CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Some of Ohio’s most terrifying ghost stories are shared in a not-too-spooky format in two new children’s book adaptations from Arcadia Publishing.
“The Ghostly Tales of Cleveland” by Beth A. Richards and “The Ghostly Tales of the Ohio State Reformatory” by Emma Carlson Berne arrived on Aug. 2.
Both books are a part of Arcadia’s Spooky America series, tailored for young readers, and both were adapted from more adult-focused Arcadia books: “Haunted Cleveland” by Richards and Chuck Gove, and “The Haunted History of the Ohio State Reformatory” by Sherri Brake.
Richards, a longtime ghost tour leader, said she got a call from Arcadia saying they wanted to adapt her 2015 book for young readers. Richards offered to adapt it herself.
“I was so excited. I will literally read anything, I don’t care if it’s considered young-adult or elementary,” Richards said.
In the adaptation, Richards shares stories about the Franklin Castle, Playhouse Square‚ the Cleveland Agora and the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument. Richards even includes moments where she’s experienced ghostly interactions in Northeast Ohio while leading Haunted Cleveland Ghost tours, which she runs with Gove.
But she doesn’t get too creepy in the adaptation. Richards said she even shared drafts of the book with five kids from her neighborhood in the Euclid area, to get their opinions and edits on the stories.
“I’ve done the ghost tour for 20 years and we’ve had kids on the ghost tour, so I just wrote it the way I do the tour,” Richards said. “You have to walk a tightrope but I think it was fun to do it.”
Berne had to take a different approach to her adaptation about the Ohio State Reformatory, since she didn’t write the original source material. But the Cincinnati resident was familiar with the Mansfield prison, she said, and included it in her Scholastic book, “World’s Scariest Prisons.”
Berne said she took care to respect the real-life stories contained in her adaptation. “The Ghostly Tales of The Ohio State Reformatory” is divided into sections about real stories, ghost hunters and prison escapees.
“This is a real place where real people lived. A lot of the stories that are captured in the book are stories of real human suffering,” Berne said. “A lot of it, the stories were kind of sad, to me at least. Stories of desperation. You really want to, as a writer, be sensitive to that. I didn’t want to sensationalize it, I didn’t want people to see people as monsters.”
Both “The Ghostly Tales of Cleveland” and “The Ghostly Tales of The Ohio State Reformatory” are available for order from arcadiapublishing.com.
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