Franklin Castle is so rife with creepy legends that everyone from local media personalities to national TV spook-seekers such as Paranormal Lockdown have approached the 1881-built home’s wrought-iron gates in Ohio City, repeating tales of a spectral woman appearing in windows, ghostly children roaming the halls and the murderous original owner of the Victorian mansion, Hannes Tiedemann, looming about.
According to legend, Tiedemann killed his niece, Karen, and a young servant girl named Rachel.
“Around 1980, Tiedemann suddenly became this murderer in the stories,” says William G. Krejci, the castle’s resident historian and co-author of the 2017 book Haunted Franklin Castle, a look into the building’s past. “Prior to [the 1980s], the house was haunted and that was it.”
While we can’t vouch for other ghosts, Krejci says the servant girl and niece never existed. Census records and talks with Tiedemann family descendents uncovered no evidence of them. According to Krejci, in a March 27, 1980, Cleveland Press article, a self-proclaimed medium living in the home at the time told the press that the ghost of Tiedemann himself confessed his crimes to her. It became part of the house’s mythology.
“It was entirely concocted by the medium,” says Krecji. “That’s where all the stories of Tiedemann being a murderer come from. If you read letters written by his daughter or look at the charitable things he was involved in, you can see he was a decent man.”
Status: Busted
Read More: Click here to read the full list of 30 Myths That Define Cleveland
CLE Myths: Haunted Franklin Castle
We've all heard the stories, but is Franklin Castle's hauntings the result of foul play?
