Jeff Double, owner of All About Reclaimed florist and prop rental business, decorates the front porch of the Butler County Historical Society's Lowrie House in anticipation of the society's “Hair-Raising History” event Oct. 15. Submitted Photo

They may not be ghostly, but they’re certainly ghastly. The stories in the latest collection taken from Butler County's past for the upcoming “Hair-Raising History” event presented by the Butler County Historical Society are filled with murder and mayhem.

“Hair-Raising History” will have three tours at the society’s headquarters at the Sen. Walter Lowrie House, 123 W. Diamond St., at 7, 8:15 and 9:30 p.m. Oct. 15.

Jennifer Ford, executive director of the historical society, said tickets for the 7 p.m. tour are nearly sold out, but spaces remain for the later tours.

“Jeff Double of All About Reclaimed will have the first floor tricked out for fall,” said Ford. “He will spooky the place up.”

Double, the owner of the florist and prop rental business at 331 S. Washington St., and a recent member of the society’s board of directors, said of his decorating job: “It’s going to be a little macabre feeling. It’s not going to be cute trick-or-treaters.

“There will be nothing gross or gory,” Double said. “It’s going to be dark and interesting.”

Ford said she will decorate the upstairs, going heavy on the cobwebs and dark lighting to create a mood for the stories to be told.

People will arrive for cider and doughnuts on the first floor and then be ushered upstairs to one of three bedrooms, each containing an actor telling a hair-raising story.

“What’s interesting is that all of the action takes place with a block of this building,” said Ford. “Well, one murder took place in Prospect, but the trial and execution were right here.”

The actors will narrate three grim stories taken from old newspapers and archives.

“All three stories are from Butler history. I may have taken a bit of artistic license when I wrote the scripts, but these aren’t necessarily ghost stories,” Ford said.

She said that in 1868, Mary Ann McCandless of Prospect “was shot dead through the window while sitting at her own dining room table.”

Also in 1868, Jacob Shubert of Butler was fatally poisoned right behind Lowrie House.

And in 1898, the body of Adam Kamerer, a janitor at the courthouse, was found a few blocks away in an alley off Cunningham Street.

“He had been viciously murdered, killed three times over ...” said Ford.

Sharon Chernick of the Butler Little Theatre and Rachel Rauschenberger, the daughter of society board president Joyce Rauschenberger, will each portray one of the witnesses or bystanders (or perhaps murderer) for each of the three deaths.

Ford credited researcher Carol Holochuk with compiling massive amounts of research on each of the cases that allowed Ford to create a script for each of her actors.

“One of the interesting things, in those days in the 1800s, every word spoken in a trial was put in the newspaper,” she said. “And these things went on for weeks, the details available.”

Tickets for “Hair-Raising History” can be purchased at 724-283-8116 or at butlerhistory.com.

Mackenzie Herold, the historical society's new outreach coordinator, shows off some of the decorations inside Lowrie House. Submitted Photo