The Legend Of Walhalla
Last week, I drove Megan, Rachel, Luke, and Josh, around Clintonville because we were bored. Megan was riding shotgun, and the other three were in the back seat. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "You know what we should do! It's almost Halloween, we should check out the Walhalla house!"
"What's the Walhalla house?" Megan and Rachel asked in unison.
"You guys don't know what the Walhalla house is?" I asked. "Boys, you know what it is right?"
Luke and Josh informed me that they did, and after I took a sigh of relief, I drove towards Walhalla Road. When we started driving down the street, I told the story:
Walhalla Road is technically a ravine. The Calumet bridge crosses over the ravine. Overlooking the bridge and the rest of the ravine stands Mooney's Mansion. Mr. Mooney was a professor at The Ohio State University in the 1950s. One evening Mr. Mooney came home from work. As he walked through the ravine to his mansion, he greeted the children who were playing in their yards. He walked into his house, and he was met by his wife, his daughter, and the family dog.
There are multiple versions of what happened that night, but they all agree that Mr. Mooney murdered Mrs. Mooney and their daughter. Mrs. Mooney's body was found without her head, and the legend is that Mr. Mooney threw it into the ravine. After the murder, Mr. Mooney hanged himself from the Calumet Bridge. People to this day say that they can see the ghost of Mr. Mooney hanging from the bridge.
Over the years, kids of all ages would go down into the ravine to see if the ghost stories were true. Legend says if you take a car and put it in neutral right in front of the bridge, the ghost of Mr. Mooney pushes you away from the mansion. So when Mom was 16 years old, she and her best friend drove down to the bridge to see if this was true. However, they found a skinned deer lying in the middle of the road when they got there, and they were obviously freaked out!
I started telling the story about Mom and the deer right as we passed Mooney's Mansion. Before I could finish telling that story, a figure was suddenly illuminated in my headlights out of the darkness! Megan and I screamed, and we frightened the others. As we got a little closer, we realized that it was just a man walking his dog. When we understood that this wasn't anything out of the ordinary, Megan, Rachel, Luke, Josh, and I busted out laughing the rest of the way down Walhalla. In hindsight, however, I don't think we should have been laughing.
In preparation for this installment, I did some research because I wanted to tell the most accurate version of the legend, not necessarily the one that I knew. While I knew almost everything that I found in my research, I stumbled on a particularly interesting version of the story. In this version, not only did Mr. Mooney kill his wife and daughter, but he also killed the family dog. According to that same version, the ghost of Mr. Moody and the dog can often be seen roaming the ravine, searching for Mrs. Mooney's head!
Have a Greattastic Halloween!
J. Mitchie Ulibarri
No comments:
Post a Comment