Chateau Laroche

Harry Delos Andrews was officially dead. A cerebrospinal meningitis outbreak at Camp Dix in 1918 sent his records to Washington marked "deceased", a doctor restarted his heart with adrenaline, and it took six months to correct the paperwork. Posted afterwards to an army hospital installed in the Château La Roche in the Dordogne, he came home to Ohio, bought two riverside lots that a failing Cincinnati newspaper had given away with six-month subscriptions, and on 5 June 1929 began building a castle for his Sunday school and scout troop. He worked on it for the rest of his life, hauling an estimated 56,000 pails of stone up from the Little Miami and moulding concrete bricks in quart milk cartons once the river stone ran out. A trash fire on 14 March 1981 burned him badly and he died a month later, aged 91. The Knights of the Golden Trail, the troop that named itself after chivalry, inherited the castle and finished it. Its ghosts are published on their own website and signed: Andrews wrote about a poltergeist he called Casper and noted that no one had ever seen him, and four members added accounts dated 1987, 1989 and 2001.

Chateau Laroche is not a ruin and not a rich man's folly. It is the work of one Ohio army medic who had been officially dead since 1918. Harry Delos Andrews was born on 5 April 1890 in Oneonta, New York, and graduated from Colgate University in the class of 1916, having studied architecture. Drafted into the US Army Medical Corps, he rose to sergeant-major. The order he later founded says he chose nursing because he objected not to war but to the weapons of modern war: killing at a distance. He never reached the front in the way he expected. He was one of some 7,000 soldiers at Camp Dix, New Jersey, struck down by an outbreak of cerebrospinal meningitis. His body was moved to the morgue and his records were marked "deceased" and sent to Washington. In the account Lori E. Jareo published in 1996, drawn from Andrews' own booklet and from the Cincinnati Enquirer, the body was taken back to the hospital for dissection, a doctor proposed trying "this new stuff" — adrenaline — a needle was pushed into his heart, and it started again. He came out of it blind and paralysed, weighing 89 pounds; his sight returned behind glasses, and his blood was later drawn to harvest meningococcus antibodies. Jareo records that only one other Camp Dix soldier survived the initial outbreak. Six months passed before the paperwork was corrected, and by then his fiancée had married another man. The castle's name comes from what happened next. Andrews was posted to an army hospital installed in the Château La Roche, near Razac-sur-l'Isle in the Dordogne, in south-western France, where he served as hospital administrator and taught French to American soldiers. He was staff there, not a patient — nothing in the record supports the widely repeated line that he was recovering from wounds at the place he named his castle after. After the armistice he stayed on in Europe, visited castles, and studied architecture at Toulouse. The land came out of a newspaper's desperation. Greg Hand, writing in Cincinnati Magazine in June 2025 from the property record, describes how the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune — a Republican daily that had been controlled since 1911 by the owner of the rival Enquirer — bought the former Apgar farm outside Loveland, cut it into thousands of parcels 20 feet wide by 100 feet long, and in 1924 handed one out with every six-month subscription, which cost $58.50. The lots were too small to build on; the paper sold the idea as a summer resort where a subscriber could pitch a tent and walk to the river. One of the original buyers was Lillie Gegner, and on 12 June 1929 she sold two adjacent plots to Harry D. Andrews. By then the boys were already camping there. The Knights of the Golden Trail — the name Andrews' Sunday school and scout troop gave itself, in the way troops name themselves Bears or Lions — celebrated its 75th anniversary in February 2002, which puts its founding in February 1927. A dozen or so boys kept losing their kit on the riverbank to weather, animals and passers-by, so Andrews built them two small stone rooms he called a "stone tent". Then, in the order's own telling, the knights decided they could not be real knights without a castle, and he made them an offer: fetch stone up from the river and he would build one. The Knights and Colgate both date the groundbreaking to 5 June 1929, and Jareo records that the castle was dedicated in 1930. Then it almost stopped. Between the Depression and the Second World War, Jareo writes, Andrews did not work in earnest until he retired from the mailroom of the Standard Publishing Company; he moved into the castle on Memorial Day 1955 with a few rooms finished and a few services installed. Jareo's measurements give an acre and a half of ground, a footprint of 96 by 56 feet and 36 feet of height at the eastern face; the building mixes German, French and English detail with four kinds of tower, a dry moat, a dungeon and hand-tiled ceilings. He carried an estimated 56,000 five-gallon pails of river stone up the bank by hand, 65 pounds each; when the river stone ran out he moulded concrete bricks in quart paper milk cartons, using more than 2,600 sacks of cement, and packed some of them with light bulbs and tin cans for thrift and insulation. Jareo's figures for the whole job are 8,000 tons of material, 23,000 hours of labour and $12,000, with Andrews doing 98 per cent of the work himself. He turned down, he said, more than fifty proposals of marriage from "widows and old maids who wanted to live in a castle". The state never quite believed he was alive. He had to convince the Pentagon he was not dead in order to draw his army pension, received it for 23 years, and saw it stop in 1979; his last years were spent on Social Security. On the morning of 14 March 1981 Andrews lit a trash fire on the castle grounds. As he tried to stamp it out his trousers caught, and then his sleeves; visitors at the castle smothered the flames with a blanket. The skin grafts at a nearby hospital went well, but he died of his injuries on 16 April 1981, having turned 91 in hospital eleven days earlier. He left the castle to the Knights. What a visitor sees today is therefore not all his. The Knights finished it: the building was extensively upgraded and largely completed after 1981, the east tower now holds a short film about his project, and an expansion of the outside gardens and a greenhouse came later still.

Chateau Laroche is open, cheap, and still run by the order that inherited it. It stands at 12025 Shore Drive, in Symmes Township just north of Loveland, Hamilton County, Ohio 45140. One caution on the address: the Knights' current page prints 12075, but their 1996 contact details, their 2003 site, their 2016 ghost-hunt contract and a 1997 CityBeat listing all print 12025. As of August 2026 the museum opens 11:00 to 17:00 — seven days a week from 1 April to 30 September, weekends only from 1 October to 31 March, closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve. Admission is $5 a head, free for children of five and under. Cards are accepted; $100 notes are not. Special-event prices vary. The telephone number, 513-683-4686, gives a recorded message. For comparison, CityBeat listed admission at $1 in October 1997. The visit is self-guided. The Knights state plainly that there are no tour guides, although the knight on duty may give a short history of Andrews and the castle, and there are two filmed interviews and a short documentary about his time in boot camp. Nothing is sold to eat or drink: there are picnic tables, benches, walls, towers and gardens, and visitors are asked to bring their own food and take their rubbish away. There are two portable toilets at the south end of the car park and no more than forty parking spaces. Dogs are welcome on a lead and owners must clean up. The road down to the castle is the one Andrews built, and coaches still cannot use it. Paranormal investigations are by appointment and by contract only, and the contract is a lease: the Knights rent the premises to a "Tenant" for a fixed number of hours, starting no earlier than seven in the evening and ending no later than ten the following morning, at $300 for up to fifteen guests, with a non-refundable deposit of $250 and $50 due on arrival. The owners insist it is not a sleepover, and ghost hunters get free museum admission on the day. The castle takes no bookings for weddings, showers, birthdays, graduations or private overnight stays, and does not close during opening hours for any reason. Wine tastings in the gardens, with live music and a charcuterie board, are sold separately at $50 for over-21s. One last thing, from their own FAQ: they invite visitors to ask the knight on duty about the castle ghosts "and the Loveland Frogman" — the local cryptid reported in the 1970s on the road beside the same river.