HGB Ep. 519 - Franklin Castle

Moment in Oddity - The Pando Tree of Utah (Suggested by: Michael Rogers with reference to Paul C. Rogers studies)

Approximately 1 mile southwest of Fish Lake in Utah one can find an extraordinary specimen of botany. This is the Pando tree. It spans approximately 106 acres and it is referred to as a singular tree although its entirety consists of over 40,000 individual trees. Pando, in Latin, means "I spread". This forest of trees emanates from an original single seed with new shoots emerging from its root system, essentially making each individual tree a clone of the original. So, relatively speaking, Pando is one giant organism weighing in around 13 million pounds. Pando's species of tree is known as the Quaking Aspen. Some Aspens produce asexually through spreading root systems where suckers emerge from the roots creating stands of trees that are genetically identical. Pando's specific age is difficult to calculate, but it is believed to have sprouted at the end of the last ice age. However, one thing is for sure, an astounding acreage of aspens all assembled from one single seed, certainly is odd. For a more detailed coverage of the Pando Tree of Utah, please use the link in the show notes to read Michael's Uncle's articles.

This Month in History - Wheel of Fortune Premiers

In the month of January, on the 6th, in 1975, The Wheel of Fortune premiered. The NBC daytime gameshow was originally hosted by Chuck Woolery and actor Susan Stafford who turned the letters. The show is one of the longest running syndicated gameshows in America. Created by Merv Griffin, The Wheel of Fortune was designed to combine roulette and Hangman. As most are familiar, contestants guess letters to solve the word puzzle. Since the show's creation, buying a vowel has remained a constant price at $250. In addition to being the longest running American gameshow, Wheel also boasts the longest running host. Pat Sajak, who will be retiring in September of 2024, has been hosting Wheel of Fortune since 1981. His co-host, Vanna White, has been working with Sajak since 1982. White recently re-upped her contract with the gameshow through the 2025-2026 season. Wheel has become such an iconic gameshow that phrases spoken by its contestants such as, "I would like to buy a vowel" and "I'd like to solve the puzzle" are a part of the American lexicon today.

Franklin Castle

Cleveland's Franklin Castle is not really a castle, but is actually a glorious Victorian mansion named for the street upon which it sits. The former Tiedemann residence is cloaked in rumors and innuendo that has lead to it famously being known as "The Most Haunted House in Ohio." Many people have passed through the doors here from bankers to smugglers to members of the German socialist party, mediums, investigators and priests. Tours and overnight stays are hosted and many guests claim that the moniker of "most haunted" is appropriate. Getting to the truth about this property isn't easy. Join us for the history and hauntings of Franklin Castle! 

The city of Cleveland was no stranger to wealthy families. And for good reason because the city was one of the five main oil refining centers in the U.S. and Standard Oil would get its start here. In Ep. 352, we featured Cleveland's Millionaire Row along Euclid Avenue. This is where most of the richest men in Ohio lived. Franklin Boulevard was known as the West Side's Euclid Avenue to give listeners an idea of the wealth of this street as well. A point of interest along this boulevard is the Franklin Circle Christian Church, which was built in 1878, but the congregation has had a presence here since 1848. One of the pastors in 1857 was James A. Garfield - yes, THAT James Garfield, future 20th president of the United States. 

The Franklin Castle has also been known as the Tiedemann House because that family were the original owners. Hannes (Hahn nez) Tiedemann was born in 1833 in Prussia. His father passed in 1846 and two years later, he emigrated to New York with his mother and five siblings. Tiedemann got work as a barrel maker in Royalton, Ohio in 1850 and he eventually moved to Cleveland where he worked as a clerk for a wholesale grocer. There he learned the business and in 1864, he joined forces with another man named John Christian Weideman and opened the wholesale grocery firm Weideman & Tiedemann. They were incredibly successful and Hannes became a rich man. Just two years before this, he married Luisa Hock and the couple would have six children. They moved into a house where the future Franklin Castle would be built in 1866. This house was known as Bachelor's Hall and had been owned by Alonzo Wolverton. Hannes' mother Wiebeka moved in with the family as well.

The Tiedemanns lost three children in infancy before 1873. Nearly every website about the hauntings at Franklin Castle claim that these three children died at the castle, but that is impossible because the castle wasn't built yet. Hannes added banker to his list of accomplishments in the 1880s and he decided to build a house fitting of his expanding position and wealth in the Cleveland community. The Franklin Castle was started in 1881 as designed by architects Cudell & Richardson in the Queen Anne Victorian style and took two years to complete. The exterior was made from sandstone with eighty windows and the house had four-stories and a corner tower. The interior featured twenty rooms, a ballroom and a wine cellar. Before the castle was completed the Tiedemanns' fifteen-year-old daughter Emma died. The story was that she passed from complications of diabetes, but some believe that something else happened here. Rumors circulated that she had hanged in the attic. It is claimed that she died in the castle, but we don't know if that is true since the house was completed. Perhaps they lived in part of it. Within a month, Hannes mother had passed away from natural causes. This is said to have been in the house too, but again, the castle wasn't completed. Deaths would continue in the family when Hannes' wife Luisa passed from liver disease in 1895 and she DID die in the castle. Depending on timing, it is possible that most members of the Tiedemann family died on the site since they lived in a house on the property before the castle was built, but the only confirmed death we know of in the house, was Mrs. Tiedemann.

As to whether Hannes was heartbroken by this development, we will never know, although he did sell the castle within a year of his wife's death, so clearly the mansion they shared lost its luster. Hannes is a tragic figure. He had six children and all of them passed in his lifetime. So he watched his entire family die before he passed. He was also said to be a generous man in the community. But the legacy of his life is clouded with rumors and innuendo that are perpetuated by nearly every article or show about the house.  There were stories that he wasn't a faithful husband and that he had carried on affairs with servants and other women in town. One tale claimed that Hannes had strangled a servant girl named Rachel because she intended to marry. None of these claims have any proof. Hannes married again shortly after his wife's death, but that marriage lasted only a year before they divorced. Hannes died in 1908 all alone. Hannes sold the castle to the Mulhauser family. The Mulhauser family lived in the castle for around seventeen years and they sold it to the German Socialist Party in 1913. This development would spark more rumors that can't be verified about the mansion. Nazis were harbored here and there are claims that around twenty people were killed in the house over political disagreements. Clearly, there could have been Nazi sympathizers here based on ownership, but as to murders, there is no proof. The German Socialist Party promoted this as a culture center and it continued that way until 1968.

The house was sold to the Romano family in 1968 and there were so many weird things happening in the house that they had a priest come in and conduct an exorcism. Apparently this didn't work and the family was gone by 1974 and the house would begin passing through many owners. Sam Muscatello was the next owner and he embraced the haunted reputation growing around the castle. He opened it to tours and ghost hunts and he embellished the legends of the house claiming that there were secret tunnels and passageways and that he found bones. Many people believe he planted the bones himself. Sam sold the house to a doctor who quickly sold to Richard Hongisto, the Cleveland police chief at the time. He and his wife only managed a year in the castle before selling to George Micerta who also opened the house to tours. He got the house placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. 

In the mid-1980s, Michael DeVinko, Judy Garland's last husband, bought the castle and he renovated it so that he could use it for social events. He managed to find the original blueprints and front door key! Michelle Heimburger was the next to try her hand at ownership, but her dreams of restoration were put out by a fire in 1999. She didn't have the funds to repair it, so she sold to a group of people who wanted to turn it into a club called the Franklin Castle Club and that lasted until 2006. Then the castle sat abandoned for a few years. In 2011, Oh Dear Productions, LLC bought the castle with plans to live on the fourth floor ballroom and open the bottom floors to run as an art gallery. There were other plans put out that the house was going to be broken into apartments. The last thing we found in regards to ownership of the mansion was that the company named Oh Dear Productions, LLC was merged out of existence and the current owners are named Kitt and Pascal. We think they owned Oh Dear Productions. They have been renovating the castle for nearly a decade and had rented out space to New York record company, Norton Records. That company was named for Ed Norton of "The Honeymooners" and has been finding and selling obscure rock and roll music for over forty years. A creepy website has been built that invites people to tour and stay overnight.

Many of the legends about the castle are untrue, but rumors of paranormal activity at the Franklin Castle have lead to its reputation as one of the most haunted houses in the United States. And there really does seem to be a lot of activity here. People report disembodied footsteps, doors opening and closing on their own and lights flickering off and on. The incidents that sparked the Romano family to seek religious help included organ music that would play on a regular basis throughout the house even though the family didn't own an organ. And shortly after moving in, the Romano children came down to the kitchen for snacks of cookies and asked if they could take a cookie up to the little girl crying upstairs. Mrs. Romano dashed upstairs and found no little girl, but the children insisted that a little girl had been up there and that she had been crying. Throughout their tenure, the Romano children would continue to claim that they played with ghost children in the house. Could these have been the Tiedemann children who had died in childhood and managed to find their way into the house that their family had later built? The priest who performed the exorcism claimed that the house harbored evil spirits.

Other ghostly sightings are connected to unfounded legends. A woman in black is thought to be the servant Rachel that Tiedemann supposedly murdered. There was a claim that he had also murdered a niece whom he caught in bed with one of his grandsons. She was supposedly only thirteen-years-old. Her spirit has identified as Karen and many people have claimed to interact with her. Websites claim that 12 baby corpses were found in a secret tunnel, but clearly newspapers would have picked up on this story, so it is unfounded. A doctor had lived in this house for a while and these were babies he experimented on, at least according to rumors. One of the creepiest stories was told by a radio host back in the 1970s. He was at the castle to do a special broadcast and he brought a tape recorder with him. As he walked up the staircase, the tape recorder was ripped from his arms and thrown down the stairs. That was unnerving enough, but when he started to played back the tape that he had recorded the special into, a strange sinister laugh could be heard throughout the entire broadcast. This wasn't something that was heard audibly during the broadcast. BTW, this was a Halloween special.

Many paranormal TV shows have featured this location. Paranormal Lockdown was there in 2016, Ghost Adventures was there in March of 2020 and The Holzer Files was there in November 2020. Nick Groff said that he felt as though whatever was in the castle was feeding off their energy or taking it from them. They caught a disembodied voice telling them to "Get out!" The Holzer Files visited the castle because Hans Holzer visited the castle when the Romano family lived there. Holzer actually visited three times and every time, his equipment malfunctioned. He always took medium Sybil Leek with him and she couldn't get a reading at the house before she and Hans had to leave. Hans called it "a frightful place filled with souls." The only thing left behind of the investigations was one reel of tape. The tape features Hans simply interviewing the family about their experiences. He wasn't trying to collect any paranormal evidence at the time and yet, there is the voice of a little girl on the tape. Supposedly, there was no little girl in the room at the time of the recording. 

Medium Cindy Kaza picked up on a woman who wanders the house and she was hearing that the kids were suffering and the kids were crying quite a bit. Then she did her trademark automatic writing. She picked up that this isn't a regular haunting and there was something like black magic or Satanic rituals and she felt very nauseous. Cindy had to get out. Equipment supervisor Shane Pittman went down into the basement and he was pushed by something he couldn't see and then later an ice-cold energy seemed to pass through him and it chilled him to his core. One of the Romanos' daughters, Dee, joined Dave Schrader for an interview. She was four-years-old when the family moved in and she clearly remembered playing with a little girl who lived in the house. She had blonde hair and wore a Victorian-era dress. She was never happy and was always crying. The little girl would say that she was waiting for her mother, so she seemed to feel abandoned. Dee said that her mom had rented out the fourth floor to some college students and one day she found a spirit board up there. This possibly was what Cindy was picking up on. Dee also said that the third time Hans visited that her mother told him to get out and she remembered her being very upset for a couple months after that. He was never invited back. In the end, the legends were debunked and the crew felt they had communicated with Emma for sure.

Historian Bill Krejci (Kree chee) lived in the castle during the winter and he hosted the crew from Ghost Adventures. We liked this guy. He was clearly angry about Hannes being dragged through the mud and most of these stories started in the 1980s because of a medium. She claimed that Hannes told her that he had murdered several people and where he committed these acts. Zak got argumentative with the guy and he clearly wanted to believe that Hannes killed somebody and hid the body in the wall. Zak went on to excitedly claim that he had heard another story connected to the family that Hannes and Luisa's son Carl had committed suicide in 1929 by jumping off a bridge. This was after the historian told him that all the Tiedemann children died before Hannes who died in 1908. On top of that, there was no son named Carl. A simple search revealed that Carl was the grandson of Hannes and the son of August. We don't know why Carl did this. A newspaper article does reveal the bizarre circumstances, but we don't think it was due to some curse on the family or the castle.

Zak also talked about the fire that happened when Michelle Heimberger owned the place. A man had set multiple fires inside and claimed he was trying to destroy the evil spirits inside. A former resident of the home named Helen Mirceta told Zak that she was pushed down the second floor stairs multiple times. She said she felt depressed and sad in the castle and she felt much better after they moved out. Her husband heard the cries of babies inside the walls. They placed an old tape recorder in a closet to see if they could capture the sounds and they caught an EVP of an angry man and a girl screaming. There was the sound of slapping also. Zac Webb lived in the castle in the summer of 2018 and he said he had many vivid dreams of an elderly lady questioning him about a murder in the castle. The crew did experience an interesting interaction with the spirit box. They asked for a name and got "it's Richard." They asked how many spirits were in the castle and got "17." Another spirit identified itself as "Lester." Aaron felt some energy come up behind him and then the box said "run." A female voice said to "help Richard." They caught a weird shadow figure and Zak felt like something was trying to push him down some stairs, They felt like most of the haunting stuff was psychological.

There may have been liquor smuggling going on when the German club was here. Tour guides tell stories of having a secret passage way that kept popping open and this had once hidden a still. The first to report this was a tour guide back in 1975 and he told the story to the Plain Dealer and a picture was shared revealing the secret area. A paperboy was delivering a paper to the castle when he watched a woman in white come through the door and float towards him. A young female ghost has been seen standing at an upstairs window and this is thought to be Emma. 

Beth A. Richards and Chuck L. Gove wrote "Haunted Cleveland" in 2015 and they share some stories in there. (p. 21-25)

Franklin Castle is mired in false legends that continue to be perpetrated by investigators. The truth though is tragic enough to leave a psychic impression on the castle. Emma passed as a teenager and seems to be separated from her mom and unable to get to her even though Luisa died on the property too. Is the Franklin Castle haunted? That is for you to decide!