Est. 1840 · Martha Wise Murder Case · Medina County History · Local Folklore
Myrtle Hill Cemetery occupies 14.45 acres off Myrtle Hill Road in Liverpool Township, Medina County, Ohio. The cemetery is active and maintained, with burials spanning multiple generations of the Valley City area.
The most discussed feature is a large granite sphere serving as a grave marker — referred to regionally as the Witch's Ball. The ball's actual provenance is not detailed in publicly available sources, and the identity of who is buried beneath it varies depending on the version of the legend consulted. Some accounts name a local woman described as a witch; others attribute the marker to a family without paranormal significance.
The legend has gravitational pull because of a real historical event in the area: Martha Wise, a Medina County woman, poisoned the water supply used by family members in the 1920s, killing three people — her husband and two relatives. The murders occurred approximately one mile from Myrtle Hill Cemetery. Wise was convicted, sentenced, and died in 1971 at the Marysville Reformatory for Women. Whether Wise is buried at Myrtle Hill has not been confirmed in available sources, but the proximity of her crimes to the cemetery's location has blended the two stories in regional folklore.
A rational explanation for the warm ball phenomenon has been offered by local researchers: granite's thermal mass absorbs solar heat during the day and releases it slowly after dark, making the stone perceptibly warm to the touch for hours after sunset.
Sources
- https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/experiences/ohio/witchs-ball-cemetery-cle
- https://medinacountygraves.com/myrtle-hill-cemetery/
- https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/42351/myrtle-hill-cemetery
Residual haunting
The Witch's Ball at Myrtle Hill Cemetery operates on a simple elegance of folklore logic: touch the granite sphere at night. If it is warm, the witch is in her grave. If it is cold, she is abroad.
The thermodynamics, in this case, do favor the witch. Granite is an excellent thermal reservoir. A sphere that sits in sunlight all day — positioned openly in a cemetery, no shade — will retain that heat well into the evening hours. On most Ohio summer nights, the ball will feel warm. On winter nights, it will feel cold. The legend is self-confirming with the natural properties of stone.
The wider legend expands the scale: five similar granite balls exist across Ohio, and when connected on a map, they form a pentagram. This detail — specific, measurable, geographic — is the kind of claim that persists in regional folklore because it demands verification.
Martha Wise, the 'Borgia of America,' poisoned multiple family members approximately a mile from this cemetery in the 1920s. Whether she is buried here, or whether the witch's grave marker refers to someone else entirely, is not established in the sources surveyed. The proximity of her crimes to this location has, over decades, merged the documented and the legendary.
Notable Entities
The Witch of the Ball
