Cleveland's Franklin Castle has the distinction of being known as Ohio's most haunted house. It is a big, dark building with stone walls, a turret, and a six-foot wrought iron fence. Hans Tiedemann, a german immigrant who got rich from his barrel-making business and later the banking industry, built the house in the mid-1800's. The count varies, but it was supposed to have 21 rooms. It also featured a fourth floor ballroom accessible by its own staircase, marble fireplaces, dumbwaiters, wine cellars, and numerous hidden passageways.
The house has been a clubhouse for a German Singing Society, home to a German Socialist organization, a doctor's office, apartments, a party house, and even a home to bootleggers.
The ghosts here are numerous. In a small room at the rear of the house a pile of baby skeletons was found, supposedly the victims of some inept doctor; today, babies can be heard crying the walls. There was a mass murder when some of the Nazis were machine gunned to death in a political dispute; their discussions can be heard throughout the house. There are rumors of an ax murder in the front tower room, the victim of which is occasionally seen as a black female figure standing in the window. The secret passageways around the ballroom are said to be where Tiedemann hung his illegitimate daughter Karen. His three babies died mysteriously in the house, as did his fifteen-year-old daughter Emma, of diabetes. His wife died from liver trouble here. A servant girl was supposedly killed in the servants' quarters on her wedding day for refusing Tiedemann's advances. He is said to have shot his mistress Rachel for wanting to marry another man; the choking sounds of her death can be heard in one of the rooms.
The owners of Franklin Castle have been subject to its many hauntings. The children of a couple who lived in the house for a while asked for a cookie to give to their friend, a little girl who wouldn't stop crying. Mrs. Tiedemann is said to have possessed the wife of one of the owners for a period. No one stays long.
The current state of Franklin Castle is a sad one. Last year a vagrant broke in and somehow set the place on fire. The fire was put out before it destroyed the house, and the arsonist is currently serving a five year jail term. I received an e-mail not long ago from a girl who told me of visiting the castle. She described finding a dollhouse which was burned in exactly the same way the house was.
Then, just recently, a very nice guy named Matt who works near the castle sent me some great pictures of the place. I was too excited to pass it up, so one night in late July I travelled with my friend Hoss from his place in Toledo, along the lake shore, into the city of Cleveland. We found the Franklin Castle without too much difficulty, surprisingly, and parked on the street across from it. It stands facing a T-intersection in what isn't exactly a slum, but certainly isn't the nice neighborhood this house probably stood in when it was built. It's kind of amazing to think that Abraham Lincoln was president when the house was first inhabited.
At first we crept along the left side of the house, in the little garden which belongs to the grounds. The windows on this side were all boarded up, and the pointy gate separated us from the house. The garden had been overgrown with weeds and vegetation. We had to hide in the shadows for a while because of a party or something going on in the house next door; the last thing we wanted to do was get the police called on us. Below is one of the daytime shots sent to me, of the left side of the house.
Next we took a walk around the block. The old stable building out back seemed to have a light on inside; this was the first sign that someone might be inside the building, which we had assumed would be uninhabited. We didn't want to run across a rent-a-cop or security guard of some kind.
We came back around and looked at the house from the front. A side door was open, with light pouring out of it. The fence had a gate which opened for the driveway, which was currently occupied by a long construction-type dumpster. At the place where the dual gates met the bars were particularly far apart, and they had blocked it by threading a rope back and forth across the gap. After untying the rope we slipped inside and approached the open door as quietly as we could. A newer house was located very close to this side of the castle, and at one point we heard somebody using the bathroom through one of the windows.
For a long time we thought there was someone inside the castle because we kept hearing noises coming from inside. We peeked through cracks in the boards over the windows and saw nothing but a well-lit, junk-strewn room, but each time we got close a noise came from inside, and we could just imagine the rent-a-cop reading his newspaper in there. We were so sure, in fact, that we went back out onto the sidewalk, re-tied the rope barrier, and threw rocks at the doorway to try to get whoever was guarding the place to come outside, in the hopes that the guy might at least give us a tour. When no one came out Hoss crept up and looked inside. No one was there.
Finally we entered the building. The light inside was coming from construction lights, the kind attached to an orange cord with metal housings around the bulbs, strung throughout the house. They were obviously working on it. Details on the remodeling project are available at the official website of Franklin Castle, put up by the current owner.
The rooms on the first floor were strewn with construction trash: pieces of drywall, strips of paneling, dust, garbage. One corner room was papered with what looked like old newspaper clippings but turned out to be the pattern on the wallpaper, like the tables at a Wendy's.
A back room contained the heating system and massive pipes. Off of this was a basement door with a note on it. The note was old-looking, and it said that there were dogs down there. We knocked and called to the dogs, and even though we didn't hear anything, we didn't want to take the chance. Dogs are one of my big phobias when in an abandoned building.
Up the main stairs we passed the front door and then came out in the big front room. It had a fireplace and seemed mostly clean. Further back in the house there was some fire damage, but it was in the process of being replaced with new wooden framework.
The third floor contained another big room, and a few rooms which were unidentifiable because the interior walls were mostly missing. This was also true of the fourth floor, where, I've read, there was once an entire ballroom. The half of this floor where the ballroom must have been was piled with bricks and pieces of wood, and the roof was mostly missing, having been replaced by blue plastic tarpaulins.
I've heard that this is one of the particularly haunted places, since Tiedemann's daughter was hung in one of the secret passages around the ballroom. There was wooden framework along the edges of the ballroom area, and room on the other side for what might have been a secret passage, but it was hard to say with the house in this state. This floor is also the most fire-damaged, with its missing roof and several severely scorched places in the back.
We sat on the fourth floor for a while and tried to talk to the ghosts, even calling them by name. Nothing happened. We didn't hear any babies crying or Nazis arguing; no ghosts appeared. Going back through the house we tried splitting up, but neither of us had an experience. Neither did we see any hidden passages, although as I said, the house was basically gutted when we visited it. The closest thing to a secret passageway we saw while we were there was the entrance to a crawlspace at the back of a hall closet on the first floor.
Overall, not bad. No ghosts welcomed us, but it was an interesting place to see. My thanks to Hoss, for making the arduous drive both ways.
