“They” spoke. Henry and Eva Pauline Schmulbach, that’s who, according to paranormal investigator Karl Crabtree.
The lost souls of the wealthiest couple in the Wheeling area back in the early 1900s have remained on this tiny hilltop ridge to begrudge the century that’s passed since their deaths in 1915 and 1936.
They haunt their home, in other words, and Crabtree proved it.
Henry was Ohio County’s first millionaire after his brewery led him into the banking business, and Eva Pauline was his hostess bride charged with the entertaining that took place at their vast Roney’s Point estate where their wealth was clearly on display. The mansion, constructed on more than 200 acres that featured everything from horse stables to an ice factory, is in ruins today after years of use as a welfare farm for the local poor, an open-air tuberculosis hospital during the national outbreak in the 1930s, and following a horrific fire in 1975 that reduced it to the dilapidated and dangerous relic it is now.
But, if Crabtree’s gifts – and his electronic EVP tools – were widely believed in and taken seriously, the headline on this article would have been:
SCHMULBACH’S SOUL REVEALS REMORSE FOR 1878 MURDER
Or …
MILLIONAIRE’S GHOST ADMITS TO NATIONAL ROAD MURDER
“Schmulbach did answer a few questions for us, I believe,” admitted Ryan Stanton, a veteran history educator at Wheeling Park High School. “We asked him about the altercation at Stamm’s Tavern and what went down there, and I definitely believe we got the vibe of remorse. I got that Schmulbach is really concerned about how we talk about that incident because Henry was tried for murder. He was acquitted, yes, but I’m sure it was a big deal in his life.
“Maybe it was an unfortunate event and it’s impossible to tell that from the records we can find these days,” he said. “But yes, definitely I detected sorrow in his answers. He seemed to really regret that evening ever happened.”
Stanton accompanied Crabtree, local resident Brittany Fehr, and videographer Erik Marple to the property known as the “county farm,” now a 500-acre property that is maintained by the Ohio County Commission. Not only is the mansion’s skeleton still prevalent along County Farm Road, but the area’s former mental health hospital rests about a mile up the road. It, too, is said to be haunted just as Schmulbach’s former home apparently is, the high school history teacher now believes.
“The spirit of Henry Schmulbach was definitely present,” Stanton insisted. “He’s real. He was real then, and I believe he is real today. I know we can look around the city of Wheeling and see a lot of his accomplishments, but it’s a shame most people don’t see them because they are so unaware of the history.
“I now believe his presence is still with us,” he confessed. “After all of the research I’ve done, it was an incredible experience to actually speak with him, and I’m really hopeful we get to do this again because when we asked him about all of his accomplishments, he seemed to be overwhelmed when he answered. He did a lot when he was alive and when you read his history, I doubt he failed at anything he tried to do. I have to talk with him more about those accomplishments.”
The Legends of Roney’s Point
Not many people these days care much about the rotting remains of what once were the scariest structures a teenager could encounter in Ohio County back in the 1970-80s. The kids traveled there most often on a dare despite the rumors of insane ghouls running rampant and reports of a man with a shotgun.
Yes, the Schmulbach Mansion is real, and the interior areas still accessible are littered with graphic graffiti, and trash speckles the property, too, with beer cans, food wrappers, broken glass, and emptied spray paint cans scattered about.
The hospital is tangible, too, because the $188,000, 40-bed “Ohio County Tuberculosis Sanitarium” was constructed in 1936 by the federal Public Works Administration, according to records archived by the University of California. The facility was transitioned into a medical health asylum in 1956, and then all care was suddenly shuttered 16 years later.
But are the fabled goblins real? Some say yes, and a few even claim to have seen or heard or felt something, while others say no because ghosts only exist in cartoons.
Crabtree? He not only wishes to return to his conversation with the Schmulbachs, and now insists on visiting the asylum, as well as the County Farm Cemetery that sits grown over and forgotten on another piece of the property.
“When I first went into the mansion, I established a connection with a man and a woman who did answer to the names of Henry and Eva Pauline,” Crabtree reported. “Having their names helped, and when I do these investigations, it always helps to have their names because when no one is trying to reach them, they go dormant to this world. No one knows where they are in their afterlife, but the only time they communicate with us is after we’ve tried to reach them.
“I heard the woman first, and that’s when I tried to get her to use the tool so everyone could hear her. Sometimes it’s easy, but they didn’t seem to like the first tool I used,” he said. “But what took place was that we had two different voices speaking through the tools being used and you could tell the difference between the two voices. That was amazing to me and I’m pretty sure to the others, too, and that’s why we have to go to the hospital and the burial ground, too.”
Belief Based on Experience
There are reasons not to believe spirits swirl around us, of course, and the biggest reason of them all is that no one can see them swirl. Electronics are needed for the psychics to hear those from the beyond, and that fact allows skepticism to run amuck.
Crabtree, though, claims he can communicate to those on the other side with or without machines.
“I felt a heaviness when I first went in, and that usually means there are several souls trying to get through the portal. I have to be careful about that because it’s a constant for me when I let it be,” he said. “And the only time I use the tools is when there are people with me. That way, they can hear what they can hear. This time we heard from a man and a woman, and using the tool you could tell them apart. They had different voices.
“I know (Ryan) had the chance to ask Henry a lot of questions, and Henry answered him,” the investigator explained. “There’s a lot of history here and that’s why I asked Henry if he wanted me to come back to talk to him again. Henry was quick to say yes, too, so hopefully we can come back in the future.”
Before battling the thick brush that separated these hunters, Fehr admitted believing that lost souls likely exist – “there has to be something out there” – and that she was prepared for a paranormal experience.
“It was incredible, but I was a little freaked out at one point in the mansion because Karl said he left the portal open for too long and you could hear all of the souls and their gibberish. Yeah, that freaked me out,” Fehr recounted. “I know Karl was trying to close it and it appeared as if he was panicking for a minute and that was something else. That was a first for me to hear those spirits fight to stay in instead of staying on the other side.
“There was another point in time when Henry picked up on me being hungry because I was starving and thinking about it. I guess he could tell because he said something about it,” she said. “Karl explained that when we are communicating to the souls that they are mind readers and can tell what we are thinking, and that apparently is true because it happened. It really happened.”
And Fehr now is a new believer in the paranormal.
“It was a fascinating experience, but yes, a little trippy, too,” she described. “It was scary, too. I’m not going to lie, there were times when we were standing there in the basement talking to Henry Schmulbach when I thought about it and it was something really new to me. I had never been involved with anything like that and I didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t think anything like that was going to happen.
“I came here to Roney’s Point believing there has to be something to the paranormal, and now I know there is much more than just something to it,” she added. “It’s kind of sad their souls are still here if you think about it. We should ask why they stayed behind the next time we’re here.”
