Mooney’s Mansion On Walhalla Road

In 1979, while still in high school, I had a profound paranormal encounter. At the time I was working for my brother-in-law for the summer vacation, to earn a few extra bucks. He operated a house painting service in those days.

He came up to me one day and said: “You will not believe where we are going to paint next!” To my shock and horror he revealed that we would be working at Mooney’s Mansion on Walhalla Road – one of the most notorious haunted places in Columbus, Ohio. I humbly requested to work on another project, but he refused saying he needed all his painters out there, since it was a large project.

Going down Walhalla Road again brought back many childhood memories and it still gave me the creeps. As kids we used to take a ride down the road on our bicycles to go by the old mansion. We hoped to see the ghost of old man Mooney and the place where he was supposed to hang himself off the bridge.

Far and away, the strangest of all the Walhalla Road tales is the one about Mooney’s Mansion….no one is ever able to stay in the house very long. So it has remained abandoned for long periods of time ~ Weird Ohio

When we arrived with my brother’s team, I noticed this place had not been lived in for years. Plastic covered all the furniture and I heard my brother in-law talking to the foremen about what needed to be done. Apparently the family was thinking about turning it into a museum, or that the grandkids might come to live here.

My brother then turned on the radio and we knew it was time to get to work. He always had the radio on very loud to ensure you could hear it all over the house. For the time being I forgot the creepy ghost stories and rumors about the place. I was concentrating on getting my work done and leaving for the day!

Suddenly the radio went silent. I did not pay attention at first, because the painters always liked to play jokes on each other. My brother yelled: “Who turned the radio off? That was a good song!” One of the guys turned the radio back on, but a couple of minutes later it went back off. By now I was beginning to feel uneasy.

One of the painters then asked everyone to come over. He seemed really freaked out. We gathered around and he pointed at a stain on the wall where he was painting. It looked like a spatter of blood. Time and time again he would paint over it and walk away to carry on elsewhere. And every time he returned to check, the “blood” stain would be back! My brother told him to put primer on it, followed by another coat of paint. But after it dried the stain just came back again.

When we broke for lunch, we were all sitting around outside. Then I had the very weird feeling like we were being watched. I didn’t want to say anything, because I was afraid that the older guys would make fun of me. I never said a word to anyone.

There were many things said about it, and all were of evil. No one ever went near it, either by day or night. In the village it was a synonym of all that is unholy and dreadful ~ William Hope Hodgson

Later we went back inside to carry on working, but everybody stopped dead in their tracks. All the painting equipment had been organized and rearranged. Everything was nice and neat! How could that happen, if everyone was outside eating their lunch? We finished work that day in a tense, nervous atmosphere.

The next day some of the guys didn’t want to go back there, because of what had happened. Rumors were going around about the place being haunted and dangerous. But we were all successfully bribed with pizza for lunch, and extra money on our pay checks. So, we agreed to return to finish the job.

One guy came up to me and asked if I had seen anything odd in the house. I told him no, but I did sense we were being watched most of the time. I also felt that we were not welcome there. “I am a church-going man,” he responded. “I feel we need God on our side in here.” He then asked me to pray with him.

When we walked back into the old mansion, we discovered that the blood on the wall was back again. The men were now all afraid to continue work there and refused to remain inside. We were all sitting around outside when my brother in-law showed up with the pizza. We never finished that job.

Mooney’s Mansion is the one place I would never walk back into. Mr. Mooney was suppose to have murdered his wife with an axe. Other people supposedly hung themselves from the bridge. As a part-time ghost hunter I will leave this one for the professionals.