A live-in boyfriend in Waynesville is hounded by strange noises and banging ... and choked by invisible hands.

Strange things happen in Arlene Daniels' old house in Waynesville. (Enquirer illustration) | ZOOM |

        A black man beckons and pleads for help in Springboro ... a century and a half after he suffocated before he could reach freedom.

        A 4-year-old boy in Springboro leads his parents to meet a mysterious playmate ... at her chilling home.

        A screaming woman runs down a western Butler County road ... 153 years too late to be saved from an ax-murderer.

        While many Tristaters are lining up at Halloween “haunted houses” and other attractions, some know that chills can be found in real-life local ghost stories.

        Local hauntings helped inspire a man who grew up in Fairfield to build a career of chronicling the frightening unknown and unexplained. He has some of the scariest stories of all.

        His native Southwestern Ohio has many restless spirits, says paranormal researcher Barry Conrad, but the meanest ghost he has ever encountered lived in San Pedro, Calif.

        “It is my strangest case,” he said. “It was a bizarre and true haunting, very disconcerting to us all. The woman, Jackie Hernandez, was actually terrorized by a male entity, which is unusual.”

        Mr. Conrad went to the woman's home with a small group of researchers to investigate her claim.

        “Human plasma — we had it analyzed — dripped from the walls one day,” he said. “A colleague was thrown against a wall. Another was pulled against an attic wall and hung on a nail — with a rope. Luckily, we got up there fast enough to stop him from choking.

        “The entity continued to harass Jackie and her children until she finally moved, and then it followed her for a while.”

        Mr. Conrad, a 1974 graduate of Miami University and a former WKRC-TV news photographer, shot extensive video during the haunting. He has edited his footage into a 90-minute documentary, An Unknown Encounter.

        “There is something on that tape that no expert can explain: tiny balls of light that shoot around independently, as if they have minds of their own,” he said. “One thing the experts do know: the lights are neither fake nor insects. They defy gravity and everything else.”

        Since moving to Los Angeles in the 1980s, Mr. Conrad has turned ghost hunting into a passion. He has purchased sensitive detection and recording equipment for staking out “haunted” buildings — at their owners' request.

        Mr. Conrad said he would also like to produce a video on Ohio's ghosts, which waft across the landscape this time of year, waiting to be rediscovered.

        At midnight near Trenton, some people swear you can hear a ghostly scream coming from a woman who runs along Wehr Road. She and her three children were killed by her abusive husband — with an ax, no less — in 1848.

        The husband, Jacob Yargus, committed suicide in

        the Butler County Jail shortly after admitting that he killed his family. Oddly enough, he committed the crimes while serving a jail term as a trusty. He simply slipped away, took a stage to the small community of Busenbark, where he lived, killed the family and returned to jail.

        Apparently his wife still can't get over their marital problems.

        “A woman with flaming hair supposedly runs across the road as though she's being chased,” said Doris Page, a co-curator of the Trenton Historical Society Museum. “Some people claim to have seen her, although two prominent men investigated in the early 1900s and didn't see anything.

        “But every year at Halloween, high school kids drive there looking for her.”

        Then there are the “real” ghosts — real, at least, to people like Arlene Daniels of Waynesville in Warren County.

        Four years ago, she moved into a rambling house built in 1846 at Third and North streets.

        “I feel comfortable here, even though we have a ghost,” she said. “It didn't show up right away. Then last winter my daughter's boyfriend moved into an upstairs bedroom. I feel that the ghost didn't like him.” She heard strange noises — things moving around in the attic.

        “One night while he was sleeping, he started gasping for air; he was being choked by a something unseen. We got him up and he finally got back his breath, but then we noticed he had a lot of tiny scratches all over his neck.

        “He didn't leave right away, though. One night he and my daughter got into an argument and he went up to that same bedroom and started knocking on the door and asking her to let him in. Suddenly, my daughter heard a terrific banging on the ceiling, coming from the attic above. The noise got to so loud that it scared her and she called the police. Her boyfriend left and has never come back.”

        Lebanon's Dennis Dalton, who is compiling a list of ghostly happenings in Warren County for publication, said Ms. Daniels' house has been haunted for years.

        But, he said, it's not the best story he's collected.

        “Last summer, a friend of mine said her 4-year-old grandson in Springboro kept talking about his playmate, Sarah, and was sad that she was going to go away soon.

        “When my friend told him to show her where he would meet Sarah, he took her out back to the old Universalist Cemetery and walked up to a grave marker of a girl named Sarah. The kid was incredible. How could he have known? He couldn't even read. The whole family is still in awe.”

        Another of his favorite stories is well known in Springboro.

        “A runaway slave was trapped in a false-back cupboard,” Mr. Dalton said. “During the rush to move a group of slaves one night, the Underground Railroad operator forgot the man in the cupboard. He suffocated there.

        “A former owner of the house told me she used to see a black man at the foot of their bed, beckoning to her, as though he were pleading. It's enough to scare you because the ghost actually beckons — as if to say, help me.”

        Across the river in Northern Kentucky, you can hear ghost tales that make your spine tingle — even when you're not drinking.

        Bobby Mackey's Music World in Wilder advertises as the most haunted bar in the nation on its Web site, www.bobbymackey.com.

        A pyschic writes of the bar: “Bobby Mackey's Music World was one of the scariest ghost busting jobs I've ever been on. Johana tried pushing me down a very steep stairway. I saw a ghost named Pearl holding her head and repeating over and over "Oh, my head. Oh, my head.' ... There were ghosts in the bathroom, on stage, in the caretaker's apartment, near the bucking bronco, and in the main bar. They were everywhere.”

        There have been nights when Donna Clifton feels a tap on her shoulder and turns around, only to find no one there. Other times, the chairs will creak, and no one is sitting in them.

        The nightclub is haunted, said Mrs. Clifton, a manager and bartender who has worked at Bobby Mackey's for nearly 14 years.

        “But I love working here,” she said. “I would never quit this job for nothing. Not even a ghost.”

        Check trick-or-treat times for your area and other Halloween information at Cincinnati.com/halloween

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