It can be fun to tell a good ghost story, especially if it has its roots in very real history. For example, is there a ghost (or a few of them) roaming a particular cemetery in Marietta, Ohio? According to many locals, there certainly is. Her name was Sally Dodge, at least when she was alive. She had spent some time at “The Ohio Lunatic Asylum” – which in the 1800s was, in retrospect, a horrible idea. The history of the place certainly illustrates that point. So, if you find yourself alone in the cemetery at night – perhaps you, too, can see the ghost of Sally, gently floating somewhere around her grave.
And yes, people do go there trying to seek her out.
It begs one question, though…
The Legend of Sally Dodge
Sarah Dodge was born on December 20, 1785, in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire to Captain Nathaniel Dodge and his wife Rebecca. The Dodge family all moved to Ohio in the early parts of the 1800s and it’s safe to say that the family was very well known all across town.
There are a few versions of the ghost story floating about, but most of them go something like this: Sally was an independent woman, perhaps a bit ahead of her time. She did get married in 1804 to a wonderful young man named Jonathan, who treated her right. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1821, not long after the couple’s fifth child was born. Jonathan’s death was quite the shock to Sally, who afterward found it difficult to cope with life. She did find solace in “a bottle” and was said to have become quite the alcoholic.
Her behavior, they say, had gotten so bad that when their eldest daughter got married, she took her younger brother to live with them, as opposed to letting him stay in a home where he was not being cared for. It wouldn’t be long before the remaining family came together and forced her into a mental asylum … all the way up in Columbus.
When she died, she was buried in Mount Cemetery, close to home in Marietta. And ever since (according to legend, mind you) she has been seen in spectral form, floating somewhere in the vicinity of her grave.
Why do they believe that she’s haunting the cemetery? Well, that’s a little murky. Some say she’s waiting for her husband to come so the two of them can cross the border into the afterlife together. Others say it might have something to do with her time in a mental asylum, most likely being subjected to all sorts of inhumane treatments. Perhaps those left her with enough unease that she feels compelled to roam the cemetery in spectral form?
Marietta’s Mound Cemetery is a frequent stopping point for ghost hunters. So, maybe she’s just looking for her ghost friends to hang out with?
Sally’s Family
Sadly, Sally’s story is not exactly unique. Many women who could not, or did not want to conform to society’s rather limited role for what a woman should be, or how they should think, were often locked away in an asylum. Often, one that wasn’t too close, lest word get out that they’re there because they (gasp) had thoughts of their own … but also close enough so that relatives could say they visited occasionally, whether they actually did so or not.
So, why are we telling Sally’s story – and not someone else’s? Well, that’s most likely due to who the rest of her family is. I said above that probably everyone in Marietta knew who the Dodge families were – and there’s a good reason for that.
To understand Sally’s story, we musts go back in time a little bit, to around the late sixteenth century (or the 1500s, if you prefer). Over in Normandy France there lived a man named Pierre Dodge (even if he did spell it D-o-u-g-e) who was an influential member of William the Conqueror’s army. His descendants later moved into the Kent and Cheshire regions of England. Later, some would move to the new world, settling in and around Massachusetts in 1629.
Throughout this entire time, there didn’t seem to be a single Dodge family that didn’t have someone serving in someone’s army – often holding positions of authority or notoriety. This, of course, did not change with the family members who came to the New World.
And this is where and when Sally was born.
Near the turn of the century, the Ohio Company of Associates was created and one of its influential members was one Captain John Dodge, Sally’s uncle, who had spent most of his army career in the Continental Army. When he heard of what the Ohio Company was doing, all he could say was “Great, where do I sign up?” (Although, on second thought, those might not have been his exact words.)
Because of his military experience (and probably his family name) he was tasked with a very important mission. Someone needed to go scope out the land, try to meet with indigenous leaders, start working on developing some kind of understanding between the various parties. When he finally returned to Boston, having accomplished his mission, without any bloodshed from either side, because God was on his side, they of course gave the guy a serious medal. It wouldn’t be long before he and his wife accompanied some of the first Ohio settlers to Marietta. His son, also names John, was among the young men who traveled up the Muskingum River a short way and created the town of Beverly.
I probably don’t have the time to tell of all the Dodge family adventures in Ohio – since really there are quite a few of them. Suffice it to say that a major portion of early Ohio history would have happened quite differently had it not been for men surnamed Dodge.
Sally’s Story
For the most part, every part of Sally’s legend is somewhat accurate. As a young lady, her family was one of the earlier settlers in Marietta. She would marry, then become a widow. And yes, when her daughter got marries, she took her younger brothers to live with them as that seemed a better option than them staying with their mother. And yes, Sally was sent to the Ohio Lunatic Asylum under the auspices of Dr. William Awl – who gladly (and often) boasted a 100% Success Rate … as long as you didn’t count all the poor souls who died on his watch or who he otherwise couldn’t “cure”.
One would think that being subjected to care at a lunatic asylum in the 1800s would be horrible enough – but, oddly, that isn’t where this story goes.
There was also a bit of notoriety surrounding Dr. Awl and his healing methods or psychological treatments, or any of the odd “controversies” that tended to surround the doctor. But, again – this isn’t where this story goes.
Not exactly, anyway.
Sally Dodge (now Crum) was admitted as the twenty-second patient at the Ohio Lunatic Asylum for “moral insanity”. This, believe it or not, was an actual medical diagnosis at the time. This usually meant any kind of abnormal emotions and behaviors, just without the hallucinations or delusions that made psychological diagnosis easy at the time.
In a way, it was kind of like saying “Everyone knows Aunt Irma is crazy, we’re just not sure why.”
Her alcoholism was a known factor, however what role it truly played was unknown. It has been noted that there was a cholera epidemic going on at the time, and whiskey and brandy drinking seemed to be something of a wives’ tale preventative cure-all. So, the name medical notes that pointed out her alcoholism also pointed to a likely excuse. So, it’s hard to say.
Forty-eight weeks after she had been institutionalized, her notes say that she was now “much improved”. I guess that sounds better than “deceased”. Sally was buried in the first of three pauper’s cemeteries located on the asylum grounds.
The Resurrectionists
This is when Sally became victimized by a war that had been going on across the nation as it was at the time, although Columbus, Ohio was a notorious battleground. This was not a war between the early residents and the Indigenous tribes that had once ruled the land. No, this was the war between the living and the dead. No, not some historic zombie outbreak – this was all about medical schools.
Today, we have groups such as The American Medical Association that helps determine who can call themselves a doctor, and what kind of things they’re allowed to do (or what’s not allowed). But back then – there was no such thing.
Modern medicine was in its infancy and there were two groups that were determined to shape its future. First, there was the “Regulars” a more accepted and established group that practiced more traditional cures. Then there were the “Irregulars” who rejected standard practices and wanted to try something new. This war (I’m not sure if I can call it that) between the two camps may just have turned out to be a good thing in the long run.
Both sides had their points, both good and bad. So, while the Regulars were more established, the irregulars questioned medical practices and asked if that was truly what was best. For a perfect example, Mercury was often being used in medicine by the regulars. When they discovered its medicinal uses, it seemed at the time like such a wonderful thing. It was the irregulars, however, who thought differently and refused to touch the stuff. Today we know that Mercury is highly toxic and can be the cause of so many medical maladies that it’s probably left outside the body as much as possible.
One area where this battle between the regulars and the irregulars was the most apparent, at least in and around Columbus, was in the ridiculous number of medical schools that were being established.
One school (sounds a lot like the regulars) would say a student would need a few years of study, followed by some time of shadowing an established physician before someone could call themselves a doctor and practice medicine. Next door, however, you might find another school (sounds a lot like the irregulars) who would say, “Nope. All you have to do is read this book and when you’re done in a day or two, you can call yourself a doctor.”
Without any licensing boards or professional standards groups – there was nobody to stop anyone from doing … well, anything.
If there was one thing that both the regulars and irregulars agreed on was that someone needed to figure out how the human body worked. Medicine had advanced by this time so that we knew a few things, however there was lots we didn’t. There were also quite a few things we thought we knew but turns out everyone was wrong.
If you wanted to learn how the human body worked, then you pretty much needed to cut one open. The problem with that, of course, is that this tended to kill the human, and that was pretty much frowned upon by pretty much everybody. Then someone got the idea to cut open someone who was already (and recently) dead – you can’t kill a corpse, can you?
For a short while, it seemed to be all the rage to “donate your body to science” or “to allow medical students to use it to learn anatomy” … but, as soon as word started getting out about what these medical students were doing with people’s remains, how they were being abused, and sometimes it wasn’t all that easy to put Uncle Frank in the family burial plot – let’s just say that it fell out of favor real quick.
I think we all know where … and how … all these medical schools started getting their mostly fresh cadavers at this point.
So, back to Sally.
It took about two days or so for Sally’s family to be notified about her death and then make the trek all the way up to Columbus from Southern Ohio. They arrived at the hospital and were shocked to learn that Sally had already been buried. The family wanted to see the gravesite, perhaps to prepare for exhumation and relocation back to the family plot down south.
The problem, everyone quickly discovered, was that Sally’s grave was now empty – as were two or three other graves of poor souls that didn’t stick around long enough to bolster Dr. Awl’s 100% Cure Rate.
Blame quickly fell to a nearby medical school, Worthington Medical College, who was beginning to get a reputation for this kind of thing. This school fell into the Regular camp, teaching a mostly plant-based system of medicine – and the forces behind the school were making quite a few astonishing discoveries about the human body. The school and its faculty were also constantly being attacked by critics, be that from people like Dr. Thompson (who wrote that book that said you could be a doctor after reading his book, no years-long study required) … or, even by his medical colleagues, who perhaps just wasn’t ready to give up the practice of bloodletting for the common headache.
Nothing that was going on was exactly new, but people were starting to get fed up. And others were using the fact that people were getting fed up to further poke at their enemies (and Worthington’s College in Columbus did happen to have quite a few of those).
The Dodge family name likely had a lot to do with this as well. Before now, people seemed reluctantly willing to accept that medical schools were staling freshly buried corpses to study human anatomy, and it really sucked when it was someone you loved. But, when that person was a member of one of the more prominent families in the State, one with a long history of achievements since The Revolutionary War … that was something else.
The Dodge family left Sally’s now-empty grave and started to plan their next move. They quickly discovered that many people were willing to help. It wasn’t long before they had amassed a small army, willing to go into Worthington’s to retrieve whatever remains of poor Sally.
Once the possy was believed to be on their way, the folks at the medical college started to panic. They locked all the doors, began barricading the windows – they had no idea what the mob was likely to do and they had to be scared.
As the streets outside the school started to fill with angry people, not much else was happening. Everyone was waiting to see what the other party’s first move was going to be. School officials inside tried telling the crowd to go away, but it became clear that wasn’t about to happen. The crowd demanded to be let in, but that wasn’t going to happen either.
I do not know if anyone from the crowd outside had actually managed to obtain a door key, or if they just said they had – but the word began to spread and the school officials announced they would be willing to back down – but only if certain conditions were met. They did not want any violence, and they demanded that the crowd let anyone in the building leave without being harmed. The crowd decided that was fair, as long as they weren’t carrying any human remains or dissecting equipment, as long as they just carried their personal effects, they’d be allowed to leave.
Then the doors were open and the people from the school were allowed to leave, and the crowd, including several members of the Dodge family, went inside.
Sally’s remains were quickly discovered, although her body had more than begun to decompose and there were clear signs of partial dissection. Whatever. The family had what they came for. Sally’s remains were secured and transported back to Marietta for burial.
As for the medical school – they did not survive past this. They were shut down, at least in Columbus. Some staff went into private practice while others joined other medical schools. The fates of some weren’t recorded well enough in history.
On its own, the closing of Worthington’s Medical College didn’t change much, although it was clearly a visible link in the chain that ultimately gave way to the system we have now.
The Mysteries of Sally
Sally was ultimately returned home to Marietta and interred at Mount Cemetery where they say her ghost can occasionally be spotted.
As I stated above, the ghost stories don’t all seem to agree on why her spirit seems restless. If her ghost is haunting the cemetery, perhaps it’s due to one of the mysteries from her final days on earth that may or may not ever be answered.
Like … I don’t know … Why did Dr. Awl say Sally had “much improved” in the note dated shortly after her death?
What happened to Sally once she was admitted to The Ohio Lunatic Asylum and placed under Dr. Awl’s care? What kind of treatment did she endure, or was she more or less tucked away in a place where she couldn’t impact the family’s reputation any more than she already had?
This leads us to another mystery? She was hospitalized for “moral insanity” which seems to be a bit of a catch-all diagnosis when people didn’t know what else to classify her as? So, what was the cause of her illness, if she had one to begin with. Women in those days were “institutionalized” in those days for a variety of reasons that seem ridiculous today. For example, if a woman didn’t want to get married, they might say that she was so mentally ill that she refused to conform to societal standards. She didn’t like to be forced to marry someone, or hadn’t met the man of her dreams? That doesn’t matter. Society says there’s something wrong with you if you’re not wed by a certain age, and that’s all there was to it. Similarly, if a woman enjoyed, let alone craved sex, even from her husband, she could be labeled “hysterical” and locked away if that’s what her husband wanted (even if everyone knew that meant he could be free of her to enjoy his mistress on the side.)
She did appear to be withdrawn after the death of her husband, so I have to assume there was some grief and depression that had been left untreated, since we didn’t know to treat things like that back then. Also, as others have pointed out, the Cholera epidemic that had been going on for some time did lead to excessive whisky intake for certain individuals – not that we fully understood what alcoholism was back then, let alone had a decent word for it.
Quite frankly, the question of how, exactly, her remains ended up in the medical school also remains a mystery. Grave robbing was a lucrative, albeit illegal profession at the time. Often, these resurrection men were alerted by hospitals and doctors to the dearly departed. Sometimes, these doctors got a financial incentive from the grave robbers. Other times, it was used to partially cover up something that had happened before death that someone felt didn’t need to be known about? What better way to hide a murder or negligence than to sell the remains to be dissected?
To be fair – there were no telltale signs of that happening here? Or does that mean the coverup was successful?
When I first started looking into Sally, I was sad for her. She lost her husband, then she was all but abandoned by her family to a lunatic asylum that wasn’t exactly close by. I had to wonder if she rejected by her family … but the way the family came together at the end, preparing to raid the medical school that they believed had stolen her remains (they had) – caused me to rethink that, even if just a bit. Still, it remains a mystery – how much of that was to protect the family legacy – or how much was out of respect for a dear loved one?
