Three Deaths in Pleasant Valley: the Ceely Rose House

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 24, 2026 · How we verify

The Ceely Rose House is a small frame dwelling that sits inside Malabar Farm State Park in Richland County, Ohio, a short distance from the village of Lucas and close to Mohican State Park. It was the miller’s house, and in 1896 it was the scene of a triple murder committed by the young woman whose name it now carries. Most visitors pass it on the way to the barns and the Big House without stopping. Those who do stop tend to know the story already.

Two things are worth separating from the start. The murders are documented history. Everything else attached to the building, the whispers, the cold rooms, the figure at the window, belongs to the category of reported experience, and is best treated that way.

Quick Orientation to the Miller’s House

• Where: within Malabar Farm State Park, near Lucas in Richland County, Ohio, adjacent to Mohican State Park
• What it was: the 19th century miller’s house, home to the Rose family
• The event: in 1896 Ceely Rose poisoned her three-person family with arsenic in their food
• On screen: investigated for a 2014 episode of Ghost Hunters on SyFy, titled “Family Plot”
• Each October: the Ceely Rose Play is staged in the park’s timber frame barn

What Ceely Rose Did in 1896

Ceely Rose was a young woman described in the park’s own account as mentally challenged, living with her parents and brother in the miller’s house in Pleasant Valley. In 1896 she killed all three of them by lacing their food with arsenic. That is the hard centre of the case, and it is why the house is remembered at all.

The version told in local retellings and in the Pleasant Valley collection of ghost stories fills in a motive: that Ceely had fixed on a neighbour, Guy Berry, that her family stood between her and the attachment she imagined, and that she removed the obstacle. The poison is usually said to have been mixed into cottage cheese. Those details come from the tradition rather than from any official record reproduced here, and a careful reader should hold them loosely. What is not in dispute is the arsenic and the three bodies.

Ceely was judged insane. She is commonly said to have spent the remainder of her life confined at the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, dying decades later, far from the valley where the killings happened.

What People Report Inside the Ceely Rose House

The house has a long-standing reputation among people who visit the park after dark or linger near it during the day. Reported experiences include voices and whispering with no traceable source, abrupt cold in otherwise still rooms, and glimpses of a figure moving inside or looking out. Visitors routinely assign that figure to Ceely herself, which says as much about the power of the story as about anything observed.

None of this is verified, and no investigation has produced anything that would settle the question. The building is small, old, empty and famous for a murder, which is a combination that reliably generates accounts of this kind. What can be said honestly is that the reports are consistent, they are numerous, and they have been repeated long enough to become part of the park’s identity.

Ghost Hunters and the “Family Plot” Episode

In 2014 a Ghost Hunters crew filmed at the Ceely Rose House for an episode called “Family Plot”, broadcast on the SyFy channel. The team examined claims of paranormal activity connected to the 1896 triple murder, and during the same episode also spent time inside Louis Bromfield’s Big House elsewhere on the property, attempting to document reported activity there too. The episode gave the house a national audience it had never previously had.

The Ceely Rose Play in the Timber Frame Barn

Every October the park stages the Ceely Rose Play in its timber frame barn. It forms one part of a trilogy of ghost story dramas performed at Malabar Farm, alongside Phoebe Wise and Louie. For anyone who wants the story told properly rather than swapped in a car park, the play is the most direct route to it.

Seeing the Ceely Rose House at Malabar Farm

Malabar Farm became an Ohio state park in 1976, and the grounds are open to the public. The house itself is not a walk-in attraction in the ordinary sense, so anyone hoping to get inside should check what the park is offering before travelling; access is tied to programming rather than to general admission. The October play and the park’s seasonal events are the reliable way to line up a visit with the story.

The rest of the park rewards the trip regardless. Malabar Farm was built in 1939 by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Louis Bromfield, who lived there until his death in 1956 and made the place a national model for sustainable agriculture. The Ceely Rose House is the oldest and darkest thing on the property, a plain building that outlasted everyone in it.

Sources

• The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution
• Youth Hostel Lucas Ohio Budget Backpacker Cheap Hotel
• The Louis Bromfield Legacy – Malabar Farm
• NPGallery NRHP Archive Search (National Park Service)
• Malabar Farm State Park (Ohiodnr (official))
• Wikipedia: Malabar Farm State Park

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