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Supernatural Lore of Ohio offers a blood-curdling exploration of the witches, werewolves, wraiths and other dastardly beings of the Buckeye State.

A rich vein of bizarre and uncanny tales snakes through Ohio’s cornfields and cityscapes. In the earliest days of statehood, dark reports spoke of witches causing feathers to form a deadly ring in one’s bed, magically strangling its sleeping victims. For years, the ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train rolled through Urbana, a small town in the center of the state, and caused clocks and watches to stop in its wake. A vampiric entity was said to haunt a strange cabin in the Black Swamp, and a werewolf reportedly roamed a Defiance train yard. Join Cincinnati historian Steven J. Rolfes on a tour of Ohio’s strangest supernatural lore, from wailing banshees to the devil himself.

Strange things are afoot in the Buckeye State/

Across city and country, Ohio echoes with tales of creatures, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena. A monster that appeared to be half man and half dog and wielding a 2-by-4 terrorized a small Northwest Ohio town during the summer of 1972. Over the years, visitors to a quiet Cincinnati suburb claim to have been accosted by a human-size, leathery frogman lurking near the riverbank. For generations, hikers and hunters have reported seeing Bigfoot throughout forests across Ohio, and some of the most notorious and well-documented UFO encounters on record have taken place here./

Authors M. Kristina Smith and Kevin Moore parse urban legends from history as they explore the unnatural side of Ohio’s heritage.