Franklin Castle

Franklin Castle is the Hannes Tiedemann House at 4308 Franklin Boulevard, in Cleveland's Ohio City neighbourhood: a rock-faced sandstone mansion with a round corner tower, built from 1881 to designs by Cudell & Richardson and finished in 1883. Tiedemann was a wholesale grocer who became a founder and vice-president of the Savings & Trust Co. in 1883. The popular story says his children died in the house and that he murdered a niece and a mistress, but the family monument at Riverside Cemetery records three infants who died of disease between 1863 and 1873 and a daughter, Emma, who died of diabetes in 1881 aged fifteen, all before the house was completed. From 1921 to 1968 the building was Eintracht Hall, home of a German-American cultural club. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History states that the haunted-house stories do not seem to predate 1965; rumours spread around 1968, and from 1974 an owner sold public tours of the haunted castle. Human bones were reported in a hidden passageway in 1975, which Scene later said forensic pathologists estimated had lain there some eighty years, though no examiner or conclusion is on record. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, gutted by arson in 1999 and restored since, the house is a private residence and is not open to the public.

Franklin Castle is an unusual haunted house: almost every claim made about it can be checked. The building has a National Register file, an entry in a university encyclopedia, a public-history study built on the family's own gravestone, and a run of Cleveland newspapers digitised by the city's public library. Checked against those, most of the legend fails — and the part that survives turns out to be about the 1970s, not the 1800s. The builder was not a banker when he built it. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, published by Case Western Reserve University, records Hannes Tiedemann (1832-1908) as "a wholesale grocer in the firm of Weidemann & Tiedemann beginning in 1864". The bank came afterwards: in 1883 he was "a founder and vice-president of the Savings & Trust Co., one of the first institutions organized in Ohio under the law permitting the formation of trust companies". The house. The address is 4308 Franklin Boulevard (Franklin Ave. in the nineteenth century), on the north side of the street opposite West 44th, in what is now Ohio City. The Tiedemanns had lived at that address since 1866, in an earlier house that was demolished to make room for the new one. The present mansion was erected from 1881 — Cleveland Historical dates the works 1881-1883 — to designs by Cudell & Richardson, "identified by a carved stone on the house" and, in the encyclopedia's words, "Cleveland's most important architectural firm in the 1880s". Frank Cudell was himself a German immigrant; the same partnership built Franklin Circle Christian Church (1874-1875) a few blocks away. The National Register of Historic Places file classifies the building as Queen Anne, significant year 1881, period of significance 1875-1899, areas of significance COMMERCE and ARCHITECTURE. Nothing in the federal record mentions ghosts, and nothing calls it Gothic. The deaths are real, and they are in the wrong place. This is where the legend breaks. Jim Dubelko, writing for Cleveland Historical — the public-history project of Cleveland State University's Center for Public History + Digital Humanities — with research support from Raymond L. Pianka, went to the Tiedemann family monument at Riverside Cemetery. On the back of it are the names of three infant children who died of disease between 1863 and 1873; on another side is the couple's daughter Emma, who died of diabetes in 1881, aged fifteen. Dubelko's conclusion is flat: "Contrary to rumors circulated about Franklin Castle since the 1960s, none of the Tiedemann children died in the Tiedemann House, which was not completed until 1883." Hannes and his wife Louise moved into the finished house in 1883 with their two surviving children, August and Dora. Both grew up there, married and gave their parents six grandchildren, all boys. Louise died in 1895; Hannes sold the house in 1896 and retired to Steinberg, the summer residence he had built in Lakewood around 1880-1881, where he died in 1908 at seventy-five. For half a century it was a German club. From 1921 to 1968 — forty-seven years, far longer than the Tiedemanns lived there — the building was Eintracht Hall, home of the German-American League for Culture, later a German singing society. Cleveland Historical reproduces a Plain Dealer article of 20 December 1938 in which the club's members, shortly after the Munich Agreement, protested Hitler's aggression against German citizens and against Germany's neighbours. That is worth holding on to: the legend's "Nazi cell in a secret room" is the exact inversion of the documented record. When do the ghosts arrive? The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History is unusually blunt for a reference work: "The spurious haunted-house stories do not seem to predate 1965." Dubelko dates the rumours to around 1968, when the German club sold up, and says they concerned the ghosts of Mrs Tiedemann and her daughter Emma — a daughter who had died before the house was finished. Between the last nineteenth-century Tiedemann death in that family and the first ghost story there is a gap of roughly nine decades. That gap is the story. Then it is sold — and sold as haunted. From 1968 to 1974 the house was the home of a family who said it was haunted; photographs in the Cleveland Press Collection at Cleveland State University identify them as Mr and Mrs James Romano and their children Jeffrey, John, Delores and Jimmy. In 1974 the family moved out and, in Dubelko's words, "the house was taken over by an individual who ... offered the public tours of 'haunted' Franklin Castle". A second Press photograph, from the paper's picture morgue, carries this note from the verso: "Eleanor Bernstein psychic - tour guide at Franklin Blvd. Castle ... 4308 Franklin Blvd. ... Owner of home geo.[rge] mirceta". The Cleveland Press printed its final edition on 17 June 1982, so the guided-tour operation is documented no later than that year. The house was also just a hall you could hire. On the night of Saturday 19 April 1975, police raided the annual Community Bail Fund Ball held in the building. The Plain Press, the neighbourhood's own newspaper, led its April 1975 issue with the raid: officers with "billy clubs and shotguns stormed the old haunted castle", eight people were arrested for serving liquor without a licence, and over the police radio came the call "Policeman in trouble ... come to 4300 Franklin!". The following July the paper reported that the first four defendants, including Father Bob Begin, had been acquitted. It is a small, unglamorous document, and it proves something useful: by April 1975 "the old haunted castle" was already the ordinary local name for the place. The bones. The best-documented paranormal episode is also the thinnest. Writing in Scene on 29 October 1992, Kymberli Hagelberg reported: "In 1975 human bones were found in a hidden passageway at Franklin Castle, which forensic pathologists estimated had rested there some 80 years." Her source, the Ohio City historian Tim Barrett, added only that the newspapers "had a field day with that". A 1996 Scene feature says the finder was "one owner, a minister". No source we were able to read names the pathologists, gives their report, or records any conclusion beyond the age estimate. Afterwards. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 15 March 1982 as the Hannes Tiedemann House (reference 82004417). In 1985 Michael DeVinko — stage name Mickey Deans, Judy Garland's last husband — bought it and spent heavily restoring it, living there for over a decade. He sold in 1999, and shortly afterwards the house was torched by an arsonist. A new owner paid for repairs but could not finish the work; in 2011 it was bought by a European couple who have made substantial progress. Cleveland Public Library's Neighborhood Photographic Survey photographed it, standing and intact, on 23 October 2025.

Franklin Castle is a private home and it cannot be visited. Cleveland Historical's entry states it plainly in its location note: "The house is not open to the public." There are no tours of any kind, no interior access, no ghost hunts, and no visitor facilities. It has been a private residence for most of the last forty years, and people live in it now: do not knock, do not enter the drive or the garden, do not use a drone, and do not treat the occupants as part of the attraction. If you photograph it, do so from the public footpath on the far side of the street and move on. The address and how to get there. 4308 Franklin Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44113, in the Ohio City neighbourhood on the near west side, on the north side of the boulevard opposite West 44th Street. It is about a mile west of West 25th Street, the neighbourhood's main artery — some twenty minutes on foot. Franklin is a residential street: park considerately and read the posted signs. The house is a tall rock-faced sandstone mansion with a round corner tower; you will not need directions once you are on the block. Walk the boulevard — that part is public and it is the real reward. Franklin Boulevard from West 38th to West 52nd Street is the Franklin Boulevard Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 31 May 1989 (reference 89000430). It was the west side's answer to Euclid Avenue's Millionaires' Row, and its Victorian mansions, carriage houses and mature street trees can be seen entirely from the pavement, at any hour, for nothing. Two churches by the same architects who designed the Tiedemann House are within walking distance: Franklin Circle Christian Church (1874-1875) at 1688 Fulton Road on Franklin Circle, and St Stephen Roman Catholic Church (1873-1881) near West 54th Street and Bridge Avenue. West Side Market, 1979 West 25th Street, is about twenty minutes away on foot and is the obvious place to build a half-day around: opened in 1912, Cleveland's oldest and largest public market, roughly sixty stallholders. Hours are Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 8:00-17:00 and Sunday 10:00-16:00 (closed Tuesday and Thursday); telephone (216) 293-9830. If you want to stand where the Tiedemanns actually are, go to Riverside Cemetery, 3607 Pearl Road, Cleveland, Ohio 44109, about four miles south. The family monument is there, with the three infant children who died between 1863 and 1873 named on the back and Emma on another face. The grounds are open daily including holidays, 7:30-17:00 from October to March and 7:30-19:00 from April to September; the office is open Monday to Saturday 8:00-16:00, closed holidays, telephone (216) 351-4800, and a cemetery map can be downloaded from the cemetery's website. It is an active burial ground founded in 1876, not a visitor attraction: no rubbings, no climbing, and keep off the graves.