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People Are Strange: A Collection of the Weird Stories of Lakewoodites

Olive Rodemann, staff writer/photographer • February 6, 2025

Front view of ‘Botox Ursula’ who has been haunting her home.

Lakewood is an odd town with a rich history and many old houses. Below is a collection of eight stories from the students of Lakewood and their experiences. From connections to the spiritual world, weird instances on vacation, or odd interactions in music stores, Lakewoodites have a grand connection to the bizarre.

Botox Ursula

In Ursula Rosen’s freshman year art class, she made a self-portrait that she believes haunts her home. She and her friends laughed at it and joked that it looked like her with plastic surgery, which they nicknamed Botox Ursula. However, the more she looked at it, the more she realized that something more sinister might be at hand.

“From the back of the page you can see her eyes and her smile…it’s terrifying,” Rosen said.

A couple of months ago, her sister came into her room, and they talked about how creepy the drawing looked. Her sister was genuinely scared at first. As Rosen laughed it off, halfway through their conversation, one of the lights on her ceiling began to flicker.

“The eyes follow you wherever you go,” Rosen said. “The light strand that’s around the area where [the drawing] was, was all on except the part right where she is, and I did not turn it on…A week later, one of my lights in my room stopped working [as well].”

A few months ago, her family adopted a dog, which has been acting weirdly since she began living with them. As Rosen recalls, once, they came home to find she was standing on the stove with the ignition continuously flickering as if trying to turn it on.

“She flooded the bathroom twice,” Rosen said. “One of the times she flooded the bathroom, she somehow managed to turn the sink on even though…we took the handle off of it.”

Rosen remarks that the situation is ongoing and that she believes the painting wishes to harm her and eventually trap her inside the portrait while the ghost lives free.

“It’s definitely possessing my house and trying to take over my life and kill me,” Rosen said.

Gas Mask Hospital Gown Guy

Felix Gilliland was walking home from her job at McDonald’s and decided to stop by her bank when she passed Nosotros Climbing Gym and noticed someone strange.

“Something’s not right about that guy,” Gilliland said. “He’s holding a big wooden cross, and he’s got a hospital gown on, and it’s pretty clear that he’s wearing a gas mask from behind him.”

It was a hot summer day, and she was on her way to cash her check when this strange man piqued her interest. Out of morbid curiosity, she followed him to find any explanation for this occurrence.

“This guy is freaky,” Gilliland said. “And so I followed him for a couple streets up to the drug mart.”

The man catches on eventually and notices that someone is paying close attention to him. Gilliland gets up to the Drug Mart when the man notices her.

“And then he just turns around and starts looking at me,” Gilliland said. “I just got out of there…some kids messed with him but he didn’t seem dangerous or anything.”

After a while, Gilliland assumed the man possibly didn’t need any help and was bothered by her interest in him. The man seemed ordinary aside from the excessive wardrobe of a wooden cross, gas mask, hospital gown, and cargo shorts.

“It was probably a stunt,” Gilliland said.

People online were also curious about this strange man. Gilliland directed me to a Reddit post circulating about him posted a year ago on r/lakewood that you can access here.

Funny Park Ranger

A year and a half ago, Wanda Collins and her friends were walking home and took a shortcut through Kauffman Park. There, they noticed a group of kids playing by the railroad tracks with one of the Kauffman Park rangers standing by.

“We just stopped because there were these kids hanging out because they’re messing around putting…a rock or two [on the tracks],” Collins said.

As they got closer, we noticed they were placing rocks across the rail. A park ranger then runs up to them, but instead of reprimanding or telling them off, he stands there patiently, not doing anything.

“The park ranger of Kauffman just comes up…he doesn’t tell them off he’s just sitting with me and my friends while the kids set everything up,” Collins said. “He’s kinda shaking his head in disapproval, but he isn’t intervening.”

Collins describes how he’s almost waiting to see what happens, blissfully waiting in childish curiosity to see whether or not the rocks will be enough to derail the train from its course. Eventually, when the train does come it causes the many medium stones and tiny boulders to split under the weight of the compartments.

“Then the kids show the actual split rock to the park ranger and us,” Collins said.

This, however, must’ve been the breaking point for the park ranger. When the kids begin to gloat about their achievements, the park ranger ends his continued inaction and begins a lecture, shifting excitement into shame.

“Only then does he tell them off,” Collins said. “And goes, ‘Okay, maybe next time don’t do that.’”

The Rapid Station

On Poppy Smrekar’s birthday, she visited her friend’s apartment near the Westside Market. On her way home, accompanied by her friend Sami Shrestha, she made her way to the rapid station, and waited for the bus to take her home. There, other people also waiting for the train were present, and they started to strike up a conversation.

“We acknowledge him like hey man or whatever…and he just starts asking us all these questions,” Smrekar said.

They start talking. He asks what they’re doing on New Year’s Eve, and they explain that they just returned from Smrekar’s birthday party. The man then begins to talk about his daughter and how ungrateful she was for his Christmas present.

“He talks about that and [goes] ‘I should’ve just gotten myself a new Call Of Duty game!’” Smrekar said. “And this other guy comes down to the station and they seem to know each other…he’s a white guy with braids and he has a paw patrol backpack.”

The man asks if she has a lighter, says that he can trade her something, and remarks that he has food in his bag.

“He opens his backpack and presents it in front of me on this bench,” Smrekar said. “It’s half-open bags of cereal, and mini-muffins, and loose Cheez-Its in the bottom.”

Poppy declines the strange but polite gesture, and they continue talking. Throughout the conversation, they discover more and more about his current situation.

“[He says] ‘Oh yeah, I just got out of jail!’” Smerkar said.

Realizing how wise her decision she had just made was, Smerkar and Shrestha carefully continued their conversation, nodding their heads along to his tangents about the Lakewood City Police. Eventually, the train arrives and their conversation ends. They get home safely and are left baffled by the people they meet on public transit.

“The interesting part was the weird conversation,” Smerkar said.

The Haunting of the Exchange

Owen Ritchie works at the Lakewood Exchange. Plenty of people stop by to buy used records, CDs, video games, and so forth, but not many people view it as a place that may house supernatural activity. However, some employees feel differently.

“I’ve worked at the exchange for over a year now and there’s always been talk and joke about how the basement is haunted for reasons passed down by other employees but I never fully believed it,” Ritchie said.

Ritchie says that the basement is creepy, however. He describes it as old school, beat up, and generally, a place you don’t want to be in for too long. One night in particular, he had an odd experience while closing shop.

“I started bringing stuff up and down stairs like I normally do, carrying boxes like DVDs and games,” Ritchie said. “But on one of my trips down there, I was going into the office which was adjacent to this back stock storage room. In doing so, I heard some rustling in the other room.”

It sounded like something had fallen over so, confused, he went to investigate. After finishing his work in the office, he walked into the back stockroom separated by this huge wood and glass door propped open by a giant old wooden log.

“I can attest from asking all my other fellow employees that that door has never really been closed,” Ritchie said.

The log that holds the door open weighs approximately 100 lbs from Ritchie’s description and isn’t something that could move on its own. So he continues to investigate the noise in the back stockroom.

“I got halfway through the room, saw nothing was up, so I started heading back further in the room,” Ritchie said. “By the time I got halfway in, the door slammed abruptly behind me.”

He was alone in the basement. Somehow the door had moved on its own and slammed with such force behind him that Ritchie could probably feel it in his chest. Finally, after long anticipation and too many warning signs, he figured his best bet was leaving the basement.

“I will admit I kinda just ran upstairs after that,” Ritchie said.

Bad Driver

Danka Wentzel lives partially in Lorain with her dad, so some of her mornings are spent getting up at the crack of dawn and making the 40-minute drive to school. On this particular day, she had morning practice for the Lakewood Marching Band, so she left the house just a little past 6 a.m.

“It was completely dark out because it was in the morning on the way to marching band,” Wentzel said. “To drive there it’s mostly small roads and highways, but there’s this one weird intersection on the way there.”

She was driving then and pulled up to that intersection right as the light turned red. She stopped in time, but the car next to her wasn’t so lucky. Just as the light turned red he tried to make a left turn but slowly realized that he was now stuck in the middle of the intersection.

“I feel like I could feel him processing what he was going to do,” Wentzel said. “But it was 6 am, and there were no cars out and there was nobody in the left turn lane.”

The car is now left with a difficult decision: either to boldly stand his ground in the center of the intersection or swallow his pride and slowly back down in shame. He had chosen the latter.

“So he just started slowly backing up into the left lane, which feels like it has to be illegal or not normal,” Wentzel said.

Much like how a king cannot control the opinions of his subjects, nor could the driver control the criticism of his fellow passengers. While backing into the left turn lane, someone in his passenger seat looked at Wentzel and displayed his discomfort.

“I looked out my window and his passenger…looked over at me as I looked over at him, and he gave me the slowest shrug of pure confusion I’ve ever seen,” Wentzel said.

Embarrassing? For sure. Illegal? Possibly. What is guaranteed, however, was those few minutes of waiting for the light to be green before continuing her way to school; Wentzel felt as if it lasted hours.

“We sat there for a full minute in what felt like awkward silence,” Wentzel said. “It felt like the most awkward minute of my entire life…and then the light turned.”

Ghost Attachment

Jax Burger and his family recently moved into a new house, and his mom has noticed some strange things. Their dogs wouldn’t enter the house after being let out, and they would hear random knocks at the door when no one was there. Eventually, Burger’s mom contacted his aunt, who has a knack for detecting paranormal activity.

“She comes over, she realizes ‘Hey, this house feels really weird. If you’re having suspicions about having a ghost you should call someone,’” Burger said. “So my mom, she finds a psychic who’s based out of Cleveland.”

Burger’s mom goes on a Zoom call with the psychic, along with many other people who are having situations of their own. They go around telling their personal stories and encounters, one after another, but the psychic debunks any signs of the paranormal. However, when it gets to Burger’s mom, the psychic goes stiff and only confirms what they previously suspected.

“She comes up to my mom’s house,” Burger said. “Gets a tour and all this. Near halfway through the tour, she brings up that there could be the ghost of Senator Grace Drake, who was the first female republican senator in Ohio.”

While on the tour, the psychic brings up Jax. Although she had never seen or spoken to him or any of his siblings, she knew their names. The psychic tells the mom that a 16-year-old girl ghost had attached herself to Burger and sometimes to his dad.

“She asks my mom if I have a mean dad,” Burger said. “She goes ‘he can be mean sometimes yeah’…The psychic says that I have an attachment from when I lived on Robinwood…Also that we have a portal above our fireplace that is letting spirits like murderers and rapists and all-around nasty people enter our house.”

The psychic was allegedly told this personal information about Burger and his family by the spirit of the 16-year-old girl attached to him. She also continues to describe how other ghosts stopped by his house often to spy on his family, which is when they began to take action.

“Basically my mom was like ‘we need to get this remedied as fast as possible,’” Burger said.

The psychic agrees to help and returns two weeks later to ward off the evil spirits. She places quince seeds around the house.

“She has all these spices and herbs to burn,” Burger said. “She comes, cleanses the house.”

No new developments have happened as of recently. It has been around a year since the psychic woman cleansed their house, and she hasn’t been needed since, which could be the work of the quince seeds.

“[She] places these seeds called quince seeds which are supposed to ward off spirits over all the doors,” Burger said. “So that spirits can’t come back from the spirit world or come into the house period…she goes home and we don’t have any more weird occurrences.”

The Wolf Man

Although not superstitious, when senior Avery Irwin was younger, she said she had experienced something terrifying, a nightmare that proved to become something that even affected her waking life.

“When I was younger I had this recurring dream where this wolf man guy would sit in my basement and would attack me,” Irwin said.

Irwin describes how the only way to stop The Wolf Man from attacking her was for her to stop believing in him, which proved incredibly difficult and always failed.

“It would freak me out because it was a recurring nightmare of me being attacked by this big wolf guy,” Irwin said.

Irwin’s issues only worsened as she started getting visions of this creature during the daytime. She describes how these visions persisted between sunset and night, whether behind the slide with her friends, dashing across the street to take out her trash, or hiding in the trees on the walk home from her aunt’s.

“I was probably around 12 at the time,” Irwin said, “When I started seeing figures in the corner of my eye while I was walking around most of the time when it was late at night…It would freak me out because I’d see figures that I would assume are The Wolf Man.”

Irwin is now 18 years old and has mostly grown out of her visions. For a while, she believed The Wolf Man was simply a nightmare that seeped into her conscious brain during the day.

“[The visions] lasted for maybe two years? Until I was 15?” Irwin said. “And then I grew out of it.”

However, that doesn’t mean that The Wolf Man is gone. She describes that on rare occasions, she still experiences these visions and dreams of The Wolf Man, who has been haunting her since she was a child.

“Every now and then I’ll still have the dream.” Irwin said. “Last time it happened was last year, it was freaky.”

The backside of ‘Botox Ursula’ whose eyes and face shine through the paper.

About the Contributor

Olive Rodemann, Co-Director of Visuals

Olive Rodemann (she/her) is a Senior at Lakewood High School. This is her first year on staff. She is the president of the LHS Photography Club and part of the Lakewood Ranger Marching Band Flag Line. Outside of school, she’s the drummer in a death metal band. In her free time, she loves to hike and is always making time to create art, ranging from collages to photography.

The Lakewood Times

The Lakewood Times

The Lakewood Times

People Are Strange: A Collection of the Weird Stories of Lakewoodites

The Lakewood Times