Mooney’s Mansion

Mooney’s Mansion is a scary urban legend about a haunted house in Columbus, Ohio where a brutal mass murder is believed to have taken place years ago.

Back in the 1950s, Dr. Mooney lived with his wife and three children in one of the old homes in Columbus, Ohio. The family was very wealthy and the Mooneys seemed to have the perfect marriage. People who knew them said the couple were very much in love and when they got married, Dr. Mooney had even erected a statue of his beautiful wife in their backyard.

However, as fate would have it, the family’s happiness would not last very long. Dr Mooney may have been rich, but a series of bad investments on the stock market resulted in him losing all of the family’s money. His bank account was completely wiped out and the unfortunate man sank into a deep depression.

They say that Mooney’s wife and children were embarrassed by his battle with depression. They tried to ignore the problem and refused to bring him to a psychiatrist, fearing that their neigbors would find out.

Left untreated, Dr Mooney gradually descended into madness and insanity. One dark night, the demented man finally snapped and flew into a psychotic rage. He took an axe and murdered his wife and children as they slept in their beds.

But Mooney’s insane act was not yet complete. He chopped off his wife’s head and kicked it like a football, out the bedroom door, down the stairs, out through the front door and all the way down the hill to the Calumet Bridge.

Still seething like a lunatic, Mooney returned to the house, grabbed his wife’s hacked-up body and took her out to the back yard, where he buried her underneath the statue. Then he took the bodies of his three children and brought them down to the Calumet Bridge where he hung them off the side. They say that Mooney’s youngest daughter was still clutching her teddy bear when Mooney tied a rope around her neck and tossed her over the bridge.

The next morning, a husband and wife were out driving in the area. As they neared the bridge, they spotted a teddy bear lying in the middle of the street. Beside the teddy bear lay a woman’s severed head. They screamed as they recognized the face of Mrs Mooney.

Trembling with fear, they looked up and saw the corpses of three young children hanging from the bridge. But that’s not all, the body of Dr Mooney was hanging right there beside them. It appeared that, when his rage subsided and he realized what he had done, the crazed father had taken his own life.

Today, people say that if you go under the bridge on Walhalla Road at night, and you look in the water to the right of the road, you will see the reflection of the ghostly hanging children.

The old Mooney Mansion is supposed to be haunted too and the husband’s ghost is said to inhabit the upstairs bedroom in which the murder took place. If you pass by, you will see a cold blue glow, visible through the upstairs windows of Mooney’s Mansion.

According to legend, the vicious axe murder is re-enacted nightly and if you go into Mooney’s Mansion at midnight, climb the staircase and knock on the bedroom door, you will see a shadowy figure kicking a phantom severed head all the way down the stairs and out into the street.

Also, as the story goes, the statue of the wife still stands in the backyard of Mooney’s Mansion. If you go there at midnight on Halloween Night, they say you will see the life-sized statue of Mooney’s wife bleeding from all the places where she received blows from the axe.

According to one story, a man was out walking one night on Walhalla Road, when he heard something moving in the bushes by the side of the road. Whatever it was kept rustling and following him as he walked down the street. Eventually, he turned around and called out “Come out and face me!” To his horror, he saw the severed head of a woman rolling out of the bushes. The head tumbled past him and rolled off down the road. The man was so freaked out that he ran all the way home. That was the last time he ever walked home alone in the dark.

The legend of Mooney’s Mansion is probably the most famous ghost story in Columbus, Ohio. However, no one in Columbus actually knows exactly where the haunted house is located. Some say Walhalla Road and others say Calumet, south of the bridge. Either way, the popularity of the legend persists to such an extent that if you are caught snooping around Walhalla Road or Calumet Bridge at night, you can be arrested.