Cintrifuse's Union Hall home in Over-the-Rhine is one of #StartupCincy's most trafficked haunts by entrepreneurs, thought leaders and visitors alike.
But did you know that when the lights go out and the living leave, Union Hall is said to still have one undead trickster who calls the place home?
That's according to a local contractor who was hired to do work in the building's historical subbasement, deep below Vine Street.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Light some candles, hunker down and don't bother locking your windows and doors — ghosts don't use them, after all. I've got a #StartupCincy spooky story for you, passed on to Cincy Inno by Laura Hughes. She's the building and operations manager of Union Hall, and heard this story directly from the subject. You'll notice that I quote her throughout the piece, retelling the rest of the story here in my own words.
Ready? Let's go.
I've been in the subbasement of Union Hall. It's beautiful and captivating in a way that anything that's both subterranean and richly historical is, with its tightly packed dirt floors, high ceilings and sweeping arches that span back, back, back. If I remember correctly, there are two large chambers separated by a small center room. Each is punctuated by more arches and unblinking bulbs keeping watch from above.
Not that there was much to see; When I visited, the giant rooms were totally empty and preternaturally still, so quiet that you forgot for a moment that there was a whole city somewhere above you.
After the awe wears off (and there truly was awe; during a tour of the building, Eric Weissmann, vice president of communications, community and economic engagement at Cintrifuse, laughed good-naturedly when the shock of the sheer size of the space elicited a breathless "whoa!" as I entered) and the realization that you're deep underground sets in, the space is undeniably and sort of deliciously creepy. Maybe it's the emptiness, maybe it's the dirt; perhaps it's the depth or the history.
Because it certainly has it. Hughes (and Weissmann) told me that the subbasement served as a logging tunnel for Champion Brewery in the 1850s, and the discolored brick and mysterious metal loops in the walls, as well as what appeared to be another doorway filled up with dirt, speak to its past. I've since learned that basements like these weren't anomalies, but were "vital to Cincinnati's brewery heritage."
While I accessed the subbasement via elevator, Hughes told me that contractors first renovating the space utilized a huge ladder, inserted into a hole in the ground. If someone needed something, their way out was up.
She heard this from a contractor who came to Union Hall to work on an unrelated electrical issue.
"It was really difficult for me to come to back," he told her.
Hughes, who's worked at Union Hall for three years, managing the building and overseeing any work that needs to be done, was aware how difficult upkeep of an older structure could be. She assumed he meant that accessing the wiring was tricky or something similar, and tried to commiserate.
That wasn't the reason, he countered. "There's a ghost in the subbasement."
The encounter was during a previous job at Union Hall where he'd apparently been first in for the day. He'd made his way down the ladder into the darkness of the subbasement with just his flashlight for guidance — he was, after all, there to set up the lights down below. At the time, they were the hanging single-bulb kind, frill-less, and the contractor in question carried one bulb in at a time.
It wasn't long before the first lamp was shedding a weak glow into the cavernous space, and the electrician was making his way up the ladder to get the next bulb. When he came down, however, the room was dark again, save for the light from his flashlight.
"He sees the first bulb he installed is out and shattered and swinging, as if someone had taken a bat and shattered it," Hughes said.
Frantic, the contractor shone his flashlight around to catch whomever was lurking down there with him, breaking things. He didn't see or hear anyone, at least at first. Yet when he turned behind him, his flashlight allowed him to glimpse a pair of feet disappearing up the ladder and through the hole in the floor, "as if he was leaving."
The contractor immediately left the subbasement and searched the property to see if the culprit decided to hide out somewhere inside.
"No one was here," Hughes said.
It's not the first spooky happening to occur in Union Hall. Hughes added that a few contractors have heard disembodied noises from the subbasement, like a baby crying at night.
While no one is sure who or what could be behind these creepy occurrences, the subbasement will have a second life as a restaurant or bar in either 2019 or 2020.
"I don’t know if that makes ghosts go away," Hughes joked.
Time will tell.
