What the Children Found at Lake Shawnee
There are places in the world where joy leaves stains.
Lake Shawnee Amusement Park in Rock, West Virginia, is one of them. The kind of place where laughter echoes wrong. Where swings creak in the wind when the air is still. Where every ride sits rusted like a ribcage, waiting.
The First Blood
Long before ticket booths and carousels, there was blood in the soil. In 1783, Mitchell Clay carved out a farm on what was once sacred ground. The Shawnee had hunted there and buried their dead there. But settlers like Clay came with plows and rifles. And the Shawnee came with a vengeance.
That summer, while Mitchell was away, warriors descended on the Clay homestead. His son Bartley was shot dead in the field. His daughter Tabitha was stabbed and scalped. His youngest boy, Ezekiel, was taken. Days later, his scorched corpse was found tied to a stake in the ashes of a Shawnee fire.
The ground never healed.
Joy Built on Bones
In 1926, Conley Snidow thought he could build something better. He paved over the grief with a Ferris wheel and a swimming pond. He turned the site into Lake Shawnee Amusement Park. For a time, it worked. Children swarmed the place. Picnics. Laughter. Birthday candles and summer screams.
Then came the deaths.
A little girl crushed on the swings—Emiline Shrader, killed when a delivery truck reversed into the arc of her joy.
A young boy drowned in the lake, sucked under by a broken drain. His body didn’t rise until the next morning.
They say there were more. Some never written down. Some too awful to retell.
The Graveyard Below
The park closed in 1966. Too many tragedies. Too many whispers. When it was reopened in the 1980s, crews brought back the rides. But when they started digging, they hit bone.
Dozens of skeletons. Archaeologists came. They said it was a burial site. Shawnee. Three thousand graves, they guessed.
The land groaned. And the wind turned colder.
The Ghosts That Linger
Today, the park is overgrown. Rusted. The swing chains rattle even when the air is still. People say they see Emiline—barefoot, bloodstained dress, staring. Some say she swings. Some say she stares.
Others hear sobbing from beneath the soil. Small hands print the windows of the abandoned ticket booth.
Sometimes, a girl is seen walking toward the water—just before she vanishes.
You can find this and other ghostly Ohio tales in my book: Haunted West Virginia
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