Franklin Castle

From the street, Franklin Castle looks like the house a child would draw if you asked for a haunted mansion.

It is a four-story mass of dark sandstone in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood, with a pointed turret, a steep slate roof, gargoyles, iron balconies and tall, narrow windows that never seem to have any light behind them. It has more than twenty rooms, and according to every tour guide and ghost story ever told about it, a network of hidden passages and secret rooms behind its walls.

For decades it has been called the most haunted house in Ohio. The stories about it involve murdered children, a secret room full of bones, a massacre of political radicals, and a woman in black who stands at the turret window.

What’s actually known about the house is quieter, and in its own way, very sad.

The Banker

Franklin Castle was built between 1881 and 1883 for Hannes Tiedemann, a German immigrant who had made his fortune in Cleveland as a grocer and wholesaler, and later as a co-founder of a savings bank. He and his wife, Louise, moved into the grand new house with their family.

Then, one by one, the Tiedemanns began to die.

Over a few years in the 1880s and early 1890s, Hannes and Louise lost four of their children. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Emma, died — the cause is often given as diabetes. Hannes’s elderly mother died in the house. Other children died young, as children so often did in the nineteenth century, of illness. In 1895, Louise herself died, at the age of fifty-seven, of what was described as liver disease.

Within about a decade of moving into the great house on Franklin Boulevard, Hannes Tiedemann had buried his mother, his wife and most of his children. He sold the house and remarried. He died in 1908.

The Legends

Out of that real grief, the legends grew.

The stories say that Hannes Tiedemann was not a grieving father but a monster. That he murdered his own niece, finding her in a secret room with a lover, and hanged her from a beam. That he killed a servant girl named Rachel, with whom he was having an affair, because she was about to marry another man. That some of his children died not of disease but at his hands. That the turret and secret passages were built to hide his crimes.

Researchers who have studied the house — including the authors of a detailed history of Franklin Castle — say there is no evidence for any of this. Tiedemann was, by every documented account, a respected businessman and a generous benefactor to his community. He gave to charities. There is no record of a murdered niece or a murdered servant. The deaths in his family were tragic, but not unusual for their time, and none was ever suspected to be foul play.

The Socialists

After the Tiedemann years, the house passed through several owners. In the early twentieth century, it was bought by a German organization, often described as a socialist club or social society.

According to one of the house’s most famous legends, twenty members of the group were once machine-gunned to death inside the house in a political massacre. No record of any such killing has ever been found. A massacre of twenty people in a Cleveland mansion would have made national headlines. There are none.

The Romanos

The modern haunting of Franklin Castle begins in 1968, when a family named Romano bought the house and moved in with their children.

According to their accounts, the children soon began talking about a little girl who played with them upstairs — a girl no one else could see. Mrs. Romano said she heard organ music in the house, though there was no organ. She heard footsteps and the sound of a baby crying. Dishes moved. Lights flickered. She reportedly asked a priest to come and bless the house, but he declined, telling her there was evil in it and she should leave.

After several years, the Romanos sold the house. Its next owner, a man named Sam Muscatello, turned it into a kind of haunted attraction and ran tours for curious visitors. During his time there, according to news reports of the period, human bones were found in a small hidden room near the turret. A coroner examined them and concluded that they were very old — so old that it was impossible to say whose they were or when they had been placed there. Some suggested they might have been medical specimens. No one ever explained them.

The Woman in Black

Since then, the reports have accumulated.

People who have lived in or visited the house describe a woman dressed in black standing at the turret window, looking down at the street. They report hearing children crying, footsteps on the stairs, and the sound of someone walking in rooms that are empty. Doors open and close on their own. Lights turn on in the middle of the night. Some have described a cold spot on the third floor, near the old ballroom.

In the 1980s, the house was owned by Michael DeVinko — the last husband of the actress Judy Garland — who reportedly spent a great deal of money restoring it, and hosted lavish parties there. He sold it after a few years.

In 1999, an arsonist set fire to the house, causing serious damage. It stood empty and boarded up for years. Since then, it has been sold several times. At various points it has been planned as a private home, an events space and a rental property.

Grief and Houses

There’s a pattern you’ll notice again and again in this book: a family suffers a series of terrible losses in a house, and decades later, people who never knew them invent a story that turns their grief into a crime.

Hannes Tiedemann lost almost everyone he loved inside the walls of the house he built. A century later, he is remembered on ghost tours as a murderer of children and servant girls, based on no evidence at all.

If there is anything haunting Franklin Castle, I like to think it’s not the vengeful victims of an imaginary monster. I think it might be something simpler and sadder. A mother, standing at the turret window, waiting for children who are never coming home.