This is the Most Haunted Restaurant in Ohio

by Caroline Gillen

photos provided by The Golden Lamb

On the fourth floor of the hotel lies the recreation of Sarah’s childhood room. The room is filled with toys and clothes that had once belonged to Sarah.

After a long night of drinking, a musician stumbles upstairs to his hotel room. With some struggle, he unlocks his door and walks in, only to lose his balance and fall flat on his face. A little girl’s laugh echoes through the halls — mocking him. Dizzily, he stands up and staggers back out into the hallway. He looks around, seeing no sign of a young girl. He retreats back into his room and tries to convince himself that he’d just had too much to drink. But he isn’t able to shake the feeling that he may have had an encounter with one of The Golden Lamb’s infamous ghosts.

The haunting of the Golden Lamb isn’t news to its visitors. In fact, it is one of its main attractions. In 2019, Food Network named the Golden Lamb, “The most haunted restaurant in Ohio.”

Over 200 years after Ichabod Corwin, one of the town founders, constructed the hotel and restaurant in Lebanon, it continues to serve the residents and visitors. Founded in 1802, The Golden Lamb was one of the first buildings in Lebanon.

The Golden Lamb has seen many notable guests, from 10 presidents, including John Quincy Adams and Ulysses S. Grant, to writers like Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain.

Over the years, guests have claimed to have seen ghosts, one of which is a young girl identified as Sarah Stubbs. In the late 1800s, Sarah’s father died when she was five, which led her to move into the Golden Lamb to live with her uncle, who was the hotel manager. Two years later her mother died. Eventually, Stubbs moved out of the Golden Lamb, got married and died at the age of 79 in 1957.

If she didn’t die inside the Golden Lamb at a young age, then how would the ghost of the young girl be Stubbs?

John Zimkus, a historian of the Golden Lamb and education director of the Warren Country Historical Society, says her haunting has to do with a paranormal theory called the imprint theory. The imprint theory is the idea that a traumatic event can leave an impression on the soul, so when one dies it is possible for them to return back to the age that the event occurred. The back-to-back death of Stubbs’s parents at a young age would explain why she would return to haunt the halls of her childhood home.

Stubbs has a way of making her presence known to the guests at the Golden Lamb, whether it be knocking objects off walls or making lights flicker.

“One of our servers, her name is Jane, heard a commotion happening in front of the partition of Sarah’s childhood bedroom,” Zimkus says. “Jane goes over and asked this lady if she was alright and the lady says, ‘I just took this picture’ and the lady shows her digital camera to Jane. In Sarah’s room there is a little brown dress that belonged to her laid out on the bed. However, in the photograph on the camera, it wasn’t there. Then, in front of Jane, the lady takes another photograph and once again the dress is not in the photo. For years, if I was talking to a table and Jane walked by, I would call her over and ask her if the story was true, and she’d cross her heart and hold up her hand and swear by it.”

In addition to Sarah Stubbs, guests claim to have seen a ghost of a gaunt older man staring out the windows of the inn. Guests have reported smelling a strong scent of cigar smoke, despite the Golden Lamb being a smoke-free establishment. Speculation about who the ghost could be points to Charles R. Sherman, an Ohio Supreme Court judge who died in one of the hotel rooms from typhoid fever, or Albert Stubbs, the hotel manager from 1878 to 1914 who collapsed and died right behind the front desk. The most popular theory, however, is Clement Vallandigham. He was an Ohio politician and leader of the anti-war Copperheads known as "peace democrats" in the 1860s who opposed the Civil War and wanted to declare a peace settlement with the Confederates.

The story of Vallandigham’s death began on Christmas Eve in 1870 when a bar fight between democrat Thomas McGehean and a Republican ended with one man dead. Vallandigham was convinced McGehean was innocent of murder, and the Republican man had accidently shot himself instead while pulling the gun out of his pocket. He spent the day testing his theory and building his defense by measuring, with a gun and piece of cloth, the powder burns one would have if they were to shoot themselves. Vallandigham went back to the Golden Lamb where he was staying, where he received a package containing a brand-new 32 revolver that was meant to be used during the court room demonstration. In his room, he laid both guns on the dresser and, in front of his two colleagues, started to practice how he planned to present his case to the court. He started acting out how he believed the event to unfold. In his eagerness to prove his theory, instead of picking up the safe, court-demonstration gun, he picked up the other gun and accidently shoot himself in the abdomen.

“Vallandigham proves that you can die that way by dying that way,” Zimkus says. “If anyone has the right to haunt the Golden Lamb, it’s Clement Vallandigham."

The Clement Vallandigham dining room.

Because of Vallandigham’s incident, McGehean was proven acquitted and released from custody. The room where Vallandigham shot himself is now a private dining area named after him where a portrait of Vallandigham adorns the back wall of the room.

Some may claim the ghost stories to be untrue or fabricated. On the other hand, others are assured in their assertions that ghosts haunt the halls of the Golden Lamb. The mysterious and unknown hauntings are what makes the hotel so alluring. The Golden Lamb, with its rich history entangled with contested stories and narratives, continues to be a gathering place for all guests, both dead and alive.