Queen Anne 1890 Victorian Village B&B whose owner openly describes a household of well-mannered spirits — including 'Cedric,' a smoker, and a boy named Moby.
313 W 5th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43201
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Standard B&B nightly rates; confirm current pricing with the innkeeper.
Access
Limited Access
Historic three-story Queen Anne residence with stairs to upper floors
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1890 · National Register of Historic Places · Victorian Village Historic District · Queen Anne Architecture · Late-20th-Century Preservation
Built around 1890 on the corner of West 5th Avenue and Harrison Avenue, the Harrison House is a representative Queen Anne residence from Columbus's late-19th-century Victorian Village expansion north of downtown. The neighborhood, originally platted as one of the city's first streetcar suburbs, fell into decline through the mid-20th century and recovered during the late-20th-century preservation movement.
The house stood vacant for substantial periods between the 1960s and 1980s. Lynn Varney acquired and restored the property and opened it as a bed and breakfast in 1990. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing structure of the Victorian Village Historic District.
Varney has operated the inn continuously since opening. The B&B is small — a handful of rooms — and reservation-only, with breakfast service in the main dining room. The property is included in the Columbus Makes Art directory and the Harrison West Society's neighborhood business profiles.
Sources
Per Columbus Monthly's 2015 'Meddling Residents of Harrison House' profile, ghost-research aggregator HauntedHouses.com, and the Harrison West Society's published Lynn Varney interview, the innkeeper has spoken openly about the building's resident presences for decades. She frames them as benign and well-mannered — drawn, she has said, to the warm character of the restored house.
The most-named figure is Cedric, who according to Varney was identified during a guest-led Ouija session. Cedric is associated with the smell of cigarette smoke that appears in the second-floor guest bedrooms when no one living has been smoking. A second named entity, Moby, is described as a boy of about 12 or 13. He is said to favor a third-floor attic room — reportedly his bedroom in life — and to occasionally jump out of a hallway closet at guests. Toys are kept in the room for him.
Other reported phenomena include footsteps on stairs and hallways when no one is on them, doors opening and closing on their own, and items disappearing for months at a time before reappearing in their original locations. Multiple regional paranormal groups have investigated the house with Varney's permission; the haunting has been written up in haunted-house compendia by Rich Newman and Nellie Kampmann.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Harrison House operates as a small reservation-only B&B in Victorian Village. Innkeeper Lynn Varney has publicly discussed the building's resident spirits with guests and journalists for many years; the haunting is part of the property's identity but is not staged as a paranormal attraction.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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