BY LOREN GENSON • Gazette Staff Writert

Willie Martin, shares his story as people taking the Ghost Walk pass by Sunday afternoon at Cross Keys. The walk, conducted the Ross County Leage of Women Voters, is intended to share some of the area's history and also serves as a fundraiser for the organization. Purchase this Photo Willie Martin, shares his story as people taking the Ghost Walk pass by Sunday afternoon at Cross Keys. The walk, conducted the Ross County Leage of Women Voters, is intended to share some of the area's history and also serves as a fundraiser for the organization. (Heather Cory, Gazette)

CHILLICOTHE -- New histories and mysteries were unveiled Sunday during the Ross County League of Women Voters' annual Ghost Walk. Among the new attractions on Main Street was the tour of the Masonic Lodge.

The lodge was built between 1903 and 1905 for use by the Chillicothe Freemasons. Building manager and Mason Steve Steele said the first floor of the building is for retail purposes, the second floor is residential and the third and fourth floors are the private lodge areas.

The building itself is a distinctive historical building. It's still heated by steam through a boiler, similar to the process used in the historic Foulke Block building on Paint Street. Steele said the Masons have a "blowout building" behind the lodge where the boiler is stored inside. At the time the building was constructed, boiler accidents had killed people in apartment buildings where boilers beneath the building would explode up through the structure.

"The blowout building is kind of a unique feature," Steele said. "Our building and the Foulke Block are the only ones who have them."

The building is also notable for its courtyard and fire escape, which give it an urban feel.

"We have the courtyard, so that even interior rooms have light," Steele said. At one time, members often would spend their lunch breaks at the lodge and there was usually a flurry of activity.

"It was truly a lodge; you would come here to take a break from your workday," Steele said.

Much of the furniture is original to the building from when it was constructed. Many of the original flooring, walls and ceilings also have been preserved.

"It's expensive to maintain it, but it's important to our members," Steele said.

Only men can become members, and they must believe in a God, Steele said. Masons do not recruit. Men can be admitted only after inquiring about the organization and after it is found they are of good moral character.

"We take good men and make them better," Steele said.

Also along the tour this year for the first time was the historic canal warehouse on the corner of Main and Mulberry streets. The warehouse is a classic example of an early 1900s-era canal house because of its many door openings on the outside of the building on each floor.

"They could send pullies out and lift up cargo from the canal to any floor," local historian Kevin Coleman said.

Coleman said the building was built by James Emmitt, who also constructed the Emmitt house in Waverly and the building across the street from it. Emmitt also owned the only road between Chillicothe and Waverly and charged users a fee.

Those on the ghost walk also got the chance to tour the Chillicothe Gazette building, which was built in 1940 as a replica of Ohio's first statehouse built in 1801 here in Ross County.

Tour attendees were given a tour of the paper archives, basement and newsroom.

Each year, the walk, hosted by the Chillicothe Ross League of Women Voters, serves as a fundraiser for the nonprofit organization.

Whoever wrote this must have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a "T." I hope you enjoy it. If you are under age 40 you won't understand.

You could hardly see the picture on our first TV for all the snow; Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, 

  My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e-coli. 

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. 

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. 

We all took gym, not PE...and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. 

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. 

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. 

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed! 

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the  48-cent bottle of mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up in church or at the neighbor's house either, because if we did we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home. 

  I recall the kid who lived next door coming over and doing his hand balancing tricks on our front stoop railing, just before he fell off. Little did his mom know that she could have owned our house.  Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck. 

Not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes. 

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive? 

Luck to all of us who shared this era; and to those who didn't, sorry for what you missed. I wouldn't trade it for anything. 

Newton Masonic Hall

Popular culture in recent years has taken Freemasonry from inside the walls of obscure stone buildings into the limelight of the big screen and bestsellers lists. Whether in books like Dan Brown's “The Last Symbol,” movies like “National Treasure,” or even the humorous “Stonecutters” episode of “The Simpsons,” there has been a growing fascination with Masonry – and more specifically, its msyteries.

Brown's book places Masonry within the walls of every important American institution – including, in a very literal sense, the U.S. Capitol. “National Treasure” has the Freemasons hiding a great treasure during the early days of the nation's birth. And few TV watchers of a certain age would have trouble remembering at least part of the “Stonecutters” theme – a clear and winking nod to the many theories about Masonic history.

As with most mysteries, the rumors about Masonry are likely a far sight more fantastic and dramatic than the real truths about the organization. And Bill Asadoorian, a past master of the Waltham Triad Masonic Lodge, is here to tell you that a lot of what you've seen about the Masons on the TV and movie screen and within the pages of your favorite beach read is just not true.

Then again, he says, some of it most certainly is.

“We're the world's oldest and largest fraternity,” he says while standing in the middle of the cavernous great room at the Newton Masonic Hall on Newtonville Road.

“We're philanthropists.”

Still, there's a reason authors and filmmakers have mined Masonry's mystery for plot points. There are certain parts of being a Mason that are secret, and many of them have to do with the rituals that take place inside rooms like the Newton lodge's, all across the world.

“The only big secret we have is our actual ritual,” Asadoorian says. “It's a traditional thing, you have to join to find out. We take good men and make them better. The ritual is a way for us to get across our different teaching points.”

While the Masons may not have alternate copies of the Declaration of Independence stashed away in their temples or secretly pass down the answers to the great unanswered questions of the world, pop culture's interest in their mystery has had some upside.

“The movie 'National Treasure' increased our membership more than any other event,” Asadoorian said. “It's done us a lot of good, it's one of the few things about us that didn't put us in a bad light. A lot of things about that movie, the symbols? True. A lot of it: pure fiction.

“We don't have the national treasure - not that I know of. Some of the clues that involve the masons were just put there to fit the movie.”

Saturday, Masonic lodges across Massachusetts are throwing open their doors to invite the curious, the skeptical, and most importantly the willing future Masons to come and see what the organization is all about. That includes the Newton lodges, which will hold their open house from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Masonic Hall. It's a chance to get a real, live Mason, instead of the disembodied voice of Ben Franklin on the “Ask a Freemason” ads that are in heavy rotation on your radio and TV.

“(Visitors will) get a tour of the building, and any questions they have we'll talk to them,” said Asadoorian, who is the Triad Lodge's open house chairman.

What you'll learn if you visit the lodge on Saturday is that Masonry isn't, despite Dan Brown and Matt Groening's artistic meanderings, a group of stern-faced men performing weird rituals and secretly running the Universe from a dark dungeon. It's a philanthropic organization that focuses on brotherhood, charity and, as Asadoorian and the radio ads say, making good men great.

There are some rules, one of which is that all Masons believe in a higher power – though there isn't any specificity about which deity a Mason prays to, only that he believes in a power greater than him.

It's an organization that has a long reach, but a quiet voice. While it's not the kind of thing that might appear in the pages of a paperback, Asadoorian said one of Freemasonry's better-kept secrets of Masonry is that all Shriners are Masons.

“Shriners hospitals,” Asadoorian reminds his visitor, “don't even have billing departments.”

The Waltham Lodge also hosts blood drives, which also falls under the charge of Asadoorian, as well as a learning center for children with dyslexia.

“Here at Waltham Triad, we give two scholarships every year to the high school for $2,000 each,” he says. “We help the Waltham Boys and Girls Club, the Salvation Army we help every year. We do three or four MYChip (Masonic Youth Child Identification Programs), where we go in, fingerprint, take a dental impression, DNA swab, and a one-minute video.”

The Triad Lodge started meeting at the Newton Masonic Hall after its Waltham building was destroyed in a 1988 fire. Three other lodges – Dalhousie Lodge, which built the hall and has been around since 1860, as well as Norumbega Fraternity Lodge and the predominately Jewish Garden City Lodge – also meet at the Newton building at 460 Newtonville Avenue, all on different nights of the week.

That means that while the Waltham Triad Lodge might be the best fit for a local man interested in Freemasonry, if he can't make the meetings on the first Monday night of every month in the fall, winter and spring, there are other options. If you do decide to join, you'll be surrounded by men from many walks of life, which is one of the things Asadoorian and his fellow Masons will tell visitors on Saturday.

“Everyone's equal, we're all masons, we're all brothers, it doesn't matter what your annual income is,” he says. “You do it quietly, you're not out there saying, 'Well, I gave this much this year, I gave this much last year.' We just do it. Most people, if they believe in God, they'll find Masonry is going to be something they enjoy. “And to my knowledge, it's the only organization that I know of where you can sit down to dinner – and this has happened to me – the president of New England Tea and Coffee, who's a member here, sits over there,” he says with a gesture across the large table in what's known as the Ladies Parlor, “and the guy sitting next to me was a tattoo artist. You would never know there was any difference in our economic statuses – at that table, all we are is brothers.”

They'll also tell anyone who wants to hear about Masonry's dedication to charity, about the sense of brotherhood it instills, and about the various programs connected to Masonry that make it more than just a men's club – for instance, the Eastern Star women's organization, the Rainbow Girls for young women, and DeMolay, which is geared toward young men.

What he won't tell you is how to perform the secret handshakes and signals – yes, those do exist – or what goes behind closed doors during the rituals the Masons perform. To find those things out, well, you'll just have to join.

There is one secret, from “The Last Symbol,” that Asadoorian is willing to address.

“He talks about in his book, drinking blood from a skull,” Asadoorian says, pauses, and shakes his head. “No. I'll open any door in this place, see if you can find a skull.”

Lodge Dues in America run small, usually $30 to $50 or $60 per year, while European Lodges run in the $100 to $500 range, with some as high as $2,000

In Europe, meetings may be held quarterly, monthly, or weekly depending on the Lodge and jurisdiction. European meetings are summoned; frequently a formal, engraved summons is issued. Members either attend the communication, or respond to the Master and/or Secretary. Meetings in the U.S. are usually held once or twice a month, with extras often called for degree work is done, but Americans hardly ever make use of the summons for Lodge meetings

In America, all business is done in the Master Mason Lodge. Lodge ceremonies and degree work are delivered from memory, often receiving instant correction on missed words or lines from the sidelines. All business in European Lodges is done in the Entered Apprentice Lodge, but only Master Masons are allowed to vote. Lodge ritual and degrees are frequently read from printed sheets at each station.

In the U.S., candidates are not considered to be Masons until after having received the Master Mason Degree while in Europe, Candidates are considered to be Masons after receiving the Entered Apprentice Degree.

In the U. S. Masters of Lodges are usually elected to a one year term of office and usually not re-elected. In Europe the Master is elected for two year terms and often re-elected to serve for more terms