Submitted photo
Stephanie Young portrays suffragette Harriet Taylor Upton on the second weekend of this year’s Ghost Walk and is co-writer and co-director of this year’s event.

The annual historical tour through some of the strange, tragic and eerie stories in Trumbull County’s history starts Friday for the first of four nights. Zell Hart Deming, who owned the Warren Tribune and Warren Tribune Chronicle in the first decades of the 20th century and was the first female member of the Associated Press, helps connect this year’s stories together.

CJ Adkins, who co-wrote and co-directed this year’s Ghost Walk with Stephanie Young, said the idea started with a story given to her by Don Novorsky, who has been involved with Ghost Walk for 30 of its 37 years.

“Last year he handed me an envelope with an interesting story he came across while volunteering for the historical society, but he made me promise not to look in the envelope until this year,” Adkins said. “So when the committee got together in March, I peeked in the envelope about a week before the meeting, and I was intrigued. It was a story about a gentleman named Charles Freas. He was a Civil War soldier, and he turned to drinking and gambling after the war.

“While I was at the library doing research on this particular fellow, Stephanie sent me another story that she had come across about a gentleman named Albert Kennedy. And between researching those two guys, we came across several other stories that we just found very interesting. I don’t remember how I learned about Zell Hart Deming, but we just put all the stories together and came up with this idea that it should be Zell as the host, presenting these stories as a special editorial edition of the newspaper.”

Tour participants start from First Presbyterian Church in downtown Warren and are led by lantern-carrying guides to some of the historic sites along Mahoning Avenue NW — once known as Millionaires’ Row — while costumed performers portray some of the Mahoning Valley’s most famous residents, such as women’s suffrage leader Harriet Taylor Upton, and others whose tales may be more infamous.

This is Adkins second year as a Ghost Walk writer and director, but she’s been a performer several times.

“For me, I like it because I feel like I really get to know the character,” she said. “This year, I will be playing Harriet Taylor Upton. I will be placed at the Upton House. That means that I just get to dive that much more into not just her history, but the history of the house. I do acting in other places too, but history is my passion, so that’s the intrigue of it for me.”

This year’s cast — Carol Stowe, Ron Schoch, Jackie Shannon, Marty Whitmore, Toni Hackensen, Anna Kelly, Meg Lawrence, Patricia Dunbar, Young and Adkins — includes several newcomers. It also includes the final appearance by Novorsky. He’s played many historical figures in the past. This time he’ll be playing a version of himself or at least one who might have existed a century ago.

“We really want to keep true to all of our characters and their stories, but we wanted to include Don as himself and not a character,” Adkins said.

“Zell will introduce him as if he were one of her editors. It’s very clever the way we set that up. Don has played so many different characters for us over the years, and he does the readers theater over at the library too.

“For him to be presented as an editor for Zell, he’s able to be tied into the other stories, and still able to be himself. It’s going to be very special. I have yet to make it through his performance without crying.”

If you go …

WHAT: Ghost Walk

WHEN: 6:30 to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday through Oct. 25

WHERE: First Presbyterian Church, 256 Mahoning Ave. NW, Warren

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children ages 6 to 12 and are available online at trumbull countyhistory.org.