The Story of These Abandoned Places in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio Is Truly Fascinating

The origin story behind Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park is quite a bit different from those of other national parks. It stretches, essentially, from the southern edge of the Cleveland metropolitan area southward to Akron, following the course of its eponymous river. As you can imagine, then, the park encompasses a lot of former urban infrastructure, including factories, roads, train tracks, and even homes that were abandoned either before or in the wake of the park's development. Their location in a national park makes these abandoned places in Ohio more accessible than many other such ruins and structures... but it doesn't make them any less eerie.

For example, the former communities of Boston Mills and Stanford were emptied out and impounded by the federal government. Their ruins are now known as "Helltown," and all the ghostly legends you could expect from such a moniker swirl around them.

The truth is almost as sinister; the stretch of the Cuyahoga River between Akron and Cleveland was so hopelessly contaminated - it famously caught fire in the 1970s - that it was poisoning the land and people who lived near it. Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area was designated by Congress in 1974 to give the government authority to start cleaning up the area and enforcing environmental regulations. If you ask me, that lends an extra layer of creepiness to the abandoned sites here (Chernobyl, anyone?).

One of the creepiest sites in the park is abandoned Stanford Road, which the state declined to keep maintaining and, eventually, simply walked away from. Many now consider this former thoroughfare haunted, referring to it as a "Road to Nowhere" or, in recognition of its Helltown location, the "Road to Hell." To access the road, park at the Brandywine Falls trailhead.

Just south of the Helltown area, you'll find the abandoned company town of Jaite, which was inhabited by employees of the long-shuttered Jaite Paper Mill (it was demolished after arsonists set fire to it in the 1990s). Many of the homes are still intact and part of the park, but there's an old rail spur off the tracks that run through the park that went from the main line to the paper mill.

The switch for the spur was removed, many of the ties have rotted or been removed, and grass has overgrown the rails. But remnants of the rail bed are still visible, and an abandoned bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River near the paper mill remains.

Although the mill is gone, its foundations and other signs of its former existence remain, and an interpretive site along the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail. The recreation area was designated a national park in 2000, and by all accounts the clean up has been a success, and more than 2 million annual visitors come to enjoy the natural setting and its history. Check out AllTrails Plus for maps, trail updates, and hike previews for more than 130 trails in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, including those that take you to some these abandoned sites. Have you visited any of these places in the park? What are some other abandoned places in Ohio with fascinating backstories? We'd love to hear about them!