John Rankin House

The Reverend John Rankin, a Presbyterian minister born in Tennessee in 1793, moved his family to the free state of Ohio in 1822 and began a 44-year ministry in Ripley. In 1828 he built the brick house on Liberty Hill; he and his wife Jean raised thirteen children in it while operating what became one of the most active Underground Railroad stations in the country. The estimate most sources carry is more than 2,000 freedom seekers sheltered between the 1820s and 1865 — sometimes a dozen at a time — and the family maintained they never lost a passenger.

The risk was real and itemized. Slave catchers surveilled the house; a reported $3,000 bounty stood on Rankin's head. Jean Rankin and the children cooked, hid and guided travelers inland toward stations at Red Oak and beyond. Down in Ripley, the African American conductor John P. Parker — whose own house survives — ferried people across the river itself. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a guest here more than once, and heard the account of a woman who carried her child across the breaking river ice that became Eliza's flight in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The story told about the house is a modest one by haunted-house standards: a lamp kept burning in an upstairs or attic window as a beacon to the river below, and figures on Jacob's Ladder on nights without a moon. The light, at least, has documentary support — Rankin's own writing and the National Historic Landmark nomination describe the house as a beacon station, one of the "first stations" a fugitive reached after crossing.

The ghostly voices and footfalls reported on the steps are filed strictly under reported experience. The archive notes the shape of this particular legend: in most haunted houses the dead are said to linger because something went wrong. Here the legend proposes they linger at the place something went right.

Ohio acquired the house in 1938; it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997, and the Ohio History Connection operates it today following a multi-year restoration that added a new visitor center. The hundred steps are still climbable, the family Bible is still inside, and on a clear day the view still takes in Kentucky.

Rankin's own words close the file better than the legend can: "My house has been the door of freedom to many human beings, but while there was a hazard of life and property, there was much happiness in giving safety to the trembling fugitives." The dossier records 2,000 documented crossings and one hill of reported footsteps, and finds the second number uncountable by design.