The Light of Hope orphanage, once located on Gore Road in northern Ohio’s Lorain County, became the subject of a popular legend when it closed in 1916 after only thirteen years in operation. A local paper reported that the founder, John A. Sprunger, became ill, and the institution fell into a state of financial disarray. Management passed into new hands and within a few years the operators had no choice but to close the institution and relocate scores of children who called it home. Even though details of the closure are well known and fairly mundane, the story of Gore Orphanage eventually took on a different flavor through the addition of tragic and even supernatural elements.
The basic version of the story told at campfires and slumber parties contains elements of horror and the paranormal. Typically, storytellers note the remote location of the orphanage on Gore Road, which runs through the mostly rural western part of the county. Next, they often describe the owner as a cruel, abusive man who terrorized the orphans. The story goes that one day, the owner neglected the kids and fire destroyed the building, killing everyone inside. Screams of burning children could be heard from a mile away. The story then concludes with a haunting theme. Ghosts of burning children roam the grounds and the surrounding area, moaning for relief from their suffering. One version concludes with stories of cars and trucks veering off into the ditch to avoid a child walking down the road, a child that nobody else has seen or for which no evidence can be found.
The Gore Orphanage legend employs themes common to many horror stories—remote wooded locations, tragic deaths of innocent victims, ghosts of the dead haunting the site. The story is entirely fictional, meant to entertain and frighten, but it merges details from a number of real-life people, institutions, and historical events. For example, the orphanage itself is an actual institution that housed children in the early twentieth century, and its location was very near where the site of the alleged tragedy occurred, though not the ruin that modern legend-trippers visit when they tour the area. In 1902 Sprunger, a Lutheran minister, bought several farms on Gore Road and the next year he and his wife moved from Bern, Indiana, to open the orphanage. They taught kids some basic farming skills and otherwise operated the home without significant disruption until Sprunger’s illness. The orphanage’s printing house seems to have burned down in November 1910, but otherwise the orphanage’s demise was the result of financial hardship and had nothing to do with cruel overseers or tragic deaths.
Still, the orphanage in a remote location with scores of innocent, vulnerable children offered a fruitful setting for the story, and when combined with details from a contemporary tragedy in the area, the basic version of the Gore Orphanage legend began to take shape. In 1908, the Lake View School in Collinwood (now a neighborhood in Cleveland) caught fire and burned, killing 176 children and adults. The scale of the tragedy ensured wide coverage by newspapers, and regular anniversaries for many years afterward kept details of the event in the popular imagination.
A final, real-life detail that is important to the legend is the site itself. A mile or so down the road from the original location of Light of Hope, visitors can find rubble from an old building in a place called Swift’s Hollow. These bits of ruin are often misidentified as the last remnants of the burned-down orphanage, when actually they are what’s left from Swift’s Mansion, a house steeped in mystery. The story of the house is compelling. In the 1840s, a man named Joseph Swift moved from Massachusetts to Lorain County and built a very elaborate mansion, complete with parquet ceilings, marble columns, and an ornate, formal garden. Swift went bankrupt on bad railroad stock and in the 1860s the house passed into the hands of Nicholas Wilbur. Wilbur’s family developed a local reputation as Spiritualists who communicated with the dead. These rumors took on a darker color when in 1893, four of Wilbur’s grandchildren died of diphtheria. Local tradition held that the Wilburs buried the children on the property and conducted séances to summon their spirits. In 1901 Wilbur died, and Sprunger acquired his farmland for the orphanage. The mansion itself was abandoned and fell into disrepair. Vandals stole doors and bricks, and thrill seekers ventured to the property to prove their courage amid rumors that the spirits of dead Wilbur children roamed the house.
Today, the foundation and stonework of Swift Mansion provide the necessary setting for a very spooky story about a cruel man who allowed innocent children to die in an orphanage fire, with their ghosts haunting the ruin and surrounding woods. Very little of it is true, but the story offers a useful example of how a few real-world people and events can be combined and reworked over time into a compelling urban legend and campfire story, and even a recent film, Gore Orphanage, released in 2015.
Jeffrey B. Webb
See also Amityville Hauntings; LaLaurie House; Legend Tripping; McPike Mansion; Whaley House
Further Reading
Dziama, Doug. 2013. Ghosts of the North Coast: Legends, Mysteries, and Haunted Places of Northern Ohio. Gettysburg, PA: Second Chance.
Ellis, Bill. 1983. “What Really Happened at Gore Orphanage?” Lorain Public Library System. http://www.lorainpubliclibrary.org/research/local-research/local-history-resources/gore-orphanage. Accessed November 4, 2015.
Woodyard, Chris, ed. 2013. The Face in the Window: Haunting Ohio Tales. Dayton, OH: Kestrel.