Remarkable Markers 2

What if I were to tell you that, when no one is looking, invisible spirits spin a large globe made of solid rock in a cemetery? Well, that is one of the explanations for the restless sphere in Marion Cemetery!

Author Eleanor Y. Stewart and the Sphere of the Spirits

In Marion, Ohio

Yes, the granite ball honoring the family of Charles Merchant in Marion, Ohio slowly spins in an erratic pattern on its base without ever becoming scratched. Others have attempted to explain the movements of the globe; see especially http://www.graveaddiction.com/marion.html. The conclusion that spirits are at work appeals to my Irish DNA.

On an Authors’ Day Out not long after Halloween some years ago, writer (and my dear friend) Eleanor Y. Stewart and I visited the cemetery after a day of research on the topics of Huber and Leader, manufacturers of agricultural steam engines in Marion. We had toured the Marion County Historical Society’s Heritage Hall Museum with its Wyandot Popcorn Museum featuring lovely popcorn wagons and its main exhibits including Prince Imperial, a long-maned horse stuffed by the same taxidermist that stuffed Jumbo the Elephant for P. T. Barnum. A wonderful hot lunch on a cold day had been our pleasure at the Warehouse, a depot specializing in Italian fare. Eleanor and I could hardly wait to see the famous ball! It exceeded our expectations.

The late afternoon had grown so overcast and cold that Eleanor and I were the only visitors to the section of the cemetery where the Merchants’ Ball stands (and revolves). Although we were alone, we felt as if someone were watching us. Occasionally, we glanced over our shoulders to survey the stones surrounding us in the gathering gloom. Were we sensing, uhm, entities?

In her poem entitled “The Graves of the Flowers,” Hoosier poet Louisa Chitwood (1832–1855) wrote, “Upon no stone is carved the name / Of April’s children fair; / They perished when the sky was bright, / And gentle was the air. / To the soft kisses of the breeze / They held half trembling up / Full many a small transparent urn / And honey-ladened cup.” When she was only 23, Louisa died; Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass in the same year. Perhaps Louisa would have taken her place in the new poetry, had she lived; after all, she left a cache of a thousand poems when she died.

As the November dusk began tilting into night, Eleanor and I shivered, scurried to my car, and drove away from the cemetery with its urns and cups and invisible hands reaching toward a cold globe.