The free "Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum" mobile app is available for Apple and Android devices.
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Users can search by name: first, last or both. They can also take a pre-designed tour. Thus far, only Woodland’s 45-minute self-guided historical tour has been added.
Angie Hoschouer, the cemetery's development and marketing manager, said self-guided versions of several other tours, including those featured on the sold-out and extremely popular History, Mystery, Mayhem and Murder Tour, will be added as well. Those featured on the tour can be found on the app.
Below are four bone-chilling gravesites you should visit. Details on the gravesites and individuals buried there is from Woodland Cemetery, Dayton History Online and the Dayton Daily News archive.
DEATHBED CONFESSION
Deceased: Christina Kett
Section 100 | Lot 2179 | Tier 3 | Grave 13
Death: March 9, 1884 at age 65
The mystery of who killed pretty 18-year-old Christine Kett Jun. 11, 1867 lingered for 17 years.
Suspects had included Christine’s brother, a neighborhood teenager, a stranger seen in the area when the murder was committed, her boyfriend and even her own mother, Christina.
A deathbed murder confession revealed the truth.
Before taking her final breath, Christina Kett told her son that she bludgeoned Christine in the head with a short-handed axe when the young woman did not come home on time to make dinner.
In an attempt to cover what was considered the city’s “most horrible and fiendish” crime at time, Kett place her daughter’s fingers in the powder flask of her son’s revolver and smeared the Christine’s face with powder.
She reportedly told her son that that the young woman’s image haunted her from that day forward.
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FALLEN LADY
Deceased: Maggie Lehman
City Lot | Lot #1 | Tier 20 | Grave 18
Death: Sept. 19, 1891 at age 36
The blue-eyed and blond "lady of the night" had four children and made a vow to turn her life around after they were taken away and placed in the Children's Home.
Jacob Harvey, the pimp and boyfriend Maggie had met in the brothel formerly owned by famed Dayton madam Lib Hedges, was having none of this.
He abused Maggie, and was sent to the Dayton Workhouse for 60 days.
Maggie eventually got her children back, but Jacob would not go away -- even after Maggie claimed to have a new boyfriend, Newton Chubb, a bartender at the brothel which by then was called “the Abbey.”
Jacob beat Maggie again when she refused to leave Newton and date him again. He was sentenced again to the workhouse.
While in jail, Jacob told officers and other prisoners he would escape and kill Maggie and her new boyfriend.
They laughed, but he did just that.
Jacob escaped and left the area, only to come back to town to find Maggie at the Abbey.
He was seen dragging the woman from the brothel’s porch and shot her behind the ear with a revolver, according to Woodland’s description of the crime.
After the shooting, Jacob walked to the Point saloon and asked the owner, Al Bloch, for a glass of beer. Then, living a cigar, he remarked, "I just killed a damned bitch down there. I shot her twice." Harvey then went on to relate the rest of the particulars of the crime to the astounded barkeeper.
Jacob Harvey was hung on June 28, 1892.
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THE GHOST ON THE BRIDGE
Deceased: Bessie Little
Section 111 | Lot #3009 | Tier 3 | Grave 15
Death: Sept. 2, 1896 at age 23
Albert J. Frantz was accused of shooting his pregnant lover Bessie Little on the Ridge Avenue Bridge on Aug. 27, 1896, and trying to pass her death off as a suicide.
Bessie's decomposed body was found floating in the Stillwater River. Prosecutors argued that Albert murdered the 23-year-old because he did not want to marry her.
According to a piece titled "The Story of the Bessie Little Bridge" by former Dayton Daily News columnist and local historian Roz Young, then-Dayton Chief Farrell "testified at the preliminary hearing that Frantz told him he had taken Bessie for a ride in his rig and that as they approached the bridge, she shot herself twice in the head. He panicked when he realized he might be blamed for her death and threw her body into the river."
Prosecutors said the first bullet killed Bessie, so there was no way she could have shot herself that second time in the head.
Her head was brought into the courtroom on the second day of the trial causing many to faint. Coroner Lee Corbin removed it from the jar it was stored in to show jurors the path of the bullets.
The jury didn’t believe the whole "she shot herself twice in the right ear" defense. They found Albert guilty after six days and more than 100 witnesses. He professed his innocence until the day he was executed by the state on Nov. 19, 1897. Albert was only the fourth man in Ohio history to meet death in the electric chair after the current was turned on and off five times. He could be heard groaning after each turn. Disowned by her adopted family due to her pregnancy, Bessie was at first buried in Potter’s Field.
The family had the body moved to Woodland Cemetery shortly after Albert’s execution.
Bessie’s ghost is said to haunt the Ridge Avenue Bridge, which is nicknamed the Bessie Little Bridge. The bridge she died on was replaced in 1927. That bridge was demolished in 2014 as part of a $5.2 million Ridge Avenue Bridge project. A new bridge took its place.
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STOVE TOP KILLER
Deceased: Mary Knight
Dayton State Hospital Section
Death: 1940
Last year, Dayton History staged a re-enactment of Mary Knight's 1895 murder trial.
Mary would not win the world's greatest daughter award. This only child with an "appetite for strong drink" was tried for the bloody death of her mother Catherine "Grandmother Hark" Hark.
The supposed murder weapon: the cross-piece of a stove top covered in hair and blood.
Mary moved into her mother’s cottage on North Urbana Street after she and her husband had a violent fight. The women fought often due to Mary’s drinking, and neighbors often walked into the house to try to make peace between them.
Screams broke out the morning of May 10, 1895, and neighbors debated in their front yards if they should call police.
Mary walked out of the house and stumbled down the street. Neighbors assumed she was “drunk again,” and went back into their own homes.
A short time later, a man spotted Mary standing on the porch looking into the window.
“Horrible! Horrible! Look,” she screamed, according to Woodland’s account.
Mary denied killing her mother, but was convicted on what the judge called “circumstantial evidence.”
She received just a year in prison, and many in Dayton doubted her guilt.
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