Down a narrow, winding road lined with open fields, at the bottom of a small valley, the broken remains of a building can be found in a dense patch of woods just before the road suddenly dead-ends. At first, all is quiet. Then, the faint sound of footsteps can be heard overhead and, perhaps, a creaking door. The distant sound of a crackling fire begins to grow louder as the anguished screams of burning children can be heard wailing in the night. Or so the legend goes.
Gore Orphanage has been a tale of terror that spans the generations. For years, thrill-seekers have taken the sharp right turn onto Gore Orphanage Road in Lorain County to visit the remains of the building that once housed more than 100 children in the early 1900s. They go in hopes of finding the fingerprints of small children pressed onto the windows of their cars, or tiny, bloody footprints in the snow. Many claim to have seen the ghost of a child dressed in night clothes walking across the road. There are said to be abandoned graves along the river that “glow like embers in the night”.
According to tradition, a fire broke out in the orphanage one night. More than 120 orphans burned and suffocated as they slept. Some believe that the spirits of those children still roam the grounds today, crying in despair. The exact cause of the fire has never been known. Some say the orphanage owners ignited it for the insurance money, while one rumor states that an "old man from the river" who hated children deliberately started the fire, while still others attribute the blaze to a boy who accidentally dropped a lantern while on his way to the outhouse. The stairs were the first to go up in flames, and soon all on the upper floor were trapped. Local residents gathered to help try to put the fire out, but in the end could only watch as the children inside burned and suffocated from the smoke. According to the few records that still exist, however, none of these details are exactly true.
According to an article by Bill Ellis (a professor of Folklore at Penn State), "What Really Happened at Gore Orphanage," there never was a Gore Orphanage. Gore Orphanage Road was once called Gore Road, named for the wedge-shaped piece of land it traversed. The Reverend and Mrs. Sprunger did establish the Light of Hope Orphanage there in 1902, which trained orphaned children for agricultural work and housekeeping, but it did not burn down; rather, after old man Sprunger died the Orphanage went bankrupt and the children were relocated into other homes.
The remains actually turn out to be that of the Swift Mansion, an old Greek revival house occupied by Joseph Swift who had it built in 1840. It may have been part of the orphanage complex at one time, but it was also a private residence. Swift's railroad stocks went bust during the Civil War and he was forced to sell the house and leave the area. Records show him to have been a very ordinary farmer, but oral tradition claims that he was the leader of a group of spiritualists, who held weird occult rituals in the Swift Mansion.
Swift sold the house to Nicholas Wilbur in 1865.
If anyone held occult rituals in the house, it was Wilbur. The Wilburs were a farming family from New York, but rumors quickly spread throughout town about séances being held in the house on a regular basis. Wilbur himself was thought to be the leader of a group of spiritualists, and his grandchildren were said to have supernatural powers. When Wilbur’s four children all died within a single week, neighbors began to question the causes of death, as well as the whereabouts of the bodies.
It was rumored the corpses were sealed in the fireplace, and their spirits were repeatedly brought back to the house during séances. Mr. Wilbur helped to build the orphanage next door in memory of the deceased children. Mrs. Wilbur allegedly went insane after the deaths, reportedly setting the table three times a day for the now dead children. Townspeople would tell stories of going to the house after the tragedy to watch her take a lamp up stairs saying, “Time for bed, children, come on,” and proceeding to tuck the children in for the night.
Mr. Wilbur died in 1901, and the house was abandoned before the Orphanage of Light and Hope eventually bought it. It burned to the ground in the 1920s. It is said, though, that the bricks from its fireplace were built into another home, and the woman who lives there has heard screams coming from them. It's just as likely, however, that Wilbur was the victim of rumors started long after he had departed this earth. The Wilburs did have four children, aged 2 to 11, who died at the house in the course of seven days at the height of the diphtheria epidemic in 1893, from January 13 through the 19th. One element of the original legend states that there were "neglected children's graves" on the land and that it is their spirits that haunt the site. However, these same children who died from this epidemic can actually be found buried at nearby Andress cemetery, about two miles away, which we visited and verified during the course of our investigation.
As early as 1905 the site was reputed to be haunted, and the still-standing Swift Mansion was vandalized and visited late at night by curiosity seekers. The Orphanage obtained the land and allowed the mansion to fall into further disrepair while they built their dormitories around it. Sprunger himself died in 1912, and the orphanage was then turned over to the Friends’ Church of Cleveland, which promptly went bankrupt. The children were relocated. The last building still standing finally did burn down in 1923, but without anyone inside.
It is thought that during the years since, the Gore Orphanage legend has become entangled with that of a real disaster which occurred forty miles east of Vermilion, in the Cleveland suburb of Collinwood, where on March 4, 1908, the Lake View Public School burned down, killing 176 children and school employees. The legend of the Gore Orphanage fire sounds suspiciously like a retelling of the story of the Lake View Public School disaster.
Current Folklore: Something as horrific as the fire of course would spawn superstitions and tales. The most common one says that when you visit the place where the orphanage was (there's just the foundation left) most people don't see or hear anything out of the ordinary, but when they return to their car dusty children's hand prints are found on the doors, windshields, and hood. There have been supposed sightings of strange lights in the area and tales of people hearing the moans and screams of burning children. There is even a statue of an angel placed near the site in memory of the children who died. They call this the "Black Angel of Death", and superstition says that if you kiss it, you will die within the year. It is said that if you visit the woods late at night you can hear the screams and smell roasting children. There is also apparently a tree with a tire swing near the site where you can see a ghostly child playing sometimes.
Regardless of which story you believe, something does seem to occur there on a regular basis. Mists and other phenomenon have been photographed near a small bridge that crosses a nearby stream on a regular basis, and lights and mists have also been seen to dance in an open field adjacent to the site. My wife and I have made two trips to the site so far, one just at nightfall and the other by day. Not much remains except a stone pillar marking one corner of the estate, that may have held part of a gated entrance. We found the covered remains of an old well which unwary visitors could easily miss in the darkness, the foundation of a small outbuilding such as a carriage house, and some large stones scattered about that may have been from the foundation of the mansion itself. It is extremely overgrown and finding a clear path to walk is difficult, it could very well be that other remains from the estate are hidden nearby from view, just out of sight.
OUR INVESTIGATIONS:
(11/2/03)(6/25/05) Like any good investigator, I went into this visit with a skeptical mind, since so many of the stories turned out to be exaggerated folklore. To my surprise we did encounter something strange on the property which validated some of the superstitions regarding the place. During our visit we penetrated into the woods as far as we could safely walk, when dusk fell and it became too dark to see your footing or which way you were heading. Our party turned and started to follow the trail back out of the woods. During our visit I had taken numerous still photographs and some video to document our investigation, without anything concrete showing up. On our way out I continued to let the video camera record, as I held it down by my side by the strap, pointing backwards over the way we had just come. (I had read numerous tips that since you don’t know when or from what direction something may suddenly appear, and since human reaction time can be slow, it’s best to leave the camera on running continuously all the time).
On our return and viewing the tape, it could be seen it was so dark it was almost impossible to make out the path or individual trees. At one unexpected moment a bright glowing object suddenly entered the field of view, made a short circle, and then flew out of camera range. The total time was so short it amounted to no more than 7 individual frames, all of which are presented here. We eliminated as many possibilities as we could, but are left with more questions than answers. First, the object is clearly glowing of its own accord, and giving off light, it is not a reflection. There was no moon that night, and the cloud cover was thick overhead. The light appears to move behind the branches of a tree at about waist-height, not up in the sky anyway. There are no homes or buildings for a least a half mile in either distance, as the site is located within the confines of state preserve. There are no roads within view from the center of the woods that could provide car headlights. There are no streetlights anywhere along that stretch of road that could have been a source of illumination. We had no flashlights with us, and though we did have still cameras with flash, it is apparent that this light is not any type of reflection off of tree branches, and it was also plainly moving through the woods.
The glowing ball of light – if that is what is was – was roughly only 20 feet or so behind us as were we leaving the area, at about human torso height off the ground, perhaps no more than a foot or so in size, and seemed to change shape as it moved. Needless to say, we missed seeing whatever it was in person, and I can only imagine what our reaction would have been if we had only turned around. Our unearthly “escort” off the property serves to convince me that something is definitely there, and that not all stories connected with the site can therefore be so readily shrugged off.
The bridge over a small creek leading to the property, another area where mists and strange lights are frequently seen.
Views showing the current wild state of the property, which adds to the difficulty of finding remains.
Part of the remains of a stone pillar that may have once marked the entrance to the Swift Mansion property.
Trying to see what remains beneath some of the ruins.
The top of the not-too-safely covered well, depth unknown (left); and one a few mysteriously carved stones from the facade of the building whose features are all but eroded away.
