GHOST 7: Odd Fellow's Lodge - Hauntings on the Hill
The Odd Fellow’s lodge is said to be haunted. The lodge towers ominously over the town’s elementary school and has loomed as Plymouth’s most haunted building for decades. Indeed, many a passerby has heard strange noises, seen lonely lights flicker from the vacant building’s windows, and heard moans of man who calls himself Kenneth – usually around Halloween, but still.
There are three marked graves on Odd Fellow’s hill and one unmarked - said to belong to Kenneth Smyth.
Kenneth was born in Petaluma, California in about 1857. His parent were born in New York. His second great grandfather Thomas Wheelen was also born in 1711 in New York. His great grand father fought in the Revolutionary War. They were East Coast elite.
Kenneth’s family came to California to represent the family’s dry goods business. Their plan was to make their fortune from those mining for gold and then scurry back to New York with their riches.
In about 1879, Kenneth was sent to Plymouth to buy a store currently owned by a Chinese family. The foreign miner’s tax excluded the family from mining. The Smyth’s were politically collected and saw the Exclusion Act of 1882 coming – so they approached Ming with a deal. (Insider information 1800s style.) Twenty-one-year-old Kenneth arrived here in July of 1879. He belonged to the Odd Fellows organization and met up with the local lodge upon his arrival - soon becoming a regular.
Kenneth was betrothed to a young women of “fine breeding” in New York. Someone he’d only corresponded with but had never seen. Only Kenneth fell in love with a farmer’s daughter from Shenandoah Valley – named Mary.
Kenneth wrote a letter to his family stating he was in love and was going to marry the farmer’s daughter. The letter was dated August 28, 1878. Records indicate Kenneth’s father – Rutter Van Doran Smyth – and Kenneth both attended a meeting at the lodge here in Plymouth in September 1878. Rutter was not too keen on Kenneth breaking off his engagement. The Smyth’s had “breeding,” but the money’d gone dry. The bet on Napa for their dry goods stores, rather than San Francisco, did not prove prudent. The marriage would get the Smyth’s back to the East Coast.
A newspaper article reports Kenneth and Ming got into a fight that same September. Kenneth was found dead in the lodge on September 21.
Whether it was his father or Ming – poor, lonely Kenneth roams the halls unhappily - forever alone in his unmarked grave.
Click on this link and follow Google Maps to Lodge Hill.
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