Sedamsville Rectory
Sedamsville Rectory is an 1891 priests' house in Cincinnati, empty since its parish closed in 1989. Ghost Adventures made it famous in 2012. The real history.
The Sedamsville Rectory is a brick priests’ house at 639 Steiner Avenue in the Sedamsville neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was built in 1891 for Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a German Catholic parish founded in 1878. The parish closed in 1989 and the building has stood largely empty since. Its haunted reputation is recent. Ghost stories about it took off after 2011, when tenants opened it for paid ghost hunts, and the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures made it nationally famous in October 2012. The darkest claims told about the house, of abusive priests and murders in the basement, are rumors with no documented case behind them.
Sedamsville Rectory History
Sedamsville grew up along the Ohio River west of downtown Cincinnati. Henry Sedam laid out the village, which was formed in 1835 and annexed by the city around 1870. It was a working river town, with meatpacking, a mill and Fleischmann’s Yeast among its employers. In 1878, German-speaking members of St. Vincent de Paul parish organized a new congregation there, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Work on the church began in 1888, and the Gothic Revival building was dedicated on 5 May 1889.
The rectory followed in 1891, according to the parish’s centennial booklet, to house the priests of a growing parish. It is a large house of more than 6,000 square feet on four levels, including a full basement. A parish school opened nearby in 1907 and closed in 1976.
The neighborhood declined through the twentieth century. The 1937 flood and the Depression hit hard. In the 1940s River Road was widened, and 91 buildings were razed and more than a hundred families displaced. Floods and the expansion of U.S. 50 thinned the congregation further. Our Lady of Perpetual Help closed in 1989, and its remaining members joined Holy Family parish in East Price Hill. Its bells, organ and other fittings went with them.
Owners and the Building Today
In 1995, John Klosterman bought the church and rectory from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, planning to rent them out. Repairs stalled for years. In 2011 restoration work began on the rectory, credited to the Midwest Preservation Society, and tenants named Tim Brazeal and Terrie Scott began promoting the house as a paranormal hotspot with tours and private ghost hunts. WCPO later reported that Klosterman still owned the rectory and planned to turn it into a short-term rental that would lean into its haunted reputation. Klosterman himself told the station he would not believe any ghost stories until one came up and bit him.
Sedamsville Rectory on Ghost Adventures
Ghost Adventures, hosted by Zak Bagans, filmed at the rectory for its seventh season. The episode, season 7 episode 6, first aired on 19 October 2012. It presented the house as the lair of a violent, demonic entity, and it showed a local priest, Father Jack Ashcraft, performing an exorcism. The case returned in the spin-off series Aftershocks, in an episode paired with the Winchester Mystery House that aired on 14 June 2014. It gave an update on the people running the house, one of whom claimed to have suffered a demonic possession there. Fans voted the rectory episode a favorite for the Travel Channel’s 2015 Halloween marathon.
Ashcraft later gave WCPO a different account. He said he performed a blessing, which included a minor exorcism, and that the show dramatized it. The only odd thing he noticed was a sulfur-like smell, which he said could come from anything. He told the station he does not believe anything paranormal is happening in the building.
The rectory also appeared on Syfy’s Haunted Collector, in 2012, and on the Biography Channel’s My Ghost Story.
The Claims and What Is Documented
The stories told about the rectory are dramatic, and almost none can be traced to a record. One rumor says the archdiocese sent “bad priests” there to hide them from abuse charges or worse. No priest has been named in connection with that claim and no case has been tied to the building. Other tales speak of a priest who killed himself in the house in the late 1800s, of a nun who died in mysterious circumstances, and of satanic rituals, drug use and prostitution in the empty building during the 1980s. Researchers who looked into these stories, including The Ohio Project, found nothing to support them.
Another local legend names Father Donald MacLeod, said to have been killed by a train near the rectory in the late 1800s, and says his figure is seen by the street or the railroad tracks. Other stories describe a man and a child found dead in the street outside at different times. These too come from local lore rather than from any record that has been published.
The activity reported inside is the familiar set of modern ghost hunting reports. Visitors describe footsteps, voices, doors opening and closing, mists and shadows under doors, and a figure of a clergyman. Paranormal investigator Dave Spinks, who visited with several colleagues, reported a scratch on the face and marks on one man’s back, and voices through a ghost box. Spinks called the place an enigma and said he found no clear historical cause for the activity.
The Ohio Project made a telling point. It found no talk of the house being haunted before 2011, the year it opened for paid ghost hunts. The cold spots and shadows people reported were generic and did not show up on camera.
Is the Sedamsville Rectory Haunted?
That depends on whom you ask. Believers point to the scratches and voices reported by investigators and to the episode that made the house famous. Skeptics point to the timing, since the reputation began when the building became a business, and to the priest who appeared on screen and says nothing was going on. What is documented is the architecture and the parish history. The abuse, murder and suicide stories are rumor. The hauntings are testimony.