Fall is a special time of year here in our area. I love to watch the seasons change and our local colors come out on the trees.

There is a chill in the air, but it is not too cold to be uncomfortable. There seems to be an anticipation, too, of the holidays just around the corner and all the fun that season brings as well. Usually this time of year, my family and I are going between horseback riding for our twins, football and scouts from my son, and dance for my daughter, but we still manage to squeeze in some fun at festivals and pumpkin patches. Fall is traditionally a spooky time of year due to Halloween. It makes me long for campfires, smores and a good ghost story. I have become a collector of sorts for local ghost stories, and I have related quite a few in this column over the years.

If there would ever be a ghost, I would wager that a cemetery might be a prime location where a specter might choose to spend their time. I have been to my fair share of cemeteries and personally I don’t find them all that menacing.

I enjoy spending time in these places because they give the living an opportunity to remember the past and those who have gone to their reward. My wife luckily feels the same. She grew up in Brooklyn, just literally next door to one of the oldest old Dutch burying grounds in New York City with burials going back to 1652.

When we got together in graduate school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, we often would go for walks in Allegheny Cemetery in the city’s Lawrenceville neighborhood near UPMC Children’s Hospital. So many notable folks are interred there like Stephen Foster, composer of hit songs of the 19th century like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River.” Others include politicians, Civil War generals, professional athletes and James Ross, co-founder of the city of Steubenville.

These large, well-kept cemeteries, I would guess, are not the places where a ghost might hang out. To me, it is far more likely that a ghost might haunt their final resting place if it is overgrown, run down or, worst of all, disturbed and scattered.

Perhaps the deceased may not wish to have been a ghost at all but if one’s final resting place was disturbed, it may make soul restless.

I would assume there are plenty of lost cemeteries around our communities today. If you think about it, folks who passed away in the past often were buried on their own farms, and, as homesteads disappeared, so, too, did the cemeteries. Take for example the graves that were dug up in 1926 of our earliest settlers of Holliday’s Cove, specifically the remains of Mary Greathouse, wife of Harmon Greathouse, who died in childbirth, possibly at John Holliday’s tavern in 1787. These folks were buried behind the tavern in a small cemetery located on Cove Road and Overbrook Drive in Weirton. Their remains were disturbed during the construction of a sewer line and, according to some sources, thrown back into the ditch quite unceremoniously. This cemetery was lost, but as the community grew, it was unfortunately disturbed in the name of progress.

Over in Steubenville around this same time, another old cemetery was being rediscovered, although it was never really lost. In 1925, work began in earnest to excavate for Grant School on the corner of South Fourth and South streets. This was the location of Steubenville’s public burying ground. As work began by contractor Harry M. Bates and Sons, strange objects began appearing in the rubble and dirt.

According to the Steubenville Herald-Star in the Saturday, July 18, 1925, edition, “A wooden cross, wrapped in cheese cloth, nailed securely down and bearing strange paraffin lettering, has been found by workmen in the excavating for the new Grant school at Fourth and South streets.”

Alan Hall, director emeritus of the Public Library of Steubenville and Jefferson County, wrote about the old cemetery in an article in the Herald-Star on Feb. 8, 2004, in which he explained that the library, which is near the Grant School lot, is not built on the old burying ground. He further explained that many of the graves, about 600, were removed from the site when Union Cemetery opened in 1854, although certainly not all the graves made it up on the hill. In 1870, the first school was built on the site, according to Hall. It was at that time, according to the 1925 article, when workmen were employed to “turn the earth at least six feet so as to remove all the old skeletons,” but it was questionable as to if this work was adequately completed. The article further explains that fragments of bone have been found on that site over the years but until then, no monuments had been found. Some stones were found bearing the names of James Campbell and Mary Campbell, who died in 1815 and 1814, in addition to another stone which read “Steubenville 1814.” Also found during the excavation was a skull and strands of red hair.

Excavations were ongoing at the site in 1873 as well. On the Jefferson County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society’s website, an article is reproduced from the Steubenville Daily Herald from July 27, 1873, which gives a description of the work being done on the site “Digging up the dead – Workmen are engaged in digging up the dead in the old graveyards on South Fourth Street. A large number of bodies remain in the valuable land that have no business there. The sand must be used for building houses for the living and the robbing of the dwellings of the dead must go on even if the bones of our former citizens can find no other resting place than the street. It has for years been the custom of digging up skeletons and ingeniously secreting them under foot boards or disjointing them for dog food. As this has been an established custom, we trust at this time it will strictly be adhered to. The dead have no rights, the living are bound to respect.”

If there ever was a ghost wandering the streets of Steubenville, perhaps it is those from the old Grant School lot. Death was not the end of the story for them.

Today, the Grant School lot is empty, and discussions have been ongoing about just what can be built on the site, but I don’t believe it will ever lose the history that it once was the burial place for Steubenville citizens. On that site, after all, the future is built upon the buried history of the past.

(Zuros is a historian and Ohio Valley native)