Cincinnati Music Hall

Cincinnati Music Hall opened on 14 May 1878 over ground the young city had used as its public burying ground: an 1830 map puts the potter's field under the south part of the building, and bones have surfaced ever since — boxes of skeletons during construction in 1876–77, coffins and a 65-grave "Valley of Death" in 1927, some 200 pounds of commingled bone when the freight-elevator shaft was deepened in May 1988, and remains of about four adults under the orchestra pit during the 2016–17 renovation. The ghost stories are older than the hall itself: reporter Lafcadio Hearn was printing night watchmen's accounts from the wooden Exposition Hall on this site in 1875, and observed that the ghosts only appeared once the digging began. Today the National Historic Landmark is home to the Cincinnati Symphony, Pops, Opera and Ballet; its preservation group publishes testimony with names attached — security guard John G. Engst dated his unexplained elevator music to 22 February 1987, fifteen months before bones were found beneath that same elevator — and its $45 ghost tours sell out, while 25-year volunteer guide Marie Gallagher counters flatly: "I don't believe in ghosts."

On 23 September 1818 — the printed page of Greve's 1904 centennial history is unambiguous on the date, though "13 September" circulates online — the young city of Cincinnati paid Jesse Embree $3,200 for out-lot 53, on the west side of Elm Street beyond 12th. The lot became the city's public burying ground: the potter's field where paupers, strangers and the unclaimed dead were interred, and the University of Cincinnati anthropologists who curate bones recovered from the site date its use to 1818–1837. An 1830 map places the burial ground under what is today the south part of Music Hall, and it stretched west beyond the line of the Miami & Erie Canal: when the canal was cut through, the journalist Lafcadio Hearn reported in 1875, about a hundred skeletons had to be moved. Hearn also wrote that when the steamboat Moselle blew up in April 1838, unidentified victims were buried "in a spot now covered by the south end of Horticultural Hall" — a claim the building's own historians note rests on that single source. Burials stopped in the late 1830s; writing in 1875, Hearn said the field had been "abandoned to other uses about thirty-five years ago". The lot passed to the township in exchange for the land that became Lincoln Park, and for some three decades the four-storey Cincinnati Orphan Asylum stood on its northern part. On 29 January 1859 the city bought the property back for $150,000 and made it Elm Street Park; in 1870 the German singing societies raised the Saengerhalle there, a huge tin-roofed wooden hall used for song festivals and industrial expositions. After rain on that tin roof drowned out the 1875 May Festival, the merchant Reuben Springer offered $125,000 towards a permanent hall. The wooden building came down and Samuel Hannaford's red-brick pile went up between 1876 and 1878, opening on 14 May 1878 with Gluck's Alceste; the exposition wings followed in 1879. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in January 1970 and designated a National Historic Landmark on 2 December 1974. The ghost stories are older than Music Hall itself. On 29 August 1875 the Cincinnati Commercial ran "The Restless Dead: Concerning Haunted Houses" — the clipping survives in the Public Library's Lafcadio Hearn collection — in which Hearn wrote that the Exposition Hall had been rumoured a headquarters for ghosts for nearly four years, that "not a foot of ground lies under the Exposition Building unoccupied by mouldering bones", and that when an elevator was erected in Power Hall "more than a barrel full of skulls and bones" had been dug up and simply placed under the floor in another part of the building. He let the night watchman speak for himself: rappings on ceiling, floor, doors and windows; stealthy footfalls behind him; knocking at the door on a snowed-in winter night with no footprints outside. Fourteen months later, in "Gossip About City Ghosts" (22 October 1876), Hearn covered the excavations for Music Hall itself — "small Golgothas" of skulls and thigh-bones, and the medical students who came by night to steal them — and observed that the ghosts did not seem to have troubled anybody until after the yellow bones had been dug up; his set piece is an exhibitor who approached a tall, pale young woman in long-forgotten fashion at his booth and watched her turn diaphanous and vanish. When the foundation crews kept filling boxes with remains, W. H. Harrison — a Music Hall Association board member who also sat on the board of Spring Grove Cemetery — arranged a plot there for their reburial. The dead kept resurfacing. In February 1927 workers digging a tunnel foundation struck three coffins, one under a headstone reading George Pollock, native of Scotland, died 29 October 1831, aged 52; the remains were sealed in a four-foot cement vault in the pit of a new elevator shaft. A trench along the south wing that same year cut through some 65 graves — newspapers dubbed it the "Valley of Death", and watchmen could not stop souvenir hunters stealing skulls. The 1969–1975 renovation found the vault again and reburied it once more. In May 1988, deepening the freight-elevator shaft broke into the communal crypt a third time: roughly 200 pounds of commingled bone — a 1998 CityBeat retrospective counted 19 skulls — went first to the coroner and then to the University of Cincinnati's physical-anthropology laboratory, where Elizabeth Murray's analysis identified partial remains of at least 30 and possibly as many as 70 individuals. The collection is still curated there and was re-studied in a 2025 master's thesis. During the 14-month, $143-million renovation of 2016–17, contractors testing soil for asbestos found arm and leg bones of about four adults under the orchestra pit on 29 March 2017, plus six grave shafts with wooden coffins in the north carriageway; archaeologists from Gray & Pape removed the remains, which joined earlier boxes taken to Spring Grove. Unusually for a haunted landmark, the testimony comes with names attached. In the 2005 CET documentary Music Hall: Cincinnati Finds Its Voice, opera CEO Patricia K. Beggs allowed: "Ghosts? Um, yes. Indeed, there are Music Hall ghosts", and Pops conductor Erich Kunzel said the presences he met while working through the night were friendly. Kitty Love, on the hall's private police force for 21 years, told the author John Kachuba: "I hear them when I'm on duty alone at night. Footsteps, doors slamming, and music playing, and I know I was the only one in the building" — always, she noted, on the south side, over the old cemetery. And the preservation group Friends of Music Hall publishes the handwritten account of security guard John G. Engst, who on 22 February 1987, escorting caterers down from Corbett Tower after midnight, heard a music-box tune he took for "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" playing around the freight elevator at every level, found no source, and for nearly two weeks could not approach the shaft on the first floor late at night "without my whole body tingling". Fifteen months later, workers deepening that same shaft found the crypt.

Music Hall stands at 1241 Elm Street in Over-the-Rhine, facing Washington Park a few blocks north of downtown Cincinnati; the Connector streetcar stops at 14th & Elm, and Metro buses and Red Bike stations serve the block. It is a working concert hall, not a museum: the Cincinnati Symphony, Pops, Opera, Ballet and the May Festival perform year-round, and the usual way to see the interior is to buy a ticket through the Cincinnati Arts Association. The building reopened in October 2017 after a 16-month, $143-million renovation; Springer Auditorium now seats about 2,289 for symphony concerts. Friends of Music Hall, the building's preservation group, leads guided tours, including evening Ghost Tours run with the Cincinnati Arts Association: roughly 90 minutes, $45 as of 2026, offered on select dates from August to October and routinely sold out, so book well ahead. Visitors under 18 must be accompanied by an adult; the route involves significant walking and stairs, though the box office can arrange accommodations if notified when booking. Video and audio recording are prohibited on the tour.