As so often happens with urban legends, Holcomb Woods is located out in what seems to be the middle of nowhere. It takes its name from the road on which it resides, Holcomb Road, which is also known as Old St. Rt. 162 in Wayne, Ohio. Legend has it that a school bus crashed in Holcomb Woods, and the cries and screams of the children that perished can still be heard when walking or driving past the wooded patch of road.
According to the website http://www.ohioexploration.com: “…legend says that a bus full of children was traveling down Holcomb Road when the driver grew incredibly angry, steering the bus into the woods. The bus crashed into many small trees until it came to rest on a larger one. The driver was killed on impact. It is on this tree that the driver’s face can be seen. The bus burst into flames, killing some of the children on board. If you take Holcomb Road from 199 just past the edge of the woods, you’ll need to turn your vehicle to face 199. Shortly after you turn off your headlights, radio stations will scramble and cell phones will lose signals. A headlight will come straight toward you and suddenly disappear when it reaches the tree.” (http://www.ohioexploration.com/paranormal/hauntings/woodcounty/)
Don and Kelly from Fringe Paranormal have attempted to explore this urban legend twice. The first time was in 2016 with Chad D. and Andrew S. from Weston Paranormal. It was dusk on a Saturday night when we came upon the woods on that trip. Unfortunately for us serious, seasoned paranormal investigators, there were two carloads of teens who apparently had the same idea and were already wandering the site. At first, we decided to just drive around for a little bit to see if maybe they’d abandon the area, but they proved to be tenacious. After about the third or fourth time driving past them, we decided to strike up a conversation, hoping perhaps they might have more insight into the legend itself (and also hoping maybe we’d find out they were growing tired of the area). No such luck on either score. They actually acted sort of frantic, saying a couple of their friends had gone into the woods and now they couldn’t find them; could we could help them look? Not to sound cold-hearted, but the Fringe and Weston crew felt that we had all seen that movie before and declined; wishing them luck as we decided to ditch the idea of investigating Holcomb Woods that night.
The second time, it was just Don and Kelly that went out to Holcomb Woods on a Sunday afternoon in June 2018. Our initial thought during these daylight hours was how the woods surrounding the road looked like a portal into another dimension. No wonder so many people think these woods would be the perfect home for an urban legend.
We parked the car by the side of the road to wander through the canopy of trees. We did not hear any children crying, but we did hear the buzz of mosquitoes and the snapping of twigs from the wildlife that most certainly reside in the area. The stretch of woods is not very long, maybe ¼ mile, so one wonders how a bus would veer off the road in this very area. And while we did see several unique looking trees, many of which had “no trespassing” signs on them, we did not see one with a face.
At one end of the woods, we came upon this short concrete pillar, possibly used to anchor one end of a gate in the past. While not part of the legend, this pillar does add to the creep factor of this remote location.
As a final note, we never heard anything back in 2016 about any missing teenagers as a result of a late night paranormal investigation. We did see this note in 2018, though, written on Holcomb Road in the middle of the woods (probably by teens) that sums up what most ghost hunters seem to feel about outdoors urban legends:
Written by Director Kelly
Fringe Paranormal 