Spooky local tales for the season

Centuries of lore tells us Halloween is a celebration of the blurring of the seen and the unseen worlds. In the spirit of the season, here are a few uncanny tales to savor as the nights grow darker and we creep closer to the witching hour. When she was a child, Sherry Spenzer would walk through Lake Shore Cemetery in Avon Lake, drawn to the old headstones among the brambles. "I was born an old soul," she said, laughing. She didn't know why it fascinated her so, but it never faded. Decades later, a second-grade classroom assignment gave her the perfect excuse to find out more. When her son — now an adult — was told to choose a local place of interest and list facts about it, she suggested the cemetery. Camera and poster board in hand, they headed to the library in those pre-internet days. They found nothing. For 17 more years, the cemetery, in a way, would haunt her. Spenzer continued researching, around her day job as an attorney for the Lorain County Prosecutor's Office and the Domestic Relations Court, scouring old microfiche and probate records. She wrote a book detailing its occupants "Lake Shore Cemetery in Avon Lake," as soon as she retired in 2013, the first of a number of books she has written on Avon Lake's history, all dedicated to raising money for charitable causes. There's something about Halloween that turns minds to our repositories of the dead. It's almost part of the ghost story starter pack to include specters rising from an eerie graveyard under a full moon, but Spenzer has no ghost stories to tell about Lake Shore. "That hasn't been my experience," she said. "But creepy stories? Oh yes, there are those." Overlooking Lake Erie, it's not surprising that the water is the reason for some of its most prominent graves. One memorial, dedicated to Capt. John Duff, only marks his memory, Spenzer notes. Duff was a skilled shipbuilder and 30-year sailor but his luck ran out more than a century ago on a dark October night. "Sailors are very superstitious, and there are two things you don't do: You don't set sail on a Friday, and never on the 13th," she said. "He violated them both." Duff set sail on Oct. 13, 1893 on his ship, the C.B. Benson. It capsized in a violent storm and went down with all hands aboard in a violent storm the next day. One of the sailors was Duff's son. His wife, Caroline, frequently accompanied her husband's journeys as a cook but was not aboard the fateful Benson trip as she was pregnant at the time. She gave birth to their son six months after her husband died, and it is she who was buried under the Duff marker. The eldest brother in the family, John, was also an accomplished sailor and shipbuilder like his father, but became a lawyer when his fiancee's mother objected to her daughter marrying a sailor, Spenzer said. "Her mother would not allow him to marry her," she said. "If not for his mother-in-law, he might not have survived." Being wary of the fickle Lake Erie — the deadliest of the Great Lakes — may have been wise indeed. In 1885, Capt. Duff's schooner, the Nellie A. Duff, named for his daughter, was built in Port Clinton. On Oct. 14, 1895, the lake reclaimed it too, taking with it three of its four crew members — two years to the day since the C.B. Benson sinking. For others, though, a gravesite would hardly matter if a long-gone loved one wanted to visit. In November 1972, Lorain Councilwoman Mary Springowski was just a little girl living on the east side of Lorain and waiting for her little sister to be born. Her mom was in the hospital and her father was working the night shift at the Lorain Ford plant, and her grandmother was staying at the family home with the kids. "As my granny was putting my three brothers to bed, I came running into the room and said 'Granny, Granddad is downstairs and wants to talk to you.' Now mind you, he's been dead two years." Her grandmother told her it wasn't funny, but Springowski insisted Granddad was there. "And then my Gran hears a man's voice ask: 'Bett, are you all right?'" Her name was Betty, but only Granddad called her Bett. Granny called out, thinking it was Mary's father in the hall, and kept on about her business, putting her grandsons to bed. Springowski, on the other hand, was "a bit put out," that what she was so certain of — that her granddad was there - was ignored. When Springowski's dad came home later than night, he asked Granny if everything was all right. When she asked why he was asking such a thing, he explained that police cars and an ambulance were next door and then there were the marks — gouges on the front door, like someone had tried using a crowbar to pry it open. Now that's scary. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.