When R.L. Stine was growing up in Bexley in Central Ohio, he was afraid of everything. It’s part of what led him to spend so much time writing in his bedroom beginning at age 9.
“I was always sure something was lurking in the garage, waiting for me. Something horrible,” he said.
Indigenous mounds and burial sites speckle Ohio’s landscape, from Miamisburg in the west to Marietta in the east.
These sites played important roles in many Indigenous cultures.
Whitney Fordyce tended to the lunch rush that piled into the Hammel House Inn’s downstairs restaurant on a Wednesday in early October. Her ponytail bobbed as she darted from table to table topping off drinks and taking orders.
The inn was completely booked leading into the fall weekend.
Kevin and Liz Jones walk slowly toward one of the brightly colored wooden boxes that line the yard of their farm in Batavia, just east of Cincinnati.
The bricks of Adams School on the south side of Youngstown are falling down.
Some of the windows are broken.
Inside, paint flakes from the walls as water drips from rusty stairwells.
“It needs to be torn down,” said Ken Stanislaw. His backyard juts up against the deteriorating building, which has sat vacant for nearly fifteen years.
The Old-Growth Forest Network welcomed two Ohio forests to its ranks this October: Stage’s Pond State Nature Preserve just south of Columbus and the Lindy Roosenburg Preserve near Athens.
The Franciscan University of Steubenville just admitted its largest freshman class ever: 772 students, according to school officials.
The school, on the far eastern edge of Ohio, had to open a new dorm before the start of the school year to accommodate them.
The gravel road to Moonville twists and turns through the dense woods of Hocking Hills in Vinton County. One side plummets to a stream bed far below.
“It’s remote enough that when people come up here, the drive scares them,” said Jannette Quackenbush, navigating the curves in her orange Jeep with care.
Every August on a small Lake Erie beach in the far Northeastern Ohio city of Conneaut, an invasion occurs.
But people don’t run for cover — instead they gather to watch a spectacle unfold as hundreds of history buffs, clad in historical WWII uniforms, reenact D-Day, June 6, 1944 when the Allies invaded Western Europe in World War II.
When Oumar Ball first arrived in Cincinnati, he was alone.
His first night in Ohio was spent on the floor of a mosque. He left his home in Mauritania, fleeing political violence and an oppressive government. Twenty-seven years on, the problem in his home country persists. Young men with stories just like Ball’s continue to arrive in Ohio.
