Ohio State’s university archives (@buckeyehistory) posted this image alongside the story of Ohio State physics professor Thomas C. Mendenhall, who tried to resurrect a dead body of a man sentenced to death for murder, as a part of the “Terrifying Tuesday” series. Credit: Courtesy of Michelle Drobik.
A man’s ashes placed within the walls of Bricker Hall.
The Ohio State professor who tried to electrify a dead man executed on murder charges back to life.?
The ghost of a long-dead United States president welcoming military trainees inside the Ohio State building of his namesake.
These scary stories are found inside Ohio State’s vast archives and have been posted throughout the month of October by the archives department on social media as a part of their “Terrifying Tuesday” series, which seeks to enrich and educate followers with bite-sized history lessons that pop up on their feed.
“I think that ghost stories offer a unique way to bring history to life and help people connect with the past in a different way,” Michelle Drobik, Ohio State reference archivist said. “I think stories like this can help us bond as a campus community. It helps us connect with our past as well to see that previous generations face some similar situations and not necessarily in these stories, but in other stories that we talk about on campus; I think that can bring a certain level of comfort.”
“Terrifying Tuesday” originates from ghost tours that Ohio State archivists, like Drobik, lead by request on the Oval, typically for alumni groups or student organizations, Drobik said. The stories used on those tours, which are sourced from the ghost subject file of the university archives, were then translated into more condensed social media posts by Drobik.
The ghost aspect of the stories has been passed on through hearsay and documented over the years, but other facts like a man’s ashes inside Bricker Hall, Hayes Hall being used as military barracks during World War I and an Ohio State professor trying to bring the dead back to life are all true, according to Drobik?
Thomas C. Mendenhall, the first faculty member hired by the then-Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1873, was a psychics professor who tested the theory that a dead body could be brought back to life through electric shock, according to university archives.?
Mendenhall received approval from the Ohio Penitentiary to transfer the corpse of prisoner John Carclay, who was hanged for murder that same day, to Starling Medical College, located in downtown Columbus. He used electric shocks to try to reanimate the corpse, which did not succeed, the archives states.
Bridget McGuinness, a fourth-year in history and history department employee, said that having small history lessons like “Terrifying Tuesday” on people’s social media feeds helps make the subject of history more approachable for people.
“History and also especially something like archival research can seem like a daunting topic to a lot of people, and it feels very exclusive because humanities can seem walled off to a lot of people,” McGuinness said. “So, if you have fun little things that people might not even realize off the top of their head, like, ‘oh, my God, that’s history,’ I think it can really bring them in closer to history and maybe want to get them more involved with maybe studying history, picking up like a history minor, or even just like watching a documentary.”
Drobik said she chose the three ghost stories specifically because the individuals in the stories are significant to the founding of Ohio State.
“I think that makes it more interesting and it really brings the history alive,” Drobik said. “A student walking by Hayes Hall might not know who the namesake of that building is, and so I think that makes it a little more interesting when you hear the full story.”
To McGuinness, reading these ghost stories from the archives lets people orient themselves in the context of that history at Ohio State, which she said provides reflection on the greater community anyone on campus is a part of.
“Something like these Halloween-themed stories in the context of Ohio State being posted by the University Archives, they can make people think, ‘this isn’t just some school I went to in passing. This has a lengthy history, and I would love to see what we’ve stored, what we’ve well preserved,’” McGuinness said. “I think preservation, at the end of the day, leads to showing that there’s a care and a love for something. ?And by the university trying to post and get more people involved with the university history as well as just history in general, it shows that there is a deep care and love for the community.”
