The Kent Stage gears up for the Halloween season with one of their premier spooky offerings, the Kent Ghost Walk, running from Oct. 11-12.
The Ghost Walk details the unexplained and unusual events from some of Kent’s oldest buildings. This is the walk’s 17th year of spooky exploration, and each year the ghosts bring something new to the table.
Coordinator of the Ghost Walk and Assistant Director of the Kent Stage, Richele Charlton, said the ghost walk mixes spookiness with history.
“We do history and haunting, so you learn a little bit about Kent’s history, but you also learn about hauntings, murders and things like that,” Charlton said.
Charlton said most of the information in the ghost walk is based on real Kent history. By taking historical events and relating them back to paranormal activity, Charlton has crafted a unique experience for Halloween lovers.
“We try to make our stories real and not just something that we made up, so that people can learn some history in a fun way,” Charlton said. “We try to do our research, if somebody will give us a story we try to figure out if what they’re telling us [is true].”
Charlton takes testimonies from people and dissects them to ensure each story is truly haunting. She then researches the specific house or building from the ghost stories to discover what other spooky events may have happened there.
Most of the information Charlton gets for the ghost walk starts with old local Kent records. Charlton visits places like the Kent and Portage Historical Societies, Kent and Ravenna libraries and local deeds offices.
“It’s to try to get information on who had lived on a property or owned a property back when it was first built, and try to get an idea of why some [unexplained] things are happening with that building.”
Charlton said she was inspired to start the Ghost Walk after renovations to the Kent Stage produced unexplained happenings inside.
“Almost everybody on our crew has some sort of an experience that was paranormal, we all saw certain things like apparitions and that sort of thing,” Charlton said.
Kent was incorporated as a village in 1867 and the university was founded in 1910, giving the city’s historical bones time to develop paranormal peers.
“I think if you’re doing any kind of renovation on an old building and it is haunted, you seem to draw ghosts in,” Charlton said. “I think they are nosy, and sometimes they’re worried you’re going to do something to their place that they love.”
In a Trip101 article, Kent State University was named the fifth most haunted place in Ohio, an extra level of scariness that Charlton takes into account while developing her ghost walk.
Charlton teased the route for this year’s Ghost Walk and invited Kent State students to come along. She said the walk this year would be going west down Water Street towards some of Kent’s oldest buildings.
“If you’re into ghost stories, it would be a fun event for you to come to if you’re a student,” Charlton said. “It might be really fun, and a way for you to learn some interesting facts about the town.”
Andrew Bowie is a beat reporter. Contact him at [email protected].
