Pythian Castle

The owner of this 1913 Knights of Pythias orphanage-turned-WWII-POW-facility in Springfield was woken by phantom gunshots and found a man in army fatigues staring down at her. She estimates about a dozen ghosts share the castle with her, sorted roughly by era: orphanage children, military figures near the basement cells, and a woman in white nobody can identify.

Tamara Finocchiaro, the owner of Pythian Castle, was asleep in her bedroom when two gunshots woke her up. She opened her eyes and found a man in army fatigues standing over her bed, staring down at her. Then he was gone. Finocchiaro lives in the castle full-time. She estimates about a dozen ghosts live there with her.

The building at 1451 East Pythian Street in Springfield, Missouri started as an orphanage. The Knights of Pythias, a fraternal order founded in 1864 by Justus H. Rathbone, built it in 1913 on 53 acres the city of Springfield sold them for a single dollar. Seven Missouri cities had competed for the project. The castle was designed to house orphans and aging members of the order, and its exterior was built from Carthage Stone, a hard Ozarks limestone that gives the building its fortress look. It functioned as intended for about three decades.

Then the military arrived. During World War II, the U.S. Army took over the complex and folded it into the O'Reilly General Hospital system. The basement became a POW holding area for German and Italian soldiers. Veterans who visited the site later described interrogations in the castle's lower levels, and some hinted that the outcomes weren't always clean. After the war, the castle served as a Veterans Administration tuberculosis hospital with 500 beds until 1952, when it was finally vacated. The building sat empty and deteriorating for years after that.

"We know we have little kids, we know we have some women, we know we have some military folks," Finocchiaro told Ozarks First. The ghosts seem to sort themselves by era. Children are heard running through hallways and have been spotted as small shadows in the basement corridors, near the old POW cells. A woman in white appears in the castle's tower window and drifts through the upper halls, visible to people passing by on Pythian Street below. Military figures show up in the lower levels, near where the interrogations happened.

Photographers on ghost hunts find the basement POW cells especially productive. Strange shapes and light anomalies cluster around that area with unusual frequency. The castle has drawn multiple television crews: Ghost Adventures filmed Season 15, Episode 11 here in 2017. Children of the Grave, Ghost Lab, and The Haunted Collector have all investigated the property.

Pythian Castle has four distinct backstories stacked on top of each other: orphanage, old-age home, military POW facility, tuberculosis hospital. Each phase brought people who lived and died inside these walls, and the reported ghost activity lines up roughly with those eras. The children's ghosts connect to the orphanage years. The military figures connect to WWII. The woman in white doesn't connect cleanly to any known period, which makes her the only real mystery in a building where most of the hauntings have fairly obvious explanations for who they might be.

The castle reopened to the public in 2010 and now offers history tours during the day, ghost tours at night, escape rooms, and murder mystery dinners. Overnight paranormal investigations with the Paranormal Task Force run from 7 PM to 3 AM for anyone who wants to bring their own equipment. The building is open and the owner is candid about what shares it with her. Finocchiaro has lived with the phantom gunshots long enough that she sleeps through them now.