinnati’s ‘Old Cunny,’ A Notorious Purveyor of Human Flesh” and “The Famous Harrison Case and Its Repercussions” by Linden Edwards, “Daniel Drake and His Followers” by Otto Juettner, Cincinnati Magazine, Friends of Music Hall.
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