The Truth Behind "Tower Johnny"
Originally published 4-25-2018
It is a story recounted in breathless whispers around campfires, in line at Kings Island, or on online forums. A high schooler, "Tower Johnny," was killed in some sort of freak accident on Kings Island's Eiffel Tower in 1983 and his ghost remains. The exact details change depending on who is telling the story, but the bare bones remain the same.
The story is frequently brought up, but does this it have any actual truth to it?
John Wesley Harter was born May 27, 1965. He grew up in Delaware, Ohio, which is a town located 30 miles north of Columbus.
John Harter attended Delaware's Hayes High School, where he was captain of the track team. Sheila Sferrella Martin, who was a close friend of Harter's during high school, recalled that "he was always trying to improve his PRs at track meets and talked about being in the Olympics."
"[He was] such a lovely person...I don't know anybody that didn't like him," recalled Anna Huckabee Tull, a close friend of John Harter in middle and high school. Tull and Harter were on the school's pep club together. "The pep club that I was on with him was six individuals and we just...formed the club ourselves and made these giant signs and we would go to pep rallies and football games and things and hold up these giant signs to get a little spirit up. That was very much who he was and how he was. A very happy, upbeat guy that sort of invited a lot of people to come along and join in. Just a really positive energy kind of guy."
Sheila Sferrella Martin was also on the pep club with Harter. "He was just so full of enthusiasm [that] he was fun to be around," Martin said. "At one pep rally, he had the cheerleader’s outfit on...[he] would do anything just for school spirit, to be funny. He was just a great guy."
"He had the greatest smile; he was a really good looking guy," Martin said. "It wasn’t a pretentious kind of good-looking, he was approachable to everyone and always had a smile on his face."
Harter was set to graduate from high school June 5, 1983. For college, he would be attending Kent State University to study accounting.
In April 1983, Kings Island began selling tickets for "Grad Night" parties on three May Friday evenings: the 6th, the 13th, and the 20th. The park would be open to graduating high school seniors from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. with concerts in the Timberwolf amphitheater. Inspired by Disneyland's successful Grad Nights, Kings Island began hosting them in 1973. Tickets were sold at participating high schools. Among the participating high schools for 1983 was Hayes High School, which would be going on Friday, May 13. John Harter, who at this time was 17, along with about 20 other seniors, bought tickets for the event.
The seniors left Delaware at about 3:30 p.m. Friday, May 13. They would be driving down in their cars to the park. During the drive down, Harter drank about half a bottle of rum and three to six beers. The group arrived at their motel at about 6:15 p.m. and finally arrived at Kings Island between 7 and 8 p.m.
May 13 was a crowded night at the park. In addition to the Grad Night, Kings Island's public relations department was hosting a special event for all the Midwest editors, reporters and bureau chiefs for the Associated Press.
Tull said, "We weren’t all hanging out together at one time, but it was one of those evenings where everywhere we went around the theme park we would keep bumping into people from our class. So it was just a fun night of people roaming around and grouping together and coming apart and it was really fun...I saw John a couple of times roaming around."
Those in Harter's immediate group stated that he was getting into frequent arguments throughout the evening with his girlfriend Pam Donley. He complained that he wanted to go home. People in his immediate group described Harter as "drunk," "upset," and "emotional." At 8:30 or so, Harter and his group entered the queue for the Racer, where he "had words with [a] male subject." After the group rode the Racer at 9 p.m., they all lost track of John. Apparently, they all figured that Harter had run off somewhere to be alone. Nobody thought anything unusual of it at the time. The group ate, then four people in the group decided to head over to the Eiffel Tower. By the time the four arrived on the tower's 50 foot platform, it was some point between 9:30 and 9:50 p.m. (Contrary to what the newspapers reported at the time, Pam Donley was not one of the people at the tower.)
That evening, two of the tower's three platforms were opened: the 50 foot and 275 foot levels. Only the north elevator was running. Five employees were working the tower that night, but two were on break, leaving Jeanne Merritt to operate the north elevator, Steve Davis to be on ground level, and Ken Allen to be on the 275 foot platform.
The elevator was just gliding to a stop in the chute at ground level when Jeanne Merritt felt it do a "funny hop." She asked the guests in the elevator if they had been jumping up or down, but they all said no. The elevator emptied out and Merritt told ground man Steve Davis that she would take the elevator up empty to make sure that there was no mechanical issue with the elevator. At about this same time, top man Ken Allen heard a bang and a scream coming from the elevator shaft. He thought someone was slamming the access door to the emergency stairwell, but he found it locked.
Merritt's elevator was ascending when, as it got to about the 60 foot point, it began shaking. Suddenly, she heard a loud thud on the top of the elevator and the elevator instantly stopped. Merritt initially assumed that something mechanical was going on with the elevator and she called Steve Davis (who also heard the bang and assumed that something had fallen onto the 50 foot platform). Merritt turned around and was shocked and horrified to see, through the elevator windows, blood all on the structure of the tower surrounding the elevator. Furthermore, she could see a group of people on the 50 foot platform gathered around "something bloody" that was lying on the platform.
Among these people were the four friends of Harter's who had just seen a "big mass" fall about 10 feet onto the elevator roof before the elevator stopped. The instant the "mass" hit the elevator, the group saw "little chunks" fall and land onto the platform. Inspection revealed them to be small bits of flesh. Initially, they assumed that someone was throwing a prank by throwing animal meat off the side of the tower. Unnerved, the group left the tower.
Meanwhile, Merritt, still stuck in the stopped elevator, received a call from Ken Allen, who had been attempting to call Steve Davis. Allen had heard another scream in the elevator shaft from the same voice as earlier at the time the elevator was rising. He then felt the tower shake. Neither he nor Merritt knew what was going on. Allen hung up and then successfully called Davis, who also did not know what was going on. Allen hung up and turned to face the elevator shaft (the phone was located just inside the aforementioned access door). Allen was shocked to see the cables of the north elevator's counterweight covered in blood along with several of the structural beams. Allen called Merritt and Davis again and then told the guests on the platform that the elevator was having trouble and that it would just be "a few minutes." All three employees by this time were frightened and hysterical.
Davis did manage to call "maintenance men and managers" to come and see what was wrong. They found a dead body on the north elevator's roof.
Immediately, park security was summoned and deputies from the Warren County Sheriff's Office were dispatched to the scene, the time being 10:20 p.m. Among the deputies dispatched was William Dunn, a detective from the sheriff's office, who would be in charge of the investigation.
Word spread around the park quickly. Bill Mefford, Kings Island's manager of marketing communications, was about to ride the Beast with the Associated Press reporters. Mefford had one foot in the Beast's car and one foot on the loading platform when "I felt a tap on my shoulder and one of the Kings Island people from the marketing department whispered in my ear, 'Meff, you need to get over to the [Eiffel] Tower, there’s been an accident.' I excused myself from my AP ride partner and immediately took off for the Tower. At that point...I didn’t know exactly what the accident was or the extent of it. By the time I arrived at the tower, KI’s safety people were already there, cordoning off the area and doing all of the things they needed to do. Of course, there was a great deal of activity at the time because no one knew exactly what had happened."
Bruce Jacklin was chaperoning a group from Hamilton Township High School in Columbus. Jacklin was on the Eiffel Tower's upper platform and he knew something had gone wrong. "We went to go down and we were waiting and waiting and then there was no elevator coming up. And then a few squads and swirling lights surrounded it [the tower] and the next thing you now, they’re putting up these white tarps at the base, covering it."
Detective William Dunn arrived at the park shortly afterwards, where security chief Jerry Niederhelman informed him that the incident had happened on the Eiffel Tower and that the three employees working the tower at the time were in the Rides Department office to be interviewed.
Dunn arrived at the Eiffel Tower along with Sgt. Paul Bailey of the Warren County Sheriff's Office, Lt. Dale Koch from Kings Island security, R.C. Fussner who was director of park safety, and Dr. Ralph Young, the Warren County coroner. The group took the south elevator up to the location of the north elevator. Dr. Young officially pronounced the victim dead at the scene. Immediately, the case appeared to present a hitch: the body had no wallet or identification.
In the interior of the 275-foot platform, the group found a large amount of blood in the north elevator's counterweight cables, in the counterweight pulley, on the section of the emergency staircase in the area, and on some of the structural beams near the elevator and counterweight shafts. One of the brackets of the counterweight pulley was broken and bent and one of the six cables was disengaged from the pulley and was on the outside and wedged under the pulley. (The dislodged cable engaged the elevator's brakes, which is why the elevator stopped.)
Detective Dunn then walked down the emergency staircase to the 50 foot platform. On the walk down, he found a small school picture of a teenage boy with the name "John" written underneath it lying on the stairs.
Dunn found the gate in the fence on the 50 foot platform that surrounds the emergency stairwell and elevator shaft locked. The fence was at least six feet tall and marked with numerous warning signs prohibiting entry by unauthorized personnel. Dunn found the aforementioned small bits of flesh on the platform, which were human. The body was then removed from the elevator roof and transported to the morgue.
Elsewhere in the park, girlfriend Pam Donley knew something was wrong. It had been several hours since John was last seen at the Racer, and he had not been seen since.
Friend Anna Huckabee Tull said, "At a certain point she [Donley] was kind of distraught and she was saying, 'Have you seen John? I haven’t seen him,' and I was like, 'Oh yeah, John’s fine,' and then I bumped into her a couple more times and there were...more people saying, 'Nobody’s seen John' and they were kind of worried. It wasn’t all that alarming to me, I was just like, 'Well, it’s a big theme park, who cares. I'm sure he’ll turn up.'"
Employees Merritt, Davis and Allen gave statements to security chief Niederhelman and detective Dunn. In addition, they spoke with the two employees on break. While they had not seen anything, they did reiterate the fact that the elevator had not had any mechanical difficulties all evening.
The park closed for Grad Night early in the morning of May 14 on schedule. The guests trapped 275 feet in the air were finally rescued. "They [security] finally came up and they walked us down quite a few flights [of stairs] and then finally we got to use an elevator on a lower level to finish our trip down to descend," chaperone Bruce Jacklin said. "Nobody was told anything. They just kept it very close-lipped...we knew something had happened but we weren’t quite sure." Jacklin did not find out what had happened until the following morning, when he read a report in the Columbus Citizen-Journal. "I thought they should have at least tried to get a hold of the chaperones from the schools and made an announcement, but they kept everyone in the dark, I imagine because it was under investigation," said Jacklin.
John Harter was still missing. Anna Huckabee Tull remembered, "[W]e had all parked in roughly the same place in the parking lot, so the idea was [that] we were going to stay until it [the park] closes and then we’ll all meet at our cars and then we’ll all drive over to the hotel. However, the whole park closed and emptied out and we’re all sitting out there by our cars and Pam was, at that point, really upset, and one by one they’re shutting down the lights and there’s nobody else coming out. So we went over to the [security] guards and said, 'Hey, we’re waiting for somebody and he hasn’t come out and we’re getting kind-of confused because it looks like the park is all shut down,' and...they said, 'There’s been an accident, and there is a body and we need somebody to come identify the body.' We were all in denial, like it can’t possibly be, because that was just so crazy; we had just seen him bopping around an hour before."
The group of four that had been on the Eiffel Tower, along with a few other classmates of Harter's were interviewed by Niederhelman and Dunn about what they witnessed. In addition, they also gave a description of what John looked like: it matched the elevator victim to a T. One close friend, who worked at a hospital near Delaware, volunteered to be the one to identify the body.
He confirmed that the body was Harter's.
Tull said, "When he [the student] came back, I think everybody was in shock because...that’s not what you think is going to happen when you go on a little night with all your classmates. We were all just pretty overwhelmed and sad. Nobody wanted to drive all the way home and we had this hotel and we all just went back to our hotel and sat in a room and cried. And we tried to relive this event over and over and over, like, who saw him? When did they see him?"
Sheila Sferrella Martin remembers, "He was full of life. It was a tough pill to swallow for all of us."
The public relations department was busy with inquiries from the media. "I knew it was going to be a long night," recalled park spokesman Bill Mefford. "I would get facts as we knew them at the time and use them to prepare statements for the media. Initially, there were very few facts as our people were continuously trying to piece together what exactly had happened, which was not an easy task. I would get updates periodically from our staff then I would update our media statements."
The inquiries lasted all night and then some. "There was, of course, a lot of interest and my phone rang into the wee hours of the night/morning," Mefford remembered. "There was a couch in my office and I slept there from about 4 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., when it all started again throughout the next day and on into the evening." (An original press release from the park is viewable below.)
In talking about the media's reaction, Mefford told me that they "obviously wanted to know what had happened. But they were professionally fact finding and I thought they did their jobs well. There was not over-the-top accusatory articles that you might see today. I think the fact that the KI PR staff for years had built such a long and respectful relationship with the media and had a lot of credibility with them...that they treated us really professionally. "
After daylight on May 14, detective Dunn returned to Kings Island. Maintenance employees gave him John Harter's Social Security card, which they had found on the Eiffel Tower's emergency staircase. Dunn found Harter's wallet in Lost and Found. None of the employees there knew who turned it in or when. A family member traveled down to meet with Dunn and positively identified the body as Harter's.
John had been scheduled to compete in a track meet at Westerville North High School on Saturday. Several team members skipped the meet. A moment of silence was held in his memory.
Kings Island opened at its usual time May 14. The Eiffel Tower was closed."It [the accident] really didn’t seem to overtly affect people. The park was full the next day and all of the following days and life went on," said Bill Mefford.
Harter's autopsy confirmed he died from "crushing injury of [the] head with fractures of skull and lacerations of brain." Warren County coroner Ralph Young told the press that Saturday that he believed Harter fell from one of the structural beams near the top after being struck by the counterweight. He fell down the elevator shaft and was killed instantly upon impact with the elevator, which was what caused his head injuries. A blood sample was saved for chemical analysis to see if drugs and/or alcohol was in his system at the time of death.
Dr. Young's early hypothesis immediately presented two questions: how did John Harter end up on the beam and why did he decide to climb onto it? Both police and park officials stated that they didn't know. One quote that was variously attributed to unspecified "police reports," unnamed "park officials," and Dr. Young claimed that Harter would have had to either climb the outside of the tower or climb over the 10-foot safety rail on the 275 foot platform and climb beneath the deck to reach the area from which he fell. (Apparently, whoever made that statement was unaware that that area could be accessed via the emergency stairs.)
Alice Baker of Delaware, with whose family Harter was living at at the time of his death, told the Columbus Dispatch, “I don’t feel it was any fault of Kings Island...We are trying to figure out what he was doing up there. John was not somebody that would just go climbing things. He would have had an audience. He loved attention...He wouldn’t have gone up there on his own without something having provoked it.” Baker conceded that they would probably never know why.
Sunday, the tower remained closed. Also, one of Harter's brothers proposed a theory that John had climbed up there in an attempt to jump onto the rising elevator. "It's illegal, but people do it," he said. Kings Island spokesman Bill Mefford told the press that the park had never had any reports of people doing that or attempting to ride the elevator. Something didn't sit right with the brother either. "He liked attention, but he usually wouldn't do something like that by himself," Tony Harter said.
The park would not begin daily operation for the 1983 season until May 22, so the park was closed Monday the 16th through the 20th.
Soon, people began wondering if Kings Island was going to implement any new safety features on the tower. Park spokeswoman Ruth Voss made no comment when asked the question that Monday, but Mefford, when asked by a reporter for the Lebanon, Ohio, Western Star that same Monday, responded, “We’ve discussed it [the accident]; we’ll probably beef up security a little bit." Mefford stressed that Harter had fallen from a clearly marked restricted area and said that, "A person's gotta want to do what he was doing" to get in that position. Still, "We will be looking at what else we can do" to increase safety measures.
Students at Hayes High School returned to class Monday. “I feel shocked and set back by the whole thing," principal Vincent Barra told the Delaware (Ohio) Gazette. "It seemed like he was everybody’s friend, a fine student and an outstanding athlete.” The school observed a moment of silence for Harter that morning.
Wednesday afternoon, Harter's funeral was held in Delaware. More than 350 people packed Asbury United Methodist Church for it. John Harter is buried in Delaware's Oak Grove Cemetery in the Garden of Peace section.
Also on Wednesday, May 18, William Dunn, the investigator from the Warren County Sheriff's Office received the autopsy and lab results. While no drugs were in John's system at the time of his death, he did have a blood-alcohol level of 0.21%, which is over twice the then-legal drunk driving limit. At the time, Dunn refused to release the autopsy report to the press.
After going over the physical evidence and witness statements, Dunn believes the following is what happened to Harter:
After walking away from his group at the Racer, Harter, who was extremely intoxicated, headed over to the Eiffel Tower. He walked up to the 50-foot platform and then ignored the numerous posted warning signs and proceeded to climb over the large fence separating the shaft and emergency stairs and climbed onto the stairs. Near the top, Harter clambered over the stair railing and went out onto one of the structural beams. He was standing in such a way that he was struck by the ascending counterweight and became tangled in the counterweight's cables (explaining the elevator's "funny hop"). When the elevator operator decided to take the elevator back up, that caused the counterweight to begin to descend. That, in turn, caused Harter to fall out of the cables and fall about 200 feet down the elevator shaft onto the elevator roof. He died instantly from the impact.
Dunn believed that the death was accidental. "There's nothing to point to anything else but an accident," he said.
While Dunn figured out how Harter fell, no one was ever able to determine why. His friends are still puzzled. Said Anna Huckabee Tull, "There was just no way that I can imagine that that would have been a suicide. I think it was just pretty much 100% agreed that it was just some kind of teenage shenanigans of some sort...I think he just must have climbed up there to get a view or...I don’t know! Nobody that I talked to ever really knew anything about that."
"He was outgoing, but I don’t know that he was crazy, that he would do something that was so risky that he put himself in a situation that was so dangerous," said Sheila Martin. "That was what was so hard to understand, how it happened."
In all my time researching this particular case, I've been unable to put a definitive date on when the Eiffel Tower reopened. Spokeswoman Ruth Voss claimed on May 16 that the tower would be closed "for a week or two" while another spokesman, Bill Mefford, claimed on May 18 that the tower would be closed "at least through the weekend." No announcement or article ever ran in any of the newspapers I checked giving a date of the reopening. The employees working on the tower at the time have not returned requests for interviews.
In any case, the Eiffel Tower did eventually reopen. Frequent guests with a keen eye might have noticed that the fence around the stairs on the 50-foot platform had been heightened several feet via the addition of steel mesh and extra signs had been posted on the fence as well. Spokesman Mefford also told the Cincinnati Post that the elevator cables were also replaced, due to the fact that Harter's fall had frayed one of the cables. Contrary to popular belief, the 50-foot platform did reopen after the accident. (In fact, this video shows that the platform was open as late as 1990.)
The elevators were replaced in the early 2000's for more modern, updated ones.
Nowadays, employees pass around supposed encounters with Harter's ghost. "There [are] guests, almost daily, at nighttime who say that there is a guy standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower as they’re leaving the park, which isn’t possible because we don’t have anybody up there when the park is closing,” one former employee told me. Lee Allen, a paranormal investigator who has done several investigations of Kings Island told me that he and his crew never picked anything up relating to the Harter accident.
There is no memorial at Kings Island or at Hayes High School for Harter, though a memorial page was put in the 1983 Hayes yearbook.
I think that what's so often forgotten in this story is that John Harter was a real person who had friends and family, a person who, said Anna Huckabee Tull, "was just sweet and full of vibrant energy and loving and inclusive and just a really great guy."
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