Jon Solo Sebastian 10/17/2025:

Welcome back to another Monster of the Week! Though, spoiler alert: this one isn’t monstrous at all. Ohio seems to be fairly stacked with cryptids, hauntings, and urban legends. Every time I discover, or stumble over one, I’m always shocked I’ve never heard of it. See, if life wasn’t so chaotic, and we weren’t forced to dedicate the majority of our time to working to pay bills and eat, I would spend the majority of my time ghost hunting, investigating cryptids, writing books and screenplays and blogs, and all the fun artsy things I enjoy. If that were the case, I’d have heard of Gretchen’s Lock by now, but as the cool kids say: I was today years old when I learned about Gretchen’s Lock.

What is Gretchen’s Lock?

Welcome to Beaver Creek State Park in East Liverpool, Ohio. The lock gets its name partly due to the folktale, but also partly because her father, an Irish engineer, was the person that built it. There are a few different versions of the legend, but they all end with a ghost of a young girl allegedly haunting the park.

The folklore tells the story of a family of three setting forth to America from Europe in the early 1800’s. The mother passed away on the boat, and was buried at sea. Not long after Gretchen and her father arrived in Ohio, Gretchen contracted Malaria. The young girl knew the disease would end her life, and so she asked her father to bury her at sea with her mother when he’s finished building the lock. He told her he would do that. When she passed away, he put his daughter’s coffin in the lock until he was finished building it. Some versions of the story say that when he travels back home with his deceased daughter that the ship is taken by a storm and everyone perishes. Some say the body was never taken back to Europe, some say it was never buried at sea, and some say her father left her coffin in the lock and that he never went back to Europe. Some say Gretchen never existed and the urban legend based on her is completely fabricated.

While it is more than likely that this entire story, aside from the engineer working on the lock is fake, we have to take something into consideration. People have seen the ghost of the girl wandering the park; usually around or on the anniversary of her death. They hear her crying, or mumbling to herself. Some witnesses claim she has asked them to bury her with her mother. It’s possible she died and was buried in the lock (though people have looked for her coffin without success), and she now wanders restlessly because she was not buried with her mother as promised. There haven’t been any reports of her being a scary or violent ghost, though I’m sure her presence might scare some people. She, unfortunately, could be trapped in between the land of the living and the dead; left to wander for eternity.

Have you been to Gretchen’s Lock? Do you know of a different version of the tale? Have you seen her? I’d love to know if any of you have any information about this urban legend. As always, thank you for being here to read my blogs!