They built it on bones.
Bethel Methodist Church still stands, slumped on its old stone foundation—white boards weathered to gray, windows dimmed by decades of grime. It backs against the woods now, hemmed in by brambles and silence, a forgotten corner of East Fork State Park in Ohio where even the birds fall quiet. But the earth remembers.
Long before the state took the land when the road was dirt, and the woods stretched unbroken, a preacher named John Collins rode into the frontier with fire in his voice and a Bible clutched in his fists. He built the first chapel here—a crude log thing, dark and damp. They say he preached with such fury even the devil flinched. That church is long gone, rotted to its nails. But the bones beneath it stayed.
The white frame church that replaced it in 1818 still lingers, hollow as a ribcage. When the Army Corps came to flood the valley and carve out the park, the congregation scattered. The doors were locked. The woods crept in.
But something else stayed behind.
Visitors say they’ve seen her—an old woman stooped and swaying, gliding without sound between the church and the graves. No one knows her name. No one dares to ask. She wears a black dress wet with soil, and her veil is like gauze soaked in ash. Her face is sagging ruin—cheeks sunken, lips chewed away, eyes milk-white and bottomless.
Sometimes, she hums hymns. But it’s not the tune that unsettles. It’s the way the notes crawl under your skin like centipedes, wrong and broken, cracked by time and rot.
Those who linger too long, joke near the stones, or wander off-trail speak of cold fingers wrapping around their wrists. Of voices that rasp from the tree line—“Don’t step where they sleep.” One man claimed he saw her rise from an open grave, her face just inches from his, mouth a black hole twitching with worms.
The locals don’t go near Bethel at night. They say she guards the graves. That she watches. That if you speak too loudly or forget to bow your head, she’ll mark you. And when she follows, it’s not fast. You’ll just start hearing footsteps behind you. Every day. A little closer.
So, keep your voice low if you walk the path by the old white church. Keep your hands out of your pockets. And if you feel something cold trail up your spine, don’t turn around. Not until you leave the woods.
And don’t come back. Not ever.
Or watch it here: https://tinyurl.com/HauntChurch
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