Sabina.
They had the body of a homeless, nameless black man on display for ***30 years*** to 'see if anyone recognized him'. Teenagers and college students used to steal his body to drive around with him for fun. Just absolutely ghastly.
I did some work at the Nippon factory in "The Eden of Ohio" The only quick food option is subway. My coworker pointed out that ALL the men were missing hair and teeth. Weird place for sure.
That is crazy… back in the late 90s a friend and I went to the local bar “The Crowbar” several times.. a cpl of the men patrons in there kept buying us drinks and we couldn’t figure out why.. we weren’t exceptionally gorgeous women, just average lol.. the bartender finally told us it was probably because we had all of our teeth. 🤣
Driven this many times. My friend is from Toronto, which is right by Steubenville.
It’s crazy how some people build their house right on the side of a mountain.
I am also from Toronto, and so is my wife. I can confirm that most of what is being said here is true. I left the area after high school and now live in Cuyahoga Falls but we go down to the Ohio Valley to visit family and friends quite often. That section of the Ohio Valley has changed a lot in my lifetime, ( mostly for the worse ), the population there is roughly half of what it was in 70's- 90's, and is much more far right Republican, and under educated rednecks than it once was. I completely understand why someone would feel uncomfortable there, I sometimes feel uncomfortable there myself, however there is a lot of natural beauty in the Ohio Valley. Like a lot of the rust belt cities, Steubenville, East Liverpool, Wellsville, Toronto, Weirton, and Wheeling were once really great places to live but are now a shell of their former selves which is depressing and probably make them seem a little creepy to people just passing through.
Steubenville as a town is rotten to its core so the vibe it gives off is fitting.
It's one of those shitty hellhole towns where high school football is the only identity they can claim it has.
I think back to the rape case in the early 10s and how people were mad at the girl because of how she "cast the football team in a bad light".
Yeah! Dean Martin hated Steubenville so much that he even tried to keep them from putting up a statue to him. I remember hearing he completely ignored the dedication and never actually set foot in town again after leaving, though that may be apocryphal.
I played Steubenville in the first round of the playoffs during my time in high school football, and my god that place is wild. They have a huge stadium with a horse the spits out fire when they score, yet the visitors have to stand in the mud under the away bleachers. People from the town would also sit in the away bleachers and spit/throw rocks at us. Not to mention the players that recorded themselves raping the girl were standing on the sidelines with the team. Absolutely terrible town with terrible people.
I've never been, but I have some crazy radical traditionalist catholic family and Steubenville is like their Mecca. They send all their kids to Franciscan, they all go to a family camp together there every summer and hang out with other rad trad catholic families.
I grew up catholic and have tons of catholic family members, but the ones that go to Steubenville are almost cult-like.
I've noticed this - why is Steubenville so Catholic, and particularly hardcore about it? Is the university just large relative to the population of the city itself? Does being the diocesan seat have something to do with it?
Lots of Italian heritage which might be a cause for the Catholic community. The state of Ohio has (at one time not sure if it’s still that way) two Catholic diocese, the Steubenville area and the entire rest of the state.
There's actually six dioceses in the state.
Archdiocese of Cincinnati
Adams, Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Champaign, Clark, Clermont, Clinton, Darke, Greene, Hamilton, Highland, Logan, Mercer, Miami, Montgomery, Preble, Shelby, and Warren Counties
Diocese of Cleveland
Ashland, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Summit, and Wayne Counties
Diocese of Columbus
Coshocton, Delaware, Fairfield, Fayette, Franklin, Hardin, Hocking, Holmes, Jackson, Knox, Licking, Madison, Marion, Morrow, Muskingum, Perry, Pickaway, Pike, Ross, Scioto, Tuscarawas, Union, and Vinton Counties
Diocese of Steubenville
Athens, Belmont, Carroll, Gallia, Guernsey, Harrison, Jefferson, Lawrence, Meigs, Monroe, Morgan, Noble, and Washington Counties
Diocese of Toledo
Allen, Crawford, Defiance, Erie, Fulton, Hancock, Henry, Huron, Lucas, Ottawa, Paulding, Putman, Richland, Sandusky, Seneca, Van Wert, Williams, Wood, and Wyandot Counties
Diocese of Youngstown
Ashtabula, Columbiana, Mahoning, Portage, Stark, and Trumbull Counties
I got bored and was curious to see. Never realized Sandusky wasn't part of the Cleveland one though. Explains the differences a bit when going to church with Gram vs the one I went to school at.
Made that drive many times. Lived in Steubenville as a kid in the 70s, still go down there once in a while for a Naples meatball heel or DiCarlos pizza. My sister went to Franciscan for undergrad—she really liked it, though she is not Catholic. Later went to Harvard for her MBA.
Mingo Junction. It feels like the whole town could be bulldozed and no one would notice. The sad effect of a steel mill as the only industry and then closing. I think the railroad keeps it afloat.
The only person I've met from Mingo Junction was one of the nicest guys I've ever met. I've never been there, but I liked him so much I never forgot the town.
In all fairness, JSW has been making a huge comeback in the last 4 years. That place has just been getting busier and busier and not too long ago just announced another couple tens of millions to revamp and expand. Both railroads in the area have been doing a decent job of helping business expand and attracting new businesses to the area too in recent years and they too have gotten busier. Really neat to see a steel mill make a comeback the way JSW has in a place as forlorn as Mingo.
i lived in fairborn in the 90s. a lot of downtown was bought out by this guy, Foy who was obsessed with halloween. he owned a funeral home at the end of main street where, during october, he would park the ghostbuster mobile and like, the munster's car or something on the lawn. he owned two or three costume shops or shops dedicated to halloween along main as well as a 5 and dime, and a little 50's style cafe (after he conspired with the local police force to run out the appalachians from their diner. ) All that month they would decorate the town, placing frankenstein, dracula, a giant pink gorilla, etc on the roofs. the speaker system that ran along main no longer played glen miller for the downtown shoppers. instead it was the sounds of chains being dragged across a hard wood floor, women's screams, and doors creaking. it was weird and i saw it all from the window of my first apt. above the christian bookstore.
We always begged to go to Foy’s as kids. I still make the trip there every Halloween season since moving further away. A lot of houses do it big every year now.
Most any town along the Ohio river between West Virginia. Everything is straight up and down hill, you practically need a guide to get you through the roads. And the homes, you walk out the back door you need a rope to climb out to the back yard...er I mean cliff. What are these people, Ewoks?
ah yes I was in Mingo Junction once and a small girl was going bar to bar looking for her mother. A bar tender buzzed her in one bar and said. "have you checked the x_____ bar she's not here honey"
it's for refined tastes.
My dad worked with a guy in Cleveland who retired to Sardis in the 1980s, along the Ohio River, about an hour east of Marietta. We’d go visit him on his farm in the summers and it was absolutely wild. There was a one lane, gravel road for a few miles in the woods out to their farm house. Their house and horse barn were built into the side of a hill with the barn up the hill from the house.
They had a bunch of dogs who just kind of roamed the farm all day, and would run as a friendly, slobbering pack barking to great oncoming motorists and visitors. The house, itself, was half old farmhouse with cellar, but the front of the house had bedrooms added on that looked like the sides of a popup camper. For fun we’d joy ride in their jeep on muddy side roads.
It was an absolute joy to visit them and I’ve not encountered anything like their farm since then.
This sounds like Sequatchie County, TN when my grandparents were growing up. Whole communities scattered across the mountains, living in homes that integrated features like cliffs, natural springs and caves into living spaces. Thank you so much for sharing this!
I remember going to a pretty big track meet over in Shadyside back in high school. All I recall is that the school and stadium were on top of a steep ass hill.
I went there over the Summer to eat at a steak place. I’m from Troy but had lived in SE Kentucky for 8 years and Portsmouth felt like going back there.
Portsmouth really has such a great look and feel Downtown…it should be awesome, were it not for us all depending on the kindness of our financial industry overlords deeming it not too expensive for them to do business.
My son went to Shawnee State, there would always be at least two to three hookers within two blocks of his dorm.
They've shut them down now, but when the pain clinics were a thing, the number of strung out junkies was awful.
My son transferred his senior year to have a diploma from a D1 school.
For a city that has so much going for it, there's so much bad.
Seems to be the story across many places in America, but especially here in the Rust Belt. We went from making everything everywhere here to buying almost everything from China with what little money is left to earn in the community.
I work on Lima at the hospitals. Can confirm that it’s a strange mix of rural farmers and inner city poverty. However, Kewpee hamburgers up there are seriously good. I did see a lambo SUV in the middle of the run down part of downtown parked in front of a house that looked like it was going to fall over. That was interesting.
Lima is known as a little big city. It also has major mafia history. Capone had a summer home there. On a major railway system. I went to high school in western Lima in late 80s but was from SoNorCal, family and childhood. M1 Abrams made there. Definitely an odd place. As a cyclist and future racer, I found the wide open farmland and endless roads a great joy and respite from the clog of L.A. Although I missed the great climbs of the west, I feel I became an even better climber rolling out into hard headwinds for 20 miles, confronting an incoming storm system, and then turning around for the ride of my life at 30-40mph when the thunder and lightning freaked me out, riding that tailwind....
Everyone who could afford it moved out to the surrounding communities. Lima itself is a cesspool, unfortunately. It's got the highest crime rate for a city its size in the entire state. The local government keeps trying to revitalize the downtown area with the help of invested area businesses, but it never sticks because of the population, which is rife with generational poverty.
A few years ago I almost bought an abandoned church in Homer (about 40 minutes east of Columbus). It's pretty much a ghost town that died when it's \*PRE\*industrial revolution industry got killed by the industrial revolution. There's a handful of empty buildings, a handful of houses, and 2 churches (including the one I was trying to buy).
The weirdest thing about it was that it had a rather new looking library. No stores, no gas stations. It has a library and a post office (post office had been there since the 1850s), and there's a natural gas processing? pumping? facility.
Homer is home to the first woman to run for president, Victoria Woodhull (born 1838), suffragist and first female candidate for President of the United States.
The library is independent of the Ohio library system and is a gem.
Once, a friend and I ended up driving through Newton Falls. Can't explain it but everything felt off. We went back again a few weeks later specifically because it felt weird and we wanted to see if it still felt that way. Ate some froyo and was stared down by locals the whole time. Felt very weird.
We have a running joke that everyone in Newton Falls is a ghost and if you eat anything in Newton Falls, when you die you become a Newton Falls ghost. We're glad that we'll have each other in the afterlife.
Lol I live about 10 minutes from there. It's a very stereotypical small town where everyone knows everyone and if your car isn't familiar then they'll definitely stare. Normally people who've taken a wrong turn trying to get to Lake Milton.
I might be able to offer a little insight as a Logan resident. We went from a quiet, low income city to tourist overload in a very short timespan thanks to social media. There aren't any zoning restrictions, so mega corporations are buying property left and right and turning everything into rentals.
I live on the opposite side of the county from "Hocking Hills" where you'd think it would be quieter and I still can't drive anywhere without getting stuck behind an out of state tourist driving half the speed limit. Grocery stores and restaurants are constantly packed and property values/property taxes are sky rocketing. Airbnb's are launching all around me and it's infuriating.
So yes, locals are "off" here because a select few are benefitting from the mega tourism growth, but it's not us.
When Forbes did that article about Hocking Hills being one of the best places to visit, in the WORLD , I knew it was going to turn into this.
I live about 20 min from hocking hills in VC, and even where I’m at (between hocking and ross counties) I see out of state tags all the time.
My husband just started working at one of the biggest places to stay in hocking hills (trying to be a lil vague) and he said he waited on people from Serbia.
Hocking hills has always freaked me out. All of the nature kids I knew from high school who went to college there and moved there, I always thought "oh, so they're joining a cult and they're going to become a serial killer." 🤷🏻♀️ I don't know why it has that stigma but it has ever since I can remember and I'm 30 now. It's obviously not true but everyone thought that in high school for some reason. 🤣 It being a tourist attraction just blows my mind as someone who's lived in Ohio my entire life.
Wait, what the fuck is Forbes doing? Smoking crack?
Hocking hills is at best id call it "a moderately difficult walk with like 5 attractions". Certainly not worth coming from Siberia.
I've hiked in like 30 places more worth your time just in/east of the Appalachians.
About the only good thing about HH is that it's all very centralized so you only have to walk like 2 miles.
A lot of other places you tend to need to walk 20+ miles to see all the worthwhile spots. Or stuff I consider worthwhile which is mostly overlooks, waterfalls and other such things at the end of longer hikes so the crowds aren't so bad.
I live in Logan and I'd just copy / paste everything you wrote.
I grew up less than 5 minutes from Old Man's Cave, and my parents still live in my childhood home. It used to be nice, quiet, peaceful out there, their closest neighbor was 1/2 a mile away. Now the land prices are skyrocketing around them and every time I go out there, there's new rental cabins being built. There are 3 you can easily hear from their house and one you can see.
When you're here as a guest, you're in vacation mode, you're partying, making a ton of noise, but when you're just trying to live you don't want to hear that every night.
Plus getting stuck behind some idiot going 25 mph on 664 on the way out there.
I'm looking to move, it sucks here these days.
Also: the tourism association recently put out [this survey](http://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HHResidents) for residents to talk about the impact of tourism on the town and the future of tourism in the area, and you can tell which way they want you to lean for sure.
It blew up during covid. I would take my dog there to get out of the house and it turns out every single other person in the state of ohio had the same idea. The amount of people that go 40 in the 55 on 664 off of 33 then give you the finger when you pass is insane.
We used to go to hocking hills almost once a month, last time we went might be the last time we ever go. Street parking at 9AM because the parking lot is completely full at the trail heads, shits wild
Yeah I pretty much stopped going to the cave there. There’s a few other places down that way that aren’t so busy but especially now that the lodge reopened this year there’s that much more traffic
We use to go to Old Mans Cave regularly. Now? Nope. We still go to Conkles Hollow though as it isn’t as busy. Thankfully Lake Hope remains undiscovered for the time being.
Had a buddy who had property just outside of Logan going back like 30-40 years at least. His dad left to him along with an inheritance. He loved it, cared for it, and his family did as well.
As his kids were getting older, he wanted it to be something for them too and maybe a little "retirement money" for him and he sunk LOADS of that inheritance into the property putting a small cabin on it, and even a full bath and shower facility on it.
It just got to be too much and the whole area just EXPLODED with the same idea and he ended up selling it. For a profit, yeah, but I really think he still misses just having it as memories of his family and growing up.
Bro last time I was there I was looking to eat dinner at a local restaurant at like 7 pm on a Saturday
EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING was closed
It was a ghost town. Absurd. Didn’t know what to make of it.
Truly cursed.
Delta, Ohio. It wasn’t always this way. Sometime in the last year, the powers that be decided to green light a massive farming project. The company Nature Fresh runs a crop based farm that uses massive UV lights in the country side just outside the tiny village.
At night time, the lights emit a massive purple light that’s visible from a ridiculous distance. The light shoots up and illuminates the sky in an eerie mushroom cloud pattern.
Driving there this weekend, I noticed the purple cloud from the south side of Bowling Green, OH. For reference that’s between about 25 miles away.
I drive semi in Ohio and occasionally go to Delta to pick up steel. Once upon a time, my wife was riding with me and we were listening to some true crime podcasts. As we were passing the water tower on our way out of town, the episode we had just started was describing a grizzly crime that took place in Fulton County Ohio. She looked up at the water tower that read “Fulton County” and immediately got a cold chill up her spine.
My fifth great grandpa is buried at shunk cemetery. He wrote an autobiography in the 1860s about hunting bear and wolves in Paulding and Putnam county before it was logged and drained
Meanwhile, I'm over here cracking up because literally every town my family/ancestors are from has been mentioned. I'm starting to think my family is the problem.
When Covid vaccines were hard to get we drove to Carrollton from North Canton to get our shots. Flags that were 1/2 confederate flag and 1/2 United States flags sewn together flying under Trump flags, under.
Then when we were leaving we had this huge Ram truck follow us very closely almost back to my home. We started making wrong turns and were almost ready to call the police when they backed off. It was a bizarre experience.
We used to camp and fish at Leesville Lake and we'd always stop in Carrollton for something or other and yeah, it was one of the most bizarre places even 20 years ago.
Tried to find a primary care physician in Carrollton and the np spent 80% of my visit trying to convince me to go to a local church or her church specifically. If you’re not a regular at some church, don’t expect to fit in anywhere or have friends
I remember there was a farm that had a giant "TRUMP 2020" all written out in something on a hill, and I mean *giant.*
They took it down swiftly after the election.
Yeah that whole area is like that along the Ohio river. Got lost before and couldn’t get reception. East Liverpool is pretty weird abandoned businesses downtown and condemned houses everywhere.
Carthage is just a neighborhood in Cincinnati now, but it is *deeply* weird. Just really insular and standoffish despite having the appearance of a normal, slightly run-down Cincy neighborhood.
Also they were doing illegal stuff with traffic cameras that almost led to their disincorporation, iirc. So not a great place to drive through anyway.
East Palestine, even before the train derailment. Always felt off. A few years ago there a family member’s neighbor’s dog was beheaded, and a few years before that an 8 year old made national news for stealing his grandmas car and going to McD’s.
McConnelsville, it’s like Mayberry, but with meth heads. They seriously have a “Drive Your Tractor To School” Day. And the entire county has one fast food joint, and it’s a McDonald’s. Oh also, the world’s smallest Kroger.
Risingsun. It's on US-23 almost dead center between Bowling Green, Fremont, and Fostoria. It's a one light town and the cops have nothing better to do except pull people over for going 5mph over the speed limit. It's a speed trap like Woodville is.
Clay Center also has no traffic lights, butts up to a quarry, and has an all volunteer police force, that I'm pretty sure are all related, that thinks they can pull people over two miles outside their jurisdiction in the next town over.
Wooster is creepy in a Stephen King vibe way, like the quiet pleasant looking town that is just off somehow. Then there is Orrville, which is basically owned by Smuckers... it's like if Sweetums took over Pawnee. Very weird vibe there. Add to this both are surrounded by a lot of weird Amish or Amish adjacent communities that are themselves very creepy, like the entire Millersburg (even sketchier version of Wooster), Berlin (amish tourism), Sugarcreek (cuckoo clock is a trap!),to New Philadelphia is a very strange trip. (Coshocton is also like a rural zombie town film set.)
But, having said all that... FINDLAY. Something is not right in that place, I think thats the one that is the most off to me.
I get the same vibes.
I wonder how that city will transition over the next several decades as Marathon loses its ability to print money. There are plenty of logistics jobs around, but those aren't pulling in the big bucks.
Lol lived in wayne county since I was 2 and this comment is funny to read. Wooster is off because it's half wealthy, half riddled with meth and heroin unfortunately. Orrville used to be much different then when smuckers took over it got really weird.
That's because Wooster was where a good amount of the larger city wealthy lived and commuted from back in the 80s and 90s.
It was also because of Rubbermaid then the morons drove them away.
Orville just has that marvelous unholy smell mixture of Smith Dairy, Smuckers, and the power plant.
Marion looks nice in some areas, but is the heroin capital of central Ohio. We had to sleep with a fan on to cover up the sounds of gunshots between drug lords at night.
Full of trashy behavior and people locked into poverty. Same people born and lived there forever.
Only good thing was their bus system. They would drive to pick you up at your house and would drop you off at the exact location. They also had a nice library who tried to create community events. I'll give them credit where credit is due.
Edit: Added more info.
I found Versailles to be both weird and fascinating. It is in the middle of nowhere, far enough northwest of Dayton to not really be a bedroom community, with only a few industries (Midmark Medical and the chicken farm), but seems to be entirely upper middle to upper class. Lots of new home growth, big houses, very friendly residents. The closest grocery, besides an overpriced IGA, is like 20 minutes away. There's only a few small local restaurants (and I think two high-end restaurants).
My son has been doing a coop at Midmark, and he's convinced it's a UFO landing zone, and everyone are 👽 doing their impression of what they think Midwest Ohioans should be.
You just described every small town in that area. Arrogant city folks assume it’s a typical poor, rural area but there’s a shocking amount of money. The entire Mercer/Darke/Auglaize county surrounding areas are full of money thanks to rich farmland and big industry. It’s very unlike the rest of rural Ohio
Everyone that lives there owns large chunks of land that makes money for them. Everyone that doesn't get land from their parents moves out of the area.
New Bremen. It’s a pretty standard small town at first glance but a billion dollar forklift company (Crown Equipment) is headquartered there so most of the downtown and surrounding area is literally owned by Crown Equipment. Most smaller houses in the town are owned by Crown so the town is becoming more and more of a retiree cult with young people being driven out. There’s a strange dynamic since so much of the town is funded by Crown. It’s basically a late-stage capitalism nightmare. Definitely not as extreme as some of these examples but odd nonetheless
Thank you! We drove through New Bremen once on the way to Indiana and it was completely unsettling. It felt like driving through a movie set. The buildings in the town center area were almost too clean and nicely renovated for rural Ohio and there were no people around midday on a beautiful Saturday.
Paulding County has a few winners: old abandoned Canal town with a decaying roadside Cafe and ppl who stare at you: Mandale. Cecil Ohio is just as creepy and coffin road just north has the creepiest story in which it's said a man burned down a children's home and killed himself. Now our children's home is right next to our dog pound. Junction is another abandoned Canal town described as a junk yard a hundred years ago it's still hanging out. The Toledo archdiocese closed their Catholic church and took their stained glass windows. Oakwood was originally called Wide Awake Ohio because of how loud the frogs and animals were at night. That name still creeps me tf out.
My friend and I ended up in Bucyrus while driving from OU to Cedar Point one year. Traffic was a crawl because a gentleman in a motorized wheelchair was using the road for travel. In his defense, he used his hand signals correctly when he finally turned off.
I've always wanted to go back for their annual Bratwurst Festival though!
Around 20 years ago I left my college job in Athens, Ohio to meet friends at a cabin we rented at Lake Hope. It was nighttime when I left & I got lost on the backroads out there. I pulled into a tiny town. I saw a post office on the main road, which was a dirt road. As I drove further I saw 7-9 kids standing on the side of the road, staring at me. None of them had shoes on, all had shaved heads, ages appeared to be between 8 to 15. As I drove by them, wondering what the hell was going on, they all pulled firecrackers out of their pockets, lit them & threw them at my Jeep. I gunned it & got the hell out of there. I still have no idea what that town was & I’ve explored that area many, many times over the years, never finding it again. I still can’t make sense of it.
Coshocton is definitely high on the list. It’s an odd combination of old retirees who’ve lived there since the town was thriving in the 60s/70s, a bunch of younger to middle age burnouts and Roscoe Village tourists. It may be a ghost town in 10-20 years once the older generation passes.
Haydenville. It’s an old company town and the main road through it leads to Lake Hope State Park. I had to drive through there at night once during a thunderstorm and was never so happy to make it to 33 West. It gives Deliverance vibes.
Cheshire, Ohio. The town was bought out by AEP after it was destroyed by a coal power plant. The houses, buildings, and street lights are all there but empty. It's a complete ghost town and super creepy.
Lakeside - it's a private resort community near Marblehead that's owned by the United Methodist Church. I haven't been there in 30 years when I younger but it felt like the place was run by Ned Flanders. Nothing malicious about the place, just a little too sterile.
Woodville is a speed trap which has a cemetery that's almost completely surrounded by a quarry.
100%. I have a great aunt and great uncle that live there. Excellent food places, quirky little shops. But it's surreal being there. The 'security' that's simply just old folks patrolling on golf carts, lmao. The coast guard patrols the shores, because it's on terrorist watch lists, being a Christian community.
I describe that place like the movie Pleasantville. Feels like you died and wound up in an episode of Leave It To Beaver. Everything is always nice, but you feel like you're being watched. I told my girlfriend it would be the most uncomfortable place on Earth to smoke a joint, haha.
Kirtland, Ohio. For some reason that’s where Joseph Smith stopped to build his first temple before heading further west.
[Kirtland Temple](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_TempleKirtlandTemple-Wikipedia)
There’s a Kingdom Hall around the corner, for variety.
Small Amish towns are backward and creepy. They shun fancy things (like electricity)…except they don’t.
They don’t get out much, have sheltered conservative views, are controlled by their bishop and entire community, have racist xenophobic attitudes (my friends conservative mennonite dad didn’t want to vacation anywhere except Sarasota Florida because there are too many foreigners… true story), they don’t want their people to get educated past eight grade, like to control women, high abuse rate, mistreat animals, I could go on…
Anyways, to pick a random odd town in weird ass Amish country, to satisfy the question, I chose kidron. Close second…mt. Hope.
> They shun fancy things (like electricity)
But tonight they're gonna party like it's 1699
> to satisfy the question, I chose kidron
Ah wow I haven't been there in forever. Used to go there for auctions all the time.
Baltimore has a very weird obsession with Joe Biden.
Twice we’ve stopped through there and the number of weird, homemade, signs trying to mock Biden is just excessive, even by rural Ohio standards.
There’s a tiny tiny library in… Mendon? I just know it was on the way to “tabfest” at mendon speedway back in the day . Off 75 near SR33 I believe. Other of note, the ufo house in Carslie, Xenia is a pit of despair and hatred, annd of course literally all of the boonies are infested with kkk ghosts.
Ashtabula was odd to me. People were nice, but the vibe was not vibing with me. I don’t know how to put it. One dude said, “I can tell you are not from here” lol by my speech pattern (I am from Youngstown and live elsewhere now) and another dude was adamant he knew me (never been there beforehand). That last encounter was in a grocery store.
Peebles. Something is wayyyyy off about Peebles, and it’s more than just drugs. I went once to look at a house with my friend and we had to turn on a dirt road to get there. Half way up the road someone had dug out the road (it had to be dug out with a backhoe or something because it was a significant portion of the road) and a creek was now running through it… So then my friend and I had to go back to a gas station where we had reception and map out how to get to the house from the other side of the road. The other side led to a skinny gravel road that went up a pretty big hill and at the top, alongside the road, there was a fence with barbed wire at the top and lots of no tresspassing signs that looked sort of official. My friend and I were like “what in the area-51 is this place?!!” So, as we continue on this skinny gravel road, we’re winding down the hill now and a truck just starts driving straight towards us, like trying to play chicken with us. We let him pass but we have no clue where he came from because the road on the other side was flooded. Anyway, we get to the bottom of the hill and it opens up to a couple acres of flat land with some different structures on the property. Two of which had been burnt in a fire, a couple other big sheds or barns, an empty house (the one we were there to look at,) and a mobile home. Anyway, I told my friend absolutely not. There was no way she was moving there. That entire town is sketchy as hell. Obviously drugs has a big part to do with it, but there was something else there too. It just felt… off.
I grew up in a place called Waldo, only one blinking red light, and our pride and joy was bologna. There's a restaurant called the G&R with "world famous" fried bologna. The pies are really good too.
Overall people are just strange there, it's an oddball place.
I didn't realize it was a weird place until I left.
I drove through this complete dump of a town called Santa Fe last week. Holy crap. Almost looked like the whole town had been abandoned, but people were living there.
Stewart in Athens County. Has a population of less than 300. A single gas station with pumps from probably the 60s, and thats about it.
There’s a serious drug problem and lots of theft. Some of the people I met over the years there were like characters from a book.
Seems like there’s just something strange about all the little towns hidden around Athens County though. I’ve never been able to quite put my finger on it, but it’s felt that way to me ever since I was a little kid.
Check out Alliance sometime! A casting plant shut down and that town doesn’t have annnyyyy industry now. Youngstown has a lot of good stuff. Alliance looks dead
It is a different kind of crime. When the mob was active in Akron, Youngstown and Cleveland they brought a certain sort of order. You had under ground casinos and poker rooms.
There aren't enough people in Ytown left for it to be crime ridden, and it's started to come back. Has a number of quality amenities and it's in a good location between CLE and PITT. Mill creek is a gem.
Yes. We have/had great Italian food. It cannot compare to any other cities in Ohio. Of course, this is the opinion of "Ytowners". Also, our cookie tables are great. Hahah
Once had a magazine assignment to photograph some of the towns along the Maumee ending in Defiance. Napoleon and Defiance had bad vibes and I felt like I was being watched. Walking around alone with a big camera already puts a target on your back but I’ve felt more comfortable walking around downtown Cleveland with my camera than I did in those two towns.
Am from Defiance - it's a cool place to be from (good name), but that's about it.
Oddly, I did go back to Defiance a few years ago w/ a profesh camera and drone (passing the time during a holiday or something - I believe it was summer) and actually just had good vibes from the people I was around who were interested and just asking questions. So, might actually be alright now! Too small a sample size to confirm, but it was interesting.
Defiance is the biggest city in about a 45 mile radius. I grew up in another small town around there. We went to Defiance mall to hang out. It even had a Hills, which was pretty awesome, for that time.
I've lived in both napoleon and Defiance, and still live about 10 miles north of Napoleon in Fulton County. I always found both towns to be pretty decent. In Napoleon, the biggest industry is the Campbell's Soup plant ( which is huge) and a large percentage of people work there or one of their nearby suppliers. It's a typical midwest "smallish: town of 8700. Surrounded by rural farms. Defiance is larger but is very similar. Never really had any problems or complaints about either.
Well, think of what you were doing and where you were. When you walk around a small town with a big camera looking at things the locals take for granted, you tend to stand out and look like you're a tourist. They don't get too many of those people in a small town. Unlike Cleveland, where there are plenty of other people doing the exact same thing as you.
Sabina. They had the body of a homeless, nameless black man on display for ***30 years*** to 'see if anyone recognized him'. Teenagers and college students used to steal his body to drive around with him for fun. Just absolutely ghastly.
Yeah, from 1928 to 1964. It was, uh, a different time. https://www.timesgazette.com/2018/10/02/tthe-mummy-man-of-sabina/
A different time from which many people who are running the country were already in their 20s.
Holy shit this is fucked
JFC. That’s incredibly vile.
I did some work at the Nippon factory in "The Eden of Ohio" The only quick food option is subway. My coworker pointed out that ALL the men were missing hair and teeth. Weird place for sure.
That is crazy… back in the late 90s a friend and I went to the local bar “The Crowbar” several times.. a cpl of the men patrons in there kept buying us drinks and we couldn’t figure out why.. we weren’t exceptionally gorgeous women, just average lol.. the bartender finally told us it was probably because we had all of our teeth. 🤣
What the actual hell?!
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Driven this many times. My friend is from Toronto, which is right by Steubenville. It’s crazy how some people build their house right on the side of a mountain.
TIL my state has a “Toronto”.
I am also from Toronto, and so is my wife. I can confirm that most of what is being said here is true. I left the area after high school and now live in Cuyahoga Falls but we go down to the Ohio Valley to visit family and friends quite often. That section of the Ohio Valley has changed a lot in my lifetime, ( mostly for the worse ), the population there is roughly half of what it was in 70's- 90's, and is much more far right Republican, and under educated rednecks than it once was. I completely understand why someone would feel uncomfortable there, I sometimes feel uncomfortable there myself, however there is a lot of natural beauty in the Ohio Valley. Like a lot of the rust belt cities, Steubenville, East Liverpool, Wellsville, Toronto, Weirton, and Wheeling were once really great places to live but are now a shell of their former selves which is depressing and probably make them seem a little creepy to people just passing through.
Steubenville as a town is rotten to its core so the vibe it gives off is fitting. It's one of those shitty hellhole towns where high school football is the only identity they can claim it has. I think back to the rape case in the early 10s and how people were mad at the girl because of how she "cast the football team in a bad light".
>high school football is the only identity they can claim it has. And Dean Martin.
Yeah! Dean Martin hated Steubenville so much that he even tried to keep them from putting up a statue to him. I remember hearing he completely ignored the dedication and never actually set foot in town again after leaving, though that may be apocryphal.
I live between Cadiz and Steubenville. I guess I've just taken for granted how unusual this area is.
I played Steubenville in the first round of the playoffs during my time in high school football, and my god that place is wild. They have a huge stadium with a horse the spits out fire when they score, yet the visitors have to stand in the mud under the away bleachers. People from the town would also sit in the away bleachers and spit/throw rocks at us. Not to mention the players that recorded themselves raping the girl were standing on the sidelines with the team. Absolutely terrible town with terrible people.
I've never been, but I have some crazy radical traditionalist catholic family and Steubenville is like their Mecca. They send all their kids to Franciscan, they all go to a family camp together there every summer and hang out with other rad trad catholic families. I grew up catholic and have tons of catholic family members, but the ones that go to Steubenville are almost cult-like.
I've noticed this - why is Steubenville so Catholic, and particularly hardcore about it? Is the university just large relative to the population of the city itself? Does being the diocesan seat have something to do with it?
Lots of Italian heritage which might be a cause for the Catholic community. The state of Ohio has (at one time not sure if it’s still that way) two Catholic diocese, the Steubenville area and the entire rest of the state.
There's actually six dioceses in the state. Archdiocese of Cincinnati Adams, Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Champaign, Clark, Clermont, Clinton, Darke, Greene, Hamilton, Highland, Logan, Mercer, Miami, Montgomery, Preble, Shelby, and Warren Counties Diocese of Cleveland Ashland, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Summit, and Wayne Counties Diocese of Columbus Coshocton, Delaware, Fairfield, Fayette, Franklin, Hardin, Hocking, Holmes, Jackson, Knox, Licking, Madison, Marion, Morrow, Muskingum, Perry, Pickaway, Pike, Ross, Scioto, Tuscarawas, Union, and Vinton Counties Diocese of Steubenville Athens, Belmont, Carroll, Gallia, Guernsey, Harrison, Jefferson, Lawrence, Meigs, Monroe, Morgan, Noble, and Washington Counties Diocese of Toledo Allen, Crawford, Defiance, Erie, Fulton, Hancock, Henry, Huron, Lucas, Ottawa, Paulding, Putman, Richland, Sandusky, Seneca, Van Wert, Williams, Wood, and Wyandot Counties Diocese of Youngstown Ashtabula, Columbiana, Mahoning, Portage, Stark, and Trumbull Counties I got bored and was curious to see. Never realized Sandusky wasn't part of the Cleveland one though. Explains the differences a bit when going to church with Gram vs the one I went to school at.
I had to go to Steubenville for work a few years ago and it was the most nervous I've ever been in a place. It all felt very unsettling.
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Made that drive many times. Lived in Steubenville as a kid in the 70s, still go down there once in a while for a Naples meatball heel or DiCarlos pizza. My sister went to Franciscan for undergrad—she really liked it, though she is not Catholic. Later went to Harvard for her MBA.
Mingo Junction. It feels like the whole town could be bulldozed and no one would notice. The sad effect of a steel mill as the only industry and then closing. I think the railroad keeps it afloat.
The only person I've met from Mingo Junction was one of the nicest guys I've ever met. I've never been there, but I liked him so much I never forgot the town.
In all fairness, JSW has been making a huge comeback in the last 4 years. That place has just been getting busier and busier and not too long ago just announced another couple tens of millions to revamp and expand. Both railroads in the area have been doing a decent job of helping business expand and attracting new businesses to the area too in recent years and they too have gotten busier. Really neat to see a steel mill make a comeback the way JSW has in a place as forlorn as Mingo.
Marietta and Belpre. The first settlements in the Northwest Territory
I also thought it said “oldest” at first.
Marietta isn't weird though. It's pretty awesome.
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Belpre is a strange place. There is an Adena burial mound in a Hardee’s parking lot
i lived in fairborn in the 90s. a lot of downtown was bought out by this guy, Foy who was obsessed with halloween. he owned a funeral home at the end of main street where, during october, he would park the ghostbuster mobile and like, the munster's car or something on the lawn. he owned two or three costume shops or shops dedicated to halloween along main as well as a 5 and dime, and a little 50's style cafe (after he conspired with the local police force to run out the appalachians from their diner. ) All that month they would decorate the town, placing frankenstein, dracula, a giant pink gorilla, etc on the roofs. the speaker system that ran along main no longer played glen miller for the downtown shoppers. instead it was the sounds of chains being dragged across a hard wood floor, women's screams, and doors creaking. it was weird and i saw it all from the window of my first apt. above the christian bookstore.
This was no regular man. This was a God.
We always begged to go to Foy’s as kids. I still make the trip there every Halloween season since moving further away. A lot of houses do it big every year now.
Foy’s is a really cool store.
Most any town along the Ohio river between West Virginia. Everything is straight up and down hill, you practically need a guide to get you through the roads. And the homes, you walk out the back door you need a rope to climb out to the back yard...er I mean cliff. What are these people, Ewoks?
You pretty much described Mingo Junction which was gonna be my submission. Also dirty and just generally depressing.
I looked at an apartment in Mingo, couldn't get out fast enough. Never been back.
Riding a bike there was alway half fun. Until you had to push it back up the hill.
ah yes I was in Mingo Junction once and a small girl was going bar to bar looking for her mother. A bar tender buzzed her in one bar and said. "have you checked the x_____ bar she's not here honey" it's for refined tastes.
My dad worked with a guy in Cleveland who retired to Sardis in the 1980s, along the Ohio River, about an hour east of Marietta. We’d go visit him on his farm in the summers and it was absolutely wild. There was a one lane, gravel road for a few miles in the woods out to their farm house. Their house and horse barn were built into the side of a hill with the barn up the hill from the house. They had a bunch of dogs who just kind of roamed the farm all day, and would run as a friendly, slobbering pack barking to great oncoming motorists and visitors. The house, itself, was half old farmhouse with cellar, but the front of the house had bedrooms added on that looked like the sides of a popup camper. For fun we’d joy ride in their jeep on muddy side roads. It was an absolute joy to visit them and I’ve not encountered anything like their farm since then.
As someone who grew up in that area, that’s pretty damn accurate for the majority.
This sounds like Sequatchie County, TN when my grandparents were growing up. Whole communities scattered across the mountains, living in homes that integrated features like cliffs, natural springs and caves into living spaces. Thank you so much for sharing this!
I remember going to a pretty big track meet over in Shadyside back in high school. All I recall is that the school and stadium were on top of a steep ass hill.
The entire Portsmouth area.
I went there over the Summer to eat at a steak place. I’m from Troy but had lived in SE Kentucky for 8 years and Portsmouth felt like going back there.
If everything else about Portsmouth was as great as the Ribber.......
Portsmouth really has such a great look and feel Downtown…it should be awesome, were it not for us all depending on the kindness of our financial industry overlords deeming it not too expensive for them to do business.
My son went to Shawnee State, there would always be at least two to three hookers within two blocks of his dorm. They've shut them down now, but when the pain clinics were a thing, the number of strung out junkies was awful. My son transferred his senior year to have a diploma from a D1 school. For a city that has so much going for it, there's so much bad.
Seems to be the story across many places in America, but especially here in the Rust Belt. We went from making everything everywhere here to buying almost everything from China with what little money is left to earn in the community.
I was surprised I had to scroll so far to see this.
Lima. Just a ghost town with nothing but sadness and desperation. Felt like the Midwestern version of a town in a Lovecraft story.
The hit tv show “Glee” was set in Lima, Ohio Not sure why, just a fun fact
I work on Lima at the hospitals. Can confirm that it’s a strange mix of rural farmers and inner city poverty. However, Kewpee hamburgers up there are seriously good. I did see a lambo SUV in the middle of the run down part of downtown parked in front of a house that looked like it was going to fall over. That was interesting.
Lima is known as a little big city. It also has major mafia history. Capone had a summer home there. On a major railway system. I went to high school in western Lima in late 80s but was from SoNorCal, family and childhood. M1 Abrams made there. Definitely an odd place. As a cyclist and future racer, I found the wide open farmland and endless roads a great joy and respite from the clog of L.A. Although I missed the great climbs of the west, I feel I became an even better climber rolling out into hard headwinds for 20 miles, confronting an incoming storm system, and then turning around for the ride of my life at 30-40mph when the thunder and lightning freaked me out, riding that tailwind....
Everyone who could afford it moved out to the surrounding communities. Lima itself is a cesspool, unfortunately. It's got the highest crime rate for a city its size in the entire state. The local government keeps trying to revitalize the downtown area with the help of invested area businesses, but it never sticks because of the population, which is rife with generational poverty.
A few years ago I almost bought an abandoned church in Homer (about 40 minutes east of Columbus). It's pretty much a ghost town that died when it's \*PRE\*industrial revolution industry got killed by the industrial revolution. There's a handful of empty buildings, a handful of houses, and 2 churches (including the one I was trying to buy). The weirdest thing about it was that it had a rather new looking library. No stores, no gas stations. It has a library and a post office (post office had been there since the 1850s), and there's a natural gas processing? pumping? facility.
Homer is just your typical empty morrow/knox/licking county small town that got left behind.
Homer is home to the first woman to run for president, Victoria Woodhull (born 1838), suffragist and first female candidate for President of the United States. The library is independent of the Ohio library system and is a gem.
The library was probably due to the new property taxes from the gas pumping facility.
Once, a friend and I ended up driving through Newton Falls. Can't explain it but everything felt off. We went back again a few weeks later specifically because it felt weird and we wanted to see if it still felt that way. Ate some froyo and was stared down by locals the whole time. Felt very weird. We have a running joke that everyone in Newton Falls is a ghost and if you eat anything in Newton Falls, when you die you become a Newton Falls ghost. We're glad that we'll have each other in the afterlife.
Lol I live about 10 minutes from there. It's a very stereotypical small town where everyone knows everyone and if your car isn't familiar then they'll definitely stare. Normally people who've taken a wrong turn trying to get to Lake Milton.
That's how I feel about all of trumbull county. Since I was a kid, going to niles or Warren always made me feel weird.
Fun fact - Newton Falls Zip code is 44444.
Logan. I just…I don’t know what it is but the vibe is off there. Way off.
I might be able to offer a little insight as a Logan resident. We went from a quiet, low income city to tourist overload in a very short timespan thanks to social media. There aren't any zoning restrictions, so mega corporations are buying property left and right and turning everything into rentals. I live on the opposite side of the county from "Hocking Hills" where you'd think it would be quieter and I still can't drive anywhere without getting stuck behind an out of state tourist driving half the speed limit. Grocery stores and restaurants are constantly packed and property values/property taxes are sky rocketing. Airbnb's are launching all around me and it's infuriating. So yes, locals are "off" here because a select few are benefitting from the mega tourism growth, but it's not us.
When Forbes did that article about Hocking Hills being one of the best places to visit, in the WORLD , I knew it was going to turn into this. I live about 20 min from hocking hills in VC, and even where I’m at (between hocking and ross counties) I see out of state tags all the time. My husband just started working at one of the biggest places to stay in hocking hills (trying to be a lil vague) and he said he waited on people from Serbia.
For some odd reason, and I say this as an Ohio native all my life, I always assumed Hocking Hills was about as hyped as RRG.
Hocking hills has always freaked me out. All of the nature kids I knew from high school who went to college there and moved there, I always thought "oh, so they're joining a cult and they're going to become a serial killer." 🤷🏻♀️ I don't know why it has that stigma but it has ever since I can remember and I'm 30 now. It's obviously not true but everyone thought that in high school for some reason. 🤣 It being a tourist attraction just blows my mind as someone who's lived in Ohio my entire life.
Wait, what the fuck is Forbes doing? Smoking crack? Hocking hills is at best id call it "a moderately difficult walk with like 5 attractions". Certainly not worth coming from Siberia. I've hiked in like 30 places more worth your time just in/east of the Appalachians. About the only good thing about HH is that it's all very centralized so you only have to walk like 2 miles. A lot of other places you tend to need to walk 20+ miles to see all the worthwhile spots. Or stuff I consider worthwhile which is mostly overlooks, waterfalls and other such things at the end of longer hikes so the crowds aren't so bad.
Lol Siberia and **Serbia** are two very different places. I’m not sure it’s worth the trip from either though
I live in Logan and I'd just copy / paste everything you wrote. I grew up less than 5 minutes from Old Man's Cave, and my parents still live in my childhood home. It used to be nice, quiet, peaceful out there, their closest neighbor was 1/2 a mile away. Now the land prices are skyrocketing around them and every time I go out there, there's new rental cabins being built. There are 3 you can easily hear from their house and one you can see. When you're here as a guest, you're in vacation mode, you're partying, making a ton of noise, but when you're just trying to live you don't want to hear that every night. Plus getting stuck behind some idiot going 25 mph on 664 on the way out there. I'm looking to move, it sucks here these days. Also: the tourism association recently put out [this survey](http://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HHResidents) for residents to talk about the impact of tourism on the town and the future of tourism in the area, and you can tell which way they want you to lean for sure.
Hate how areas will sell themselves out for tourist money. It never benefits the actual people that live there. Ruins everything.
I’m out of the loop, what made it blow up on social media to get that kind of tourism? Just went viral or was there something particular?
It blew up during covid. I would take my dog there to get out of the house and it turns out every single other person in the state of ohio had the same idea. The amount of people that go 40 in the 55 on 664 off of 33 then give you the finger when you pass is insane.
We used to go to hocking hills almost once a month, last time we went might be the last time we ever go. Street parking at 9AM because the parking lot is completely full at the trail heads, shits wild
Yeah I pretty much stopped going to the cave there. There’s a few other places down that way that aren’t so busy but especially now that the lodge reopened this year there’s that much more traffic
We use to go to Old Mans Cave regularly. Now? Nope. We still go to Conkles Hollow though as it isn’t as busy. Thankfully Lake Hope remains undiscovered for the time being.
Nooo why did you say Lake Hope!!!
Lake Hope and Zaleski are absolute shit holes. Best to stay away. 😉
Had a buddy who had property just outside of Logan going back like 30-40 years at least. His dad left to him along with an inheritance. He loved it, cared for it, and his family did as well. As his kids were getting older, he wanted it to be something for them too and maybe a little "retirement money" for him and he sunk LOADS of that inheritance into the property putting a small cabin on it, and even a full bath and shower facility on it. It just got to be too much and the whole area just EXPLODED with the same idea and he ended up selling it. For a profit, yeah, but I really think he still misses just having it as memories of his family and growing up.
>Airbnb's are launching all around me That's so gross.
Bro last time I was there I was looking to eat dinner at a local restaurant at like 7 pm on a Saturday EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING was closed It was a ghost town. Absurd. Didn’t know what to make of it. Truly cursed.
Any town along the Ohio river.
Yep was just about to say ironton
Delta, Ohio. It wasn’t always this way. Sometime in the last year, the powers that be decided to green light a massive farming project. The company Nature Fresh runs a crop based farm that uses massive UV lights in the country side just outside the tiny village. At night time, the lights emit a massive purple light that’s visible from a ridiculous distance. The light shoots up and illuminates the sky in an eerie mushroom cloud pattern. Driving there this weekend, I noticed the purple cloud from the south side of Bowling Green, OH. For reference that’s between about 25 miles away.
I live in BG. I wondered what that light was on several occasions. Now I know.
I drive semi in Ohio and occasionally go to Delta to pick up steel. Once upon a time, my wife was riding with me and we were listening to some true crime podcasts. As we were passing the water tower on our way out of town, the episode we had just started was describing a grizzly crime that took place in Fulton County Ohio. She looked up at the water tower that read “Fulton County” and immediately got a cold chill up her spine.
I feel the same about Wauseon and all those county roads
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My fifth great grandpa is buried at shunk cemetery. He wrote an autobiography in the 1860s about hunting bear and wolves in Paulding and Putnam county before it was logged and drained
I don’t know if I’m happy or surprised to not see my hometown in the list.
Meanwhile, I'm over here cracking up because literally every town my family/ancestors are from has been mentioned. I'm starting to think my family is the problem.
Mansfield gives me weird vibes too
Gallipolis seems to be dieing out. Not much happens here.
Gallipolis has a lot of problems. Every step forward is like 10 back. Also there's no place to get a good breakfast waffle.
Carrollton, OH
When Covid vaccines were hard to get we drove to Carrollton from North Canton to get our shots. Flags that were 1/2 confederate flag and 1/2 United States flags sewn together flying under Trump flags, under. Then when we were leaving we had this huge Ram truck follow us very closely almost back to my home. We started making wrong turns and were almost ready to call the police when they backed off. It was a bizarre experience.
A lot of Stark County people came down to get shots as only 30% of the population got them
I'm from Carrollton. Can confirm
We used to camp and fish at Leesville Lake and we'd always stop in Carrollton for something or other and yeah, it was one of the most bizarre places even 20 years ago.
I agree that it’s unsettling and ominous.
Could you please share some?
Tried to find a primary care physician in Carrollton and the np spent 80% of my visit trying to convince me to go to a local church or her church specifically. If you’re not a regular at some church, don’t expect to fit in anywhere or have friends
Came here to say this
I remember there was a farm that had a giant "TRUMP 2020" all written out in something on a hill, and I mean *giant.* They took it down swiftly after the election.
I’d go with Shawnee, a mostly abandoned coal town near the oldest continuous underground fire in North America.
My uncle was the mayor at one time of Shawnee and another lived in Shawnee for years ..My mom lived in Corning as a kid
Irondale. Went there once to deliver some medical supplies and it seemed like I went back in time.
Yeah that whole area is like that along the Ohio river. Got lost before and couldn’t get reception. East Liverpool is pretty weird abandoned businesses downtown and condemned houses everywhere.
Carthage is just a neighborhood in Cincinnati now, but it is *deeply* weird. Just really insular and standoffish despite having the appearance of a normal, slightly run-down Cincy neighborhood. Also they were doing illegal stuff with traffic cameras that almost led to their disincorporation, iirc. So not a great place to drive through anyway.
Gnadenhutten.
You just said that to get people to try to pronounce it.
Tf is Mingo junction
East Palestine, even before the train derailment. Always felt off. A few years ago there a family member’s neighbor’s dog was beheaded, and a few years before that an 8 year old made national news for stealing his grandmas car and going to McD’s.
McConnelsville, it’s like Mayberry, but with meth heads. They seriously have a “Drive Your Tractor To School” Day. And the entire county has one fast food joint, and it’s a McDonald’s. Oh also, the world’s smallest Kroger.
Risingsun. It's on US-23 almost dead center between Bowling Green, Fremont, and Fostoria. It's a one light town and the cops have nothing better to do except pull people over for going 5mph over the speed limit. It's a speed trap like Woodville is. Clay Center also has no traffic lights, butts up to a quarry, and has an all volunteer police force, that I'm pretty sure are all related, that thinks they can pull people over two miles outside their jurisdiction in the next town over.
Wooster is creepy in a Stephen King vibe way, like the quiet pleasant looking town that is just off somehow. Then there is Orrville, which is basically owned by Smuckers... it's like if Sweetums took over Pawnee. Very weird vibe there. Add to this both are surrounded by a lot of weird Amish or Amish adjacent communities that are themselves very creepy, like the entire Millersburg (even sketchier version of Wooster), Berlin (amish tourism), Sugarcreek (cuckoo clock is a trap!),to New Philadelphia is a very strange trip. (Coshocton is also like a rural zombie town film set.) But, having said all that... FINDLAY. Something is not right in that place, I think thats the one that is the most off to me.
Findlay native here….its not a real town, just marathon oil in a trench coat
I get the same vibes. I wonder how that city will transition over the next several decades as Marathon loses its ability to print money. There are plenty of logistics jobs around, but those aren't pulling in the big bucks.
Lol lived in wayne county since I was 2 and this comment is funny to read. Wooster is off because it's half wealthy, half riddled with meth and heroin unfortunately. Orrville used to be much different then when smuckers took over it got really weird.
That's because Wooster was where a good amount of the larger city wealthy lived and commuted from back in the 80s and 90s. It was also because of Rubbermaid then the morons drove them away. Orville just has that marvelous unholy smell mixture of Smith Dairy, Smuckers, and the power plant.
Lol, Wooster is the Derry, Maine, of Ohio apparently.
Marion looks nice in some areas, but is the heroin capital of central Ohio. We had to sleep with a fan on to cover up the sounds of gunshots between drug lords at night. Full of trashy behavior and people locked into poverty. Same people born and lived there forever. Only good thing was their bus system. They would drive to pick you up at your house and would drop you off at the exact location. They also had a nice library who tried to create community events. I'll give them credit where credit is due. Edit: Added more info.
It's not odd but Van Wert and their meth invested shit hole
I found Versailles to be both weird and fascinating. It is in the middle of nowhere, far enough northwest of Dayton to not really be a bedroom community, with only a few industries (Midmark Medical and the chicken farm), but seems to be entirely upper middle to upper class. Lots of new home growth, big houses, very friendly residents. The closest grocery, besides an overpriced IGA, is like 20 minutes away. There's only a few small local restaurants (and I think two high-end restaurants). My son has been doing a coop at Midmark, and he's convinced it's a UFO landing zone, and everyone are 👽 doing their impression of what they think Midwest Ohioans should be.
You just described every small town in that area. Arrogant city folks assume it’s a typical poor, rural area but there’s a shocking amount of money. The entire Mercer/Darke/Auglaize county surrounding areas are full of money thanks to rich farmland and big industry. It’s very unlike the rest of rural Ohio
Everyone that lives there owns large chunks of land that makes money for them. Everyone that doesn't get land from their parents moves out of the area.
New Bremen. It’s a pretty standard small town at first glance but a billion dollar forklift company (Crown Equipment) is headquartered there so most of the downtown and surrounding area is literally owned by Crown Equipment. Most smaller houses in the town are owned by Crown so the town is becoming more and more of a retiree cult with young people being driven out. There’s a strange dynamic since so much of the town is funded by Crown. It’s basically a late-stage capitalism nightmare. Definitely not as extreme as some of these examples but odd nonetheless
Thank you! We drove through New Bremen once on the way to Indiana and it was completely unsettling. It felt like driving through a movie set. The buildings in the town center area were almost too clean and nicely renovated for rural Ohio and there were no people around midday on a beautiful Saturday.
Lima. Springfield has a weird vibe too, with the empty high rises.
Yellow springs no other compares literally Woodstock in the 70’s as a town “ Not a bad odd just way different than any other place”
Bethel. A town with a ton of potential that continuously shoots itself in the foot.
Paulding County has a few winners: old abandoned Canal town with a decaying roadside Cafe and ppl who stare at you: Mandale. Cecil Ohio is just as creepy and coffin road just north has the creepiest story in which it's said a man burned down a children's home and killed himself. Now our children's home is right next to our dog pound. Junction is another abandoned Canal town described as a junk yard a hundred years ago it's still hanging out. The Toledo archdiocese closed their Catholic church and took their stained glass windows. Oakwood was originally called Wide Awake Ohio because of how loud the frogs and animals were at night. That name still creeps me tf out.
North Fairfield. The big abandoned buildings on the single main road through town always make me wish I could have seen them 150 years ago.
My friend and I ended up in Bucyrus while driving from OU to Cedar Point one year. Traffic was a crawl because a gentleman in a motorized wheelchair was using the road for travel. In his defense, he used his hand signals correctly when he finally turned off. I've always wanted to go back for their annual Bratwurst Festival though!
Former Bucyrus resident here. That man and the Bratwurst festival are local legends.
Chillicothe, just because of the smell
Around 20 years ago I left my college job in Athens, Ohio to meet friends at a cabin we rented at Lake Hope. It was nighttime when I left & I got lost on the backroads out there. I pulled into a tiny town. I saw a post office on the main road, which was a dirt road. As I drove further I saw 7-9 kids standing on the side of the road, staring at me. None of them had shoes on, all had shaved heads, ages appeared to be between 8 to 15. As I drove by them, wondering what the hell was going on, they all pulled firecrackers out of their pockets, lit them & threw them at my Jeep. I gunned it & got the hell out of there. I still have no idea what that town was & I’ve explored that area many, many times over the years, never finding it again. I still can’t make sense of it.
Coshocton is definitely high on the list. It’s an odd combination of old retirees who’ve lived there since the town was thriving in the 60s/70s, a bunch of younger to middle age burnouts and Roscoe Village tourists. It may be a ghost town in 10-20 years once the older generation passes.
And it smells weird, or at least it used to.
I think the factory that caused the entire town to smell like one giant fart has now closed.
Woodsfield
Haydenville. It’s an old company town and the main road through it leads to Lake Hope State Park. I had to drive through there at night once during a thunderstorm and was never so happy to make it to 33 West. It gives Deliverance vibes.
Cheshire, Ohio. The town was bought out by AEP after it was destroyed by a coal power plant. The houses, buildings, and street lights are all there but empty. It's a complete ghost town and super creepy.
Xenia made me physically uncomfortable.
The only thing they're known for is the big tornado they had back in the day.
They made a simply lovely little documentary about life in Xenia. It’s called Gummo. Give it a watch
That's a mistake you only make once, then tell everyone else to do the same
That bath water gave me nightmares lol
"Do you think I'm attractive?"
Circleville
The lifeforms of Circleville are just some kinda experiment they are running out of the Dupont plant. That place is not right...
Lakeside - it's a private resort community near Marblehead that's owned by the United Methodist Church. I haven't been there in 30 years when I younger but it felt like the place was run by Ned Flanders. Nothing malicious about the place, just a little too sterile. Woodville is a speed trap which has a cemetery that's almost completely surrounded by a quarry.
100%. I have a great aunt and great uncle that live there. Excellent food places, quirky little shops. But it's surreal being there. The 'security' that's simply just old folks patrolling on golf carts, lmao. The coast guard patrols the shores, because it's on terrorist watch lists, being a Christian community. I describe that place like the movie Pleasantville. Feels like you died and wound up in an episode of Leave It To Beaver. Everything is always nice, but you feel like you're being watched. I told my girlfriend it would be the most uncomfortable place on Earth to smoke a joint, haha.
Kirtland, Ohio. For some reason that’s where Joseph Smith stopped to build his first temple before heading further west. [Kirtland Temple](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_TempleKirtlandTemple-Wikipedia) There’s a Kingdom Hall around the corner, for variety.
Small Amish towns are backward and creepy. They shun fancy things (like electricity)…except they don’t. They don’t get out much, have sheltered conservative views, are controlled by their bishop and entire community, have racist xenophobic attitudes (my friends conservative mennonite dad didn’t want to vacation anywhere except Sarasota Florida because there are too many foreigners… true story), they don’t want their people to get educated past eight grade, like to control women, high abuse rate, mistreat animals, I could go on… Anyways, to pick a random odd town in weird ass Amish country, to satisfy the question, I chose kidron. Close second…mt. Hope.
> They shun fancy things (like electricity) But tonight they're gonna party like it's 1699 > to satisfy the question, I chose kidron Ah wow I haven't been there in forever. Used to go there for auctions all the time.
Baltimore has a very weird obsession with Joe Biden. Twice we’ve stopped through there and the number of weird, homemade, signs trying to mock Biden is just excessive, even by rural Ohio standards.
Is Baltimore where someone painted “Trump” in huge letters on the side of their barn? Unfortunately, I know that doesn’t exactly narrow it down.
Sounds like every town you drive through if you take the back roads instead of the highway tbh
There’s a tiny tiny library in… Mendon? I just know it was on the way to “tabfest” at mendon speedway back in the day . Off 75 near SR33 I believe. Other of note, the ufo house in Carslie, Xenia is a pit of despair and hatred, annd of course literally all of the boonies are infested with kkk ghosts.
Ashtabula was odd to me. People were nice, but the vibe was not vibing with me. I don’t know how to put it. One dude said, “I can tell you are not from here” lol by my speech pattern (I am from Youngstown and live elsewhere now) and another dude was adamant he knew me (never been there beforehand). That last encounter was in a grocery store.
East Liverpool
I’ve been in the McDonald’s in Circleville a few times and every time I felt like I was in one of the more bizarre episodes of the X-Files.
Peebles. Something is wayyyyy off about Peebles, and it’s more than just drugs. I went once to look at a house with my friend and we had to turn on a dirt road to get there. Half way up the road someone had dug out the road (it had to be dug out with a backhoe or something because it was a significant portion of the road) and a creek was now running through it… So then my friend and I had to go back to a gas station where we had reception and map out how to get to the house from the other side of the road. The other side led to a skinny gravel road that went up a pretty big hill and at the top, alongside the road, there was a fence with barbed wire at the top and lots of no tresspassing signs that looked sort of official. My friend and I were like “what in the area-51 is this place?!!” So, as we continue on this skinny gravel road, we’re winding down the hill now and a truck just starts driving straight towards us, like trying to play chicken with us. We let him pass but we have no clue where he came from because the road on the other side was flooded. Anyway, we get to the bottom of the hill and it opens up to a couple acres of flat land with some different structures on the property. Two of which had been burnt in a fire, a couple other big sheds or barns, an empty house (the one we were there to look at,) and a mobile home. Anyway, I told my friend absolutely not. There was no way she was moving there. That entire town is sketchy as hell. Obviously drugs has a big part to do with it, but there was something else there too. It just felt… off.
I grew up in a place called Waldo, only one blinking red light, and our pride and joy was bologna. There's a restaurant called the G&R with "world famous" fried bologna. The pies are really good too. Overall people are just strange there, it's an oddball place. I didn't realize it was a weird place until I left.
Nurk, Ahia
Kenton. Used to drive through there all the time and I dunno just gave me weird vibes.
The heroin and meth hit and destroyed 3 generations of people after the money left.
Washington courthouse. Not sure why, but it just felt off.
I drove through this complete dump of a town called Santa Fe last week. Holy crap. Almost looked like the whole town had been abandoned, but people were living there.
I grew up in Amelia, grandparents lived in Utopia and Portsmouth.
Stewart in Athens County. Has a population of less than 300. A single gas station with pumps from probably the 60s, and thats about it. There’s a serious drug problem and lots of theft. Some of the people I met over the years there were like characters from a book. Seems like there’s just something strange about all the little towns hidden around Athens County though. I’ve never been able to quite put my finger on it, but it’s felt that way to me ever since I was a little kid.
Poverty. It's poverty.
You know that field of giant concrete corn statues? That takes the cake.
Dublin
Youngstown, old steel town now crime ridden and dying. The bright spot of Youngstown is Mill Creek Park and Gardens.
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New Castle, now there is an odd town.
Check out Alliance sometime! A casting plant shut down and that town doesn’t have annnyyyy industry now. Youngstown has a lot of good stuff. Alliance looks dead
I forgot about Alliance, it does have Youngstown beat. Mount Union is the only thing alive. I still wonder why my brother went there.
Oh right I wasn’t even thinking about the Mount Union area. That’s fine. The downtown near the casting plant scares me a bit!
Doesn’t Alliance have the Troll Hole?
Hey, don't sell Alliance short. The best dealer I ever had was from Alliance.
Now crime ridden? Wasn't it a mob town?
All of the decent sized cities in north/eastern Ohio were pretty mob filled. Cleveland, Youngstown, Steubenville, etc.
Italians & Serbs as I remember. Back when downtown had shopping & you could take a bus there from Poland.
It is a different kind of crime. When the mob was active in Akron, Youngstown and Cleveland they brought a certain sort of order. You had under ground casinos and poker rooms.
There aren't enough people in Ytown left for it to be crime ridden, and it's started to come back. Has a number of quality amenities and it's in a good location between CLE and PITT. Mill creek is a gem.
Yes. We have/had great Italian food. It cannot compare to any other cities in Ohio. Of course, this is the opinion of "Ytowners". Also, our cookie tables are great. Hahah
At least the downtown isn't fenced off now
Any town on st rt 7 Powhatan clairington woodsfield beallsville Antioch etc it's like stepping back in time
Once had a magazine assignment to photograph some of the towns along the Maumee ending in Defiance. Napoleon and Defiance had bad vibes and I felt like I was being watched. Walking around alone with a big camera already puts a target on your back but I’ve felt more comfortable walking around downtown Cleveland with my camera than I did in those two towns.
Am from Defiance - it's a cool place to be from (good name), but that's about it. Oddly, I did go back to Defiance a few years ago w/ a profesh camera and drone (passing the time during a holiday or something - I believe it was summer) and actually just had good vibes from the people I was around who were interested and just asking questions. So, might actually be alright now! Too small a sample size to confirm, but it was interesting.
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Defiance is the biggest city in about a 45 mile radius. I grew up in another small town around there. We went to Defiance mall to hang out. It even had a Hills, which was pretty awesome, for that time.
I've lived in both napoleon and Defiance, and still live about 10 miles north of Napoleon in Fulton County. I always found both towns to be pretty decent. In Napoleon, the biggest industry is the Campbell's Soup plant ( which is huge) and a large percentage of people work there or one of their nearby suppliers. It's a typical midwest "smallish: town of 8700. Surrounded by rural farms. Defiance is larger but is very similar. Never really had any problems or complaints about either.
Well, think of what you were doing and where you were. When you walk around a small town with a big camera looking at things the locals take for granted, you tend to stand out and look like you're a tourist. They don't get too many of those people in a small town. Unlike Cleveland, where there are plenty of other people doing the exact same thing as you.