The Best of Cleveland 2012 issue is online and on the streets now. Read it, love it. In addition to the usual categories, there were some offbeat staff picks. We’ll be posting them here over the next few days.
Best Morbid Curiosity : Haunted Cleveland Ghost Tours
Back in 1935, Cleveland became home to one of the first serial-murder sprees the U.S. had ever known. Over three years, “The Mad Butcher” dismembered the heads and limbs of 12 to 15 vagrants inhabiting the shantytowns near the abortive industrial Kingsbury Run region. The killings ended in 1938, when public safety director Eliot Ness razed the Kingsbury Run Hoovervilles. But the gruesomeness and impenetrable mystery of the killings — the Butcher was never identified — have haunted the masses ever since. It’s that fascination that the Haunted Cleveland tour company has prudently capitalized on with its “Murder, Mystery and Mayhem” expedition, which rolls around each Halloween season. Since 1999, Haunted Cleveland has turned the region’s unforgettable disasters into fascinating theater — everything from the scenes of Cleveland’s bloodiest mafia blow-ups to the Collinwood school fire. And each tour is painstakingly researched by leading experts, ensuring the most historically accurate nightmares around.
216-251-0406, hauntedcleveland.net
This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 3, 2012.
In a couple of decades they can add City Hall to the list of haunted venues with rumors that you can still hear Jimmy Demora burping and farting as he waddles down the corridor…