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Historic haunted places in Columbus, OH. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
4 listings shown.
OHIO / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Soon after the Civil War, people described a veiled Lady in Gray tending graves at the old prison camp cemetery. Grounds workers and visitors still report fresh flowers left on hea…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
OHIO / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Staff over many years have reported Oscar Kelton standing in the garden as if pausing for a smoke, a habit he had in life. A young girl has also been seen in a second-floor hallway…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
OHIO / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Senate clerk Thomas Bateman kept the same route out of the building every day for 52 years, and lights along that path are said to flicker around 5 p.m. A Lady in Gray is heard wee…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
OHIO / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Humorist James Thurber wrote 'The Night the Ghost Got In' about a night in 1915 when he heard footsteps circling the dining-room table in this house. He insisted he truly heard a g…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Columbus was laid out in 1812 as Ohio's planned capital — a city chosen for its central location at the meeting of major routes, on land that had not yet been settled, and named for Christopher Columbus. Its haunted map still follows that founding plan: the oldest scares cluster around Capitol Square, the German Village streets to the south, and the great cemetery the young city built for itself a generation later.
At the center stands the Ohio Statehouse at 1 Capitol Square. Wikipedia's documented history of the building records that it was opened to the public in 1857 and completed in 1861, built in the Greek Revival style with a distinctive cupola, and that it is both a U.S. National Historic Landmark and the working seat of Ohio's government. Abraham Lincoln's connection to the building is documented history, not legend: he visited Columbus in life, and his body lay in state in the Statehouse as his funeral train carried him home to Illinois — the fact on which the building's best-known ghost story hangs.
East of downtown, at 77 Jefferson Avenue, stands Thurber House, the restored 1873 home of humorist and cartoonist James Thurber. Thurber House's own history records that James Thurber and his family lived in the home from 1913 to 1917, while he was a student at Ohio State, and that the house opened as a museum in 1984 — today it is a nonprofit literary center and the home of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The house's own haunted-history page adds the darker layer underneath: the land it sits on is the former site of the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum, which burned down in 1868, killing six women in the fire and fatally injuring another.
Southwest of downtown, Green Lawn Cemetery has been Columbus's city of the dead since it was founded in 1848 and received its first burial in 1849. Wikipedia documents it as the second-largest cemetery in Ohio, and its notable burials include James Thurber himself, World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, and several Ohio governors — a roll call of the names on Columbus street signs.
This section is folklore — reported by the Statehouse, the houses, and the tour operators, and never asserted as fact here.
The Statehouse's resident tradition is told by its own Haunted Statehouse Tours. Visitors on those lantern-lit walks pass, in the tour's telling, the ghost of President Lincoln in an unfinished dance with Kate Chase, daughter of Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase, who hosted Lincoln in Columbus in 1859. A weeping Lady in Grey is also said to haunt the building, along with a green, ghostly president felled by an assassin's bullet. The Statehouse presents these as spooky tales intertwining history and hauntings — its own framing — and this page keeps them there.
Thurber House's ghost was documented by the resident himself. The house's own haunted-history page records that James Thurber claimed to have heard a ghost in the house on November 17, 1915, and that he fictionalized the experience in his short story "The Night the Ghost Got In" — and, the house says, Thurber believed to his dying day that the home was haunted. Staff, visiting authors, and others have since reported unusual phenomena of their own, in the house's telling.
At Green Lawn, local legend holds that the Hayden Mausoleum answers its visitors: knock on the mausoleum door after dark, the story goes, and something knocks back from inside. Shadowy figures among the headstones are also reported in local lore. The cemetery itself is a working, gated burial ground that closes at night — the legends are told on licensed after-dark tours, not tested by trespass.
Hountix lists 4 places in Columbus, OH. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The Ohio Statehouse is the rare haunted attraction that is also a functioning seat of government, and its ghost program is run by the building itself. The Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, which operates the Statehouse, runs the Haunted Statehouse Tours each October: conductors lead visitors through the dimly lit limestone corridors by oil lantern light, past costumed figures and the building's historic exhibits. Columbus on the Cheap's listing for the 2026 season gives the shape of the event — Friday and Saturday nights in the second half of October, departures every half hour between 7 and 8:30 p.m., groups limited to 35, advance tickets required, and the program recommended for ages 12 and up. The Statehouse's own news pages add a daytime counterpart: free Trick-or-Treat Tours for children and free Spooky Statehouse Tours, telling ghostly tales and strange occurrences from the building's past, on Halloween Day itself.
The stories the tours tell are the building's resident folklore, presented by the Statehouse as legend. Lincoln is said to linger here — seen, in the tour tradition, still dancing with Kate Chase in the Senate Chamber — alongside a weeping Lady in Grey. The documented frame underneath the folklore is real: a Greek Revival capitol opened in 1857 and completed in 1861, where Lincoln's body genuinely lay in state in 1865.
The Statehouse is at 1 Capitol Square, and its ordinary guided tours run year-round from the Map Room. The haunted version is seasonal and sells out — the Statehouse's own news release for the evening tours notes that all tickets must be pre-ordered, with none sold at the door.
*Website: https://www.ohiostatehouse.org/news/trick-or-treat-and-spooky-tours-on-halloween-day*
Thurber House is a literary museum with a ghost problem it refuses to hide. The house at 77 Jefferson Avenue was built in 1873 and was the family home of James Thurber from 1913 to 1917; founded as a nonprofit in 1984, it now runs author events, writing workshops, writer residencies, and the Thurber Prize for American Humor from the restored house.
Its haunting is documented first by Thurber himself. The house's own haunted-history page — which opens by warning that not everything reported online about the house is factual — records the claims it stands behind: the land is the former site of the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum, which burned in 1868 with the loss of six women and another fatally injured; and on November 17, 1915, James Thurber heard a ghost in the house, an experience he turned into "The Night the Ghost Got In" and believed in for the rest of his life. Staff and visiting authors have reported further unusual phenomena since, in the house's own account.
Unusually for a museum, you can test the claim. Thurber House permits a limited number of groups per year to conduct private ghost investigations in the house — six hours, at $95 per person with a $300 minimum, with the fees supporting its programs, in its own published terms. Its Halloween season adds a murder-mystery night and a raffle for a private "Evening with the Ghosts" investigation. Thurber House has its own Wikipedia article, which documents it as a literary center in James Thurber's historic former home, individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the haunting claims above come from the house's own published history and investigations pages.
*Website: https://www.thurberhouse.org/*