Here are some things NOT to think about on the Kokosing Gap Trail

I intended to have a big column ready for you this weekend about a 200-year-old man living in a railroad shack.

Okay, maybe he was only 123. Or 90. But, as the best stories do, that one started exploding in every which direction, and still needs some more digging.

At any rate, I was getting pictures for that story the other day, when it occurred to me that I also needed a picture for my new book coming out in September, “The Maplehurst Murder.”

Longtime readers of the column will know that I’ve done several columns on the Maplehurst murder, a tragic unsolved case from 1905 involving the violent death of Miranda Bricker.

The book will be considerably expanded from the original columns, and it will be teeming with new information, including the one that called for this picture.

Bricker was attacked as she returned to her apartment in the Maplehurst mansion, where she worked, on East Gambier Street the night before Easter, 1905.

Her assailant assaulted and strangled the poor woman in the shady yard of the mansion on a moonless night. The body was discovered and police were called the following morning.

After a wide-ranging telephone search, Knox County officials hired bloodhounds from Dayton to come and see if they could track the killer’s trail.

The dogs and their handler arrived late that night by train and were taken to the murder scene. They caught a scent.

The hounds then trailed it from Maplehurst down the hill toward the Kokosing River. The trail then followed the railroad tracks east for almost half a mile.

The Cleveland, Akron & Columbus Railroad is long gone, but in its place now is the Kokosing Gap Trail, a wonderful paved path for walking, jogging, and biking, that follows the original railroad bed.

What I’m going to tell you now is probably not going to make your next walk on the trail pleasant, but it will momentarily bring history home in a startling way.

Based on what I’ve been able to reassemble from original newspaper reports, Sheriff Frank Shellenbarger interpreted the dogs’ trail to mean that the killer had followed the railroad for a distance, then walked onto what was then Quarry Street and stepped off the road at the bridge over Center Run to wash the blood off his hands and clothes from the gory attack.

The dogs then tracked the killer’s path back through town and to a house on the north side of town, which is where the sheriff ultimately arrested the wrong guy, which is something I explore at length in the book.

I don’t think the dogs were wrong about the trail, the sheriff simply made a mistake with a hasty arrest due to the volatile situation, with townspeople threatening a lynching.

When I went exploring for the bridge where I might get a photo, I was flummoxed at first, because as it currently goes today, Quarry Street never crosses Center Run.

That’s because Quarry Street was cut apart when Mount Vernon Avenue Extension was extended to meet up with South Edgewood Road.

Because of the new road, Quarry Street no longer includes the original rock quarry after which it was named.

The old quarries, no longer in use, are further out what was originally the eastern part of Quarry Road, which is now known as Lower Gambier Road, because it runs from what is now the southeast corner of Mount Vernon almost all the way out to Gambier.

This means that the original bridge on Quarry Street where the killer washed his hands is today the bridge on Lower Gambier Road, immediately adjacent to the parking lot for the Kokosing Gap Trail.

For additional unease, you can pause to consider that 130 years ago, local maps showed that this parking lot was the location of a slaughterhouse.

On second thought, maybe you’d better not dwell on that.

But one can consider that the killer probably chose this spot to wash his hands because no one was likely to notice a few drops of blood in the vicinity of a slaughterhouse.

If you venture onto the trail, you’ll be right at the spot. After you park, trying to forget what I just told you about the slaughterhouse, you will then cross the road, and climb up the embankment onto the trail, and start walking east.

The first thing you will notice on your left, is the bridge over Center Run on Lower Gambier Road, which briefly parallels the trail.

You can imagine in your mind’s eye a killer squatting at the water’s edge 120 years ago, washing blood from his hands in the midnight darkness.

And after that shiver runs up your spine, you can look around at the way beauty has reclaimed and redeemed this place, leaving only a distant echo of a horrific crime from years ago …