Franklin Castle

Franklin Castle in Cleveland, built in the 1880s for a German immigrant who lost six family members in fifteen years, has been called Ohio's most haunted house since the late 1960s. The Romano family's children reported a crying girl upstairs, and visitors to the tower room describe choking sensations attributed to a maid named Rachel.

The Romano children kept asking their mother for extra cookies. They said a sad girl upstairs wanted some.

The Romanos moved into 4308 Franklin Boulevard in the late 1960s, and their kids were the first to report something off about the house. The sad girl, they insisted, lived on the upper floors and cried when nobody brought her anything. Their mother, who had seen a full figure on the staircase herself, contacted a local radio station. That phone call turned a private Cleveland mansion into Ohio's most famous haunted house.

Franklin Castle was built between 1881 and 1883 for Hannes Tiedemann, a German immigrant who had done well as a wholesale grocer and banker. The architectural firm Cudell and Richardson designed it in the High Victorian style, with four stories, more than 80 windows, turrets, and gargoyles. It was a showpiece on what was then one of Cleveland's most prestigious streets.

Then the family started dying. Tiedemann's daughter Emma died of diabetes at fifteen in January 1881, before the house was even finished. His mother Wiebeka followed shortly after. Three more infant children were buried over the next few years. His wife Louise died of liver disease on March 24, 1895, at age fifty-seven. Tiedemann had commissioned a grand ballroom spanning the entire fourth floor and added turrets to the facade, reportedly to distract Louise from her grief. It did not work.

The murder rumors started decades later. People claimed Tiedemann had strangled Rachel, the family maid, in the tower room after she rejected his advances. They said he hanged his niece from the rafters. Investigative historian William Krejci, who wrote a book on the castle, found no evidence for any of it. None of the recorded deaths were foul play. But the stories stuck, and each new owner added to them.

The house passed to the Mullhauser family in 1896. From 1921 to 1968, it served as Eintracht Hall for the German-American League for Culture, functioning as a singing club and cultural center. When it became known as Franklin Castle in the late 1960s, the ghost stories came with the new name.

In the mid-1970s, a new owner found human bones in a closet and began offering haunted tours. Most historians believe the bones were planted for publicity, possibly relocated from nearby Monroe Street Cemetery or left by a previous owner who had been a doctor. The bones were real. The story behind them was almost certainly not.

Michael DeVinko purchased the castle in 1985 and poured roughly a million dollars into restoration. DeVinko's claim to fame was being Mickey Deans, Judy Garland's fifth and final husband. Garland died of a barbiturate overdose just three months after their 1969 wedding. Whether DeVinko was drawn to the castle's tragic reputation or just saw a real estate opportunity is unclear. He listed it for sale in 1994.

The castle burned in 1999 (arson; the suspected arsonist was later caught and arrested). The carriage house caught fire again in March 2011. A European couple, Chiara and John Dona Dalle, bought it for ,000 that same year and began restoration. By December 2022, the castle was accepting overnight guests.

Visitors to the tower room report difficulty breathing and sensations of pressure around their throats, which believers attribute to the maid Rachel. Flickering lights and slamming doors are routine. Dark figures appear in peripheral vision and vanish when you turn to look.

Ghost Adventures filmed there in March 2020 (Season 23, Episode 2). Paranormal Lockdown spent 72 hours inside for Season 1, Episode 3 in March 2016. The Holzer Files investigated in November 2020.

The strongest case for Franklin Castle being haunted has nothing to do with the murder legends. Six members of one family died within fifteen years of moving in. That kind of concentrated grief soaks into a place. The tower room, the fourth-floor ballroom built for a woman who was already broken, the nursery where infants died of diseases nobody could treat yet. The stories people invented about Tiedemann are probably fiction. The sadness is documented fact.