Serpent Mound in Adams County is one of the spookiest places in the state.
A giant snake slithering over the hills of southeastern Ohio with its mouth wide open, seemingly swallowing an oval-shaped earthen structure, is a creature worthy of anything that would haunt us at Halloween.
What must have been in the minds of the Fort Ancient people who are believed to have constructed the monster centuries ago, around A.D. 1000?
Edrick Thay wrote in his book Ghost Stories of Ohio that some archaeologists think it might illustrate what some American Indian cultures believed about the cause of eclipses.
"Many varied legends explain an eclipse as a result of a serpent attacking the sun and swallowing it," Thay wrote. "The serpent is a malevolent creature that rises from the depths of hell to challenge the light above.
"Seen in this light, the Serpent Mound is an expression of the duality of life, of a world where human beings inhabit a realm neither good nor evil, but one pitched between heaven and hell."
In Serpent Mound, although not haunted in the conventional sense, "one finds not only a connection to the past, but also a kinship with the anxieties and concerns that encompass all cultures," he wrote.
Brad Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society, has investigated Serpent Mound extensively. Equating the Native-American underworld with hell is wrong, he said. "I think this misunderstanding comes from Christian missionaries. ...
"The underworld in the Indian interpretation was a source of great power, and power is always dangerous but not necessarily evil," he said.
What does Lepper think Serpent Mound represents?
"The Great Serpent - or Mishebeshu, to use the Ojibwa name - was a fearsome creature that could rise from the depths of lakes and rivers to overturn canoes and eat people," he said. "Seeing the earthen incarnation of this force of nature must have been awe-inspiring for American Indians. And knowing what it represents, it can be a little scary to modern visitors to the site."
Lepper thinks the earthen snake represents Mishebeshu and that the oval, instead of being an egg or the sun or the moon, is the eye of the serpent.
So you see that monsters have been with us all through time, and regardless of which story resonates with you, they indeed were both monsters.
Retired weather columnist John Switzer writes a Sunday Metro column.