Ep. 27 - The Rose Family Murders

Not too far from Malabar Farm State Park in Ohio sits Pleasant Valley Cemetery. One marble grave marker stands a bit higher than the rest of the headstones around it and across the top is embossed the family name Rose. This marks the final resting place of three members of the Rose family who all died within a thirty day time frame. The cause of death was not some hideous plague that swept through town. The family was murdered. That revelation is horrific enough, but what makes this story truly chilling is that they were murdered by one of their own.

David S. Rose was born in 1829. He married Rebecca Easter in 1855 and they had two children, Walter and Celia. When the Civil War broke out, David enlisted with the Union Army at the age of 32. He served with distinguished honor in the 63rd Infantry Regiment Ohio. He mustered out in 1865. Walter had been born in 1857, before the war, but Celia came much later. She wasn't born until 1873. Celia, or Ceely as everybody called her, was described in those days as slow in abilities, so she probably had some form of cognitive disability. The Rose's lived near the Berry family who had a son named Guy. Ceely fell madly in love with Guy. She would spend every moment she had tracking him down and trying to talk to him. Guy was nice to Ceely, he probably felt a tad sorry for her, but he did not have the same romantic feelings for her. His family did not approve of the friendship. As one can imagine, back in the 1800s, slower people were not treated with much dignity or respect. The Berry Family went so far as to tell David to keep his daughter Ceely away from their son. David respected their wishes and told Ceely that she had to stay away from Guy.

Ceely was enraged. She just knew that Guy loved her. This is what she had been telling all her friends, even declaring that she and Guy were going to get married. Now her family was keeping her away from her one true love. There was only one thing she could do to rectify the situation and that was to kill her family. She went to the store and bought some rat poison. The next morning, she made the family breakfast and laced the cottage cheese with the arsenic. Ceely's brother and parents all fell ill. Walter was strong enough to go to town to fetch the doctor. The doctor could not figure out what had made the family ill. David died quickly and passed on June 30th in 1896. He was the first to succumb to the poison. Walter followed shortly thereafter, passing away on July 4th at the age of 39. Rebecca recovered and the town folk figured that the mysterious illness had passed. No one is sure how, but Rebecca figured out what Ceely had done and she knew that some people in town were suspicious since Ceely had bought a large quantity of rat poison shortly before the deaths of her father and brother. She told Ceely that they would need to leave town.

This only panicked Ceely further and she again decided to poison her mother. This time she was successful and Rebecca died on July 19th. The Mansfield, Ohio newspaper, "The Richland Shield & Banner" reported on 7/25/1896, "Of the mysterious poisoning of the Rose Family. The mother died Sunday and the daughter is the only survivor - People of that vicinity intensely aroused and demand investigation. Coroner Baughman was notified by telephone message from Dr. Budd of Perrysville of the death of Mrs. Rebecca Rose, which occurred at 5 o'clock Sunday morning. This is the third death, which has occurred in the Rose family the result of supposed poisoning, the deaths of the father and son, Walter, having occurred previously. The coroner left immediately for the Ross homestead in Pleasant Valley and at 2:30 o'clock yesterday afternoon held a post mortem, assisted by Dr. Budd. The stomach, liver and kidneys were removed and sealed up and brought to this city. They will probably be analyzed, as will also the stomach of Walter, which is in the coroner's possession. The post mortem revealed that Mrs. Rose had died from gastritis, which also caused the death of the father and son. The coroner developed several facts which tend to cast strong suspicion upon the daughter, Celia, who is the only surviving member of the Rose family. With this evidence at hand Prosecuting Attorney Douglas will bring the case before the grand jury. The daughter, Celia, appears to be utterly indifferent in the matter and apparently does not comprehend the nature of the crime of which she is suspected. The funeral of Mrs. Rose was held Monday morning and the remains were interred in the cemetery at Pleasant Valley church, beside those of the father and son. The people of Pleasant Valley are aroused and demand that the strictest investigation be made to discover if possible the guilty party."

Later the paper reported on 8/23/1896, "Results of Dr. Spenser's Analysis of the Stomach Of Walter Rose and his Mother, Mrs. Rebecca Rose - Sr. Spencer states that he found Arsenic in the Stomach, Liver and Kidneys of Mrs. Rose and in the stomach and Liver of Walter Rose." The police figured the best way to get an indictment was to get Celly to confess since their evidence was slim. With the help of one of Ceely's friends, Ceely confessed that she was responsible for her families death and told her how she had put poison in the family meals. Ceely was arrested and put on trial. The jury found Ceely guilty by reason of insanity and she became a ward of the state. She was shipped off to the Toledo Asylum where she remained until 1915. At that time, she was transferred to the Lima State Hospital. There she stayed until her death in 1934. Her body was buried at the Lima Hospital,s graveyard and features a simple white cross with a picture of her attached. So she was not buried with the rest of her family at the Pleasant Valley Cemetery. BTW, her love, Guy Berry, is buried at Pleasant Valley as well.

This is not where the story ends for us ghost seekers though. The Malabar Farms State Park now owns the Rose Family home. Apparently, it is haunted. The story goes that on a full moon night, the spirit of Ceely will make an appearance and is usually seen peering out of a window. It would seem that she is still very attached to her former home. Her full-bodied apparition is also seen walking the grounds outside as though she may still be seeking her long lost love Guy Berry. The state park also built a barn from wood beams taken from the Rose Family mill. People have claims of unexplained happenings in the barn. A play was put on in the barn featuring the story of Ceely Rose. During a rehearsal, one of the stage lights during the scene of where Ceely is killing her mother would continuously flicker on and off throughout that scene. After the scene was over the light went back to normal.

Mark Jordan wrote that play and he decided that he should pay his respects to Ceely at her grave. He wrote this of the experience and others that followed, "When I initially read Woodyard's version of the story, I wasn't overly concerned about the ghost angle, but I knew it was a vivid story for presentation as a play, so I wrote a play entitled "Ceely". When I first offered my script to local theatres, none of them were interested in taking a big risk on a dark drama by an unknown writer, so I shelved it for a while. After eight years, I found an actress who I thought could do the role of Ceely, and I also met the manager of Malabar Farm State Park, Louis Andres, who was interested in having the play performed at Malabar Farm itself. So I threw myself back into the project, and got the Mansfield Playhouse to back the project as a co-production with the state park. I involved my actress, Candy Boyd, with the research.

On a raw, windy day in March of 2003, we made the drive to Lima, Ohio to visit the old prison graveyard where Ceely is buried. The clouds were low and heavy that day, and the closer we got to Lima, the more they seemed to close in on us. The drive had started with cheerful chatter, but it had all evaporated by the time we approached the ominous complex of prisons on Lima's north side. Driving up to the prison, my stomach sank. I felt like I was being sent away myself. Because of the overlapping jurisdictions of the various prisons, it took the staff members over an hour to determine just who should send a guard to accompany us to the graveyard site. Eventually, they gave us an escort from the Oakwood Correctional Facility. He had to go back to the office to get the keys to the cemetery gate. We followed him by car to the back side of the prison property, where the small, grim cemetery was located. Although it is small, over three hundred inmates whose bodies were unclaimed by relatives are buried there. Only about half of the graves actually have the names on them. Many have only numbers. The guard was embarrassed to discover that the cemetery no longer had a gate -- I had the distinct impression that visitors to the cemetery was an almost unheard of happening. We located her grave quickly, as Ceely was buried in the front row of the main section, and her grave was one that had the name on it, even if it was misspelled as "Cecilia Rose" (her given name was "Celia"). I took several pictures, including one of Candy standing by Ceely's grave. After taking all the pictures, it suddenly hit me just how real this story was that I was about to recreate on stage. These weren't fictional characters. Ceely was a real person, and here I was snapping pictures of her grave like a tourist at Disneyland. I decided I'd better step up to the grave and properly pay my respects. I'm not committed to any organized religion, and I couldn't say I was sure that it would make any difference one way or the other, but just out of respect to the troubled dead, I thought I should offer a little silent prayer, telling Ceely that we sought to tell her story not out of sensationalism, but instead, in hopes of reminding people how a troubled life can snowball out of control until many others lives are ruined by it. If anyone could ever have taken enough control of the developing situation, the tragedy of Ceely's life and acts could have been avoided. But no one did. I said in my thoughts, "Ceely, we want to tell your story so that something like this never has to happen to anyone else. We will tell your story with respect, and with love." At that exact moment, for the first time that day, the leaden clouds parted and a ray of sunshine shone down on Ceely's grave for about ten seconds. Nowhere else in the graveyard, or even in the landscape around, was the sun shining. Just there on Ceely. Candy and I slowly turned to each other, our mouths agape. Then the clouds pulled over the sun again like a heavy door, and everything returned to the earlier drab pall. I snapped a couple more pictures, and we left.

Most of the pictures I took that day are clear depictions of the sad little cemetery. But there is one strange one -- one of the last ones I took before leaving. It is centered on the pine tree right next to Ceely's grave, which overhangs it. Ceely's grave is on the left, but off to the right, past the tree, is a little group of bright streaks, four or five of them, which seem to have flew out of frame just as the picture was being taken. There certainly wasn't anything there when I took the picture (not that I could see, anyway). I can't really by sure about the directions of the streaks. If they were moving into camera range instead of out of it, then they are moving towards Ceely's grave. Either way, it was a surprising picture.

Later that fall, during the actual production at Malabar Farm, I had a few more interesting happenings. One of the spookiest things about our production is that we were putting the play on in the big barn at Malabar Farm, less than a quarter of a mile away from the Rose farmhouse itself. Some of the older wooden beams in the barn actually come from the Schrack Mill, which Ceely's father ran until his death. So the connection with the real people is again very palpable, not to mention the eeriness of hanging out in a barn out in the middle of nowhere late at night in October! The first strange thing was during a rehearsal in late September in the barn. The actresses playing Ceely and her mother Rebecca were on stage, going through the intense scene where Ceely decides to poison her mother for the second time. I was walking from position to position around the stage, making sure that the sight-lines were good, so that everyone in the audience would be able to see their faces. I ended up down by the house right corner of the stage, so that I was almost looking across at the actors. As I did so, I noticed that one of the light bulbs on the sloped roof just beyond them was acting strange. Our main lights for these rehearsals were these lights -- two strips of lights running the length of the barn, all interconnected, attached to the sloping roof about eight feet off the ground. The one furthest back on the left side was slowly, evenly pulsing off and on. I looked around at the other lights. They were all on as usual. Only that one, nearest the actresses on stage, was pulsing like that. I looked around -- no one else had noticed it, for the scene was engrossing, no matter how many times we'd all seen it. I decided not to point it out, and returned to watching the scene. By the end of the scene, the actresses were drained and everyone else watching, myself included, seemed to release our breaths all at once in relief. I glanced back up at the light. It had stopped pulsing and was now off, although the rest of the lights were still on. I thought to myself, maybe it was just burning out, although I had never seen one pulse like that before going out. Later in the rehearsal, I noticed it was back on, like normal.

That weekend, we were putting up our technical equipment, and I stayed late that Sunday night stapling up pieces of black fabric to cover the open overhang that led to the lower part of the barn, where animals are kept (Including Pete the horse, who cheerfully added a few realistically rural sound effects throughout the rehearsals and performances. And I don't mean neighing. Think high-fiber diet.) Anyway, it was chilly that evening, and I had left the stage lights on for warmth, and to counter the gloom as I was hanging the dark fabric. The lower section of the barn is open to the outside, and a breeze would always blow up through the overhang. I noticed that this breeze was making my fabric billow in a very spooky manner. I had been making my way up the side, covering the overhang piece by piece. I was just about to the sign. Part of my original plan had been to have little signs distributed throughout the barn, that would light up in the darkness at the beginning of the play, and each sign would have words or a phrase relating to the story, such as "poison," "triple murder", "mentally deficient", etc. My tech director Dan Feiertag had built one sample sign with the phrase "mysterious deaths" on it, and we had hung it on a post by the overhang, and wired it into the board and tried it a few days previously. Unfortunately, we finally determined that we did not have enough dimmer packs to use all these various signs, so we decided instead (necessity being the mother of invention) to have the actors whispers these phrases from backstage, which ended up being a chilling effect in its own right. Even though we weren't going to use it, we had left the sign hanging on the post. Here I was hanging fabric after midnight in the barn, knowing I had to go to work at my day job in the morning. I decided that I wasn't going to mess with unhooking and removing the sign. I could easily just cover it with the black fabric I was hanging. Just as I walked up to the overhang to staple up the piece of fabric next to the sign, it briefly flashed, lighting up "mysterious deaths" in red letters. I froze for a second, then put down the cloth and whirled around to see if someone had snuck in the barn behind me and flashed the sign from the board, even though I knew the short burst had been quicker than the submaster could be manually faded. No one was there. I took a few steps back and walked up to the overhang again, wondering if some reflection of light on the sign could make it appear to light up, but no matter how many angles I tried, no reflection was equivalent to what I had seen out of the corner of my eye. The sign had lit up from within. It crossed my mind to panic and get the hell out of there. But I decided there was no point. I spoke out loud, "Thanks for the company!" and resumed my work, covering the sign with fabric. I can't say it didn't set my pulse to pounding, and I breathed a little easier once the sign was covered and out of sight. 

Dan set up the sound equipment on Monday, so we started running with full tech that evening. Things started okay on Tuesday evening, until toward the end of act one, when the sound equipment suddenly stopped emitting any sounds. I fiddled with the various pieces, trying to locate the problem -- I knew the old amplifier had a tendency to short out, so I assumed at first that it was merely shorting out. But then I got it working again, because I could hear its usual hum through the speakers. But then we I hit the CD player, nothing would come through. I unplugged and replugged the player, amp, and mixing board and tried it again, and this time I could heard the music from the speakers, but it sounded constricted, staticky, and far away, no matter how much I turned up the amp or board. I finally gave up and told the cast to continue on without sound, and gave Dan a call and asked him to come fix it tomorrow. Before Wednesday's rehearsal, Dan showed up with different equipment. And started plugging in different pieces that he knew worked, in order to see which piece of our original equipment had gone bad. About twenty minutes later, with rehearsal overdue to start I heard Dan cussing at the equipment and saying, "This is not #$%^ possible!" I ran over to confer. He said that nothing he was plugging in was working. He was trying each new piece, but nothing was working. He even replaced the cables and power cords, and nothing worked. He swore at it some more and said, "The only other thing I can try is to hook up all the new stuff and completely remove the other equipment we were using. But it doesn't make sense. I shouldn't have to do that." By this point, I had a crazy idea, and I thought I'd better try it, or my big debut production was going to be a fiasco. I told him to remove all the old equipment and hook up the replacement pieces. While he was occupied with that, I stepped off to the side of the barn and, feeling a bit foolish but having nothing to lose, I said quietly, "Ceely, we're doing this show for you. Without your help we can't tell your story. Please knock it off, or we're finished." I stepped back over to the booth, where Dan was finishing up. He put in the music CD and pressed play. Rich and loud poured the music from the speakers once again. After that, I made it my habit to remind Ceely before every performance of how we needed her help, and we suffered no other major problems. One night I forgot to go through this little litany, and a couple minutes before the show started, as I was standing backstage, I looked up and noticed the light which had pulsed during rehearsal was doing it again. I quickly thanked Ceely for her help just before the lights were faded down to start the show, and everything went well. When the lights were faded up again for intermission, it had resumed its steady shine. In the end, the production was a huge success, and all the performances sold out, and all the shows went well."

The Pleasant Valley Cemetery is said to be haunted by the Rose Family members buried there. Most of the stories about this feature orbs in pictures, so take that for what it is worth. The strange shapes that people have caught in pictures are another story. Quite creepy! People claim that Ceely is the ghost in the graveyard and is coming to visit her family, whom she murdered. Or perhaps she is visiting Guy's grave. If you are in the area during October, the park puts on the Ceely Rose play and serves up dinner while you watch. Then you head out for a hayride to the Rose Family home and a visit to the cemetery! Are the spirits of the Rose Family, in particular Ceely Rose's spirit, still roaming around on this side of the veil? That is for you to decide!