On a calm winter night in 1892, Edward Wallace was sitting with his wife and their five children in a room in their small log house near the railroad tracks in Waynesville. The night was peaceful and relaxing as they busied themselves with their own tasks. The quiet was interrupted when a ghost suddenly appeared before them. At once, the spirit blew out their lights and demanded they leave the house and never return.

Confused, the family members protested this idea. When they did, the ghost grabbed the nearest child, the oldest, Cora. He quickly shoved her facedown onto the nearby table and started beating her. In shock, the family members could only watch in horror, glued to their seats. They recognized the ghost as that of Joe Lynch, who was murdered in 1878 in Waynesville by James Buckner. Before they had time to wonder why he showed up or react to his actions, another ghost appeared and rescued Cora.

As the second ghost started fighting the first ghost, they recognized the second spirit as the ghost of their relative Warren Cotton. Warren had died only a few years after Joe Lynch, but as far as the family knew, Lynch and Cotton had never met. The Wallace family had also never met Joe Lynch.

The appearance of Warren Cotton’s ghost started an epic supernatural battle. The ghosts screamed like banshees, their eyes gleaming in the darkness and the atmosphere was charged with electricity. Furniture tumbled to the floor, chairs were broken, and objects flew about the room as the spirits fought. As the glass from shattered windows scattered about the room, the action became too much to bear. The Wallace family fled in terror leaving all their possessions behind in the ghostly battleground that was their house. As they fled, they told a neighbor they had been run from their house by the ghost of a murdered man.

When they arrived in Xenia at the home of their friend Archie Valentine, they were almost incoherent with terror. It was late at night as they related the story to him, breathless. Valentine, living in an area known as Barr’s Bottom, already had a large family in his small house but he did his best to accommodate his friend Edward Wallace and his family. He certainly wasn’t going to turn them away in their time of need.

Valentine didn’t have to accommodate them for long though. That night as the Wallace family settled in, another spirit appeared before them telling them to move on from the house. Already on edge and hoping to avoid another ghostly battle, they did not hesitate to listen to what this spirit told them. Without giving any more information on their way out, the Wallace family quickly slipped into the darkness of the night and were never heard from again.

Read this and other ghost stories in Dayton Ghosts & Legends, available through Amazon and major book retailers. Autographed copies available directly from the author on SaraKaushal.com