August 4, 2026 • 20 mins
George Noory and historian William Krejci discuss the legends of ghosts and hauntings around Cleveland and Ohio including the haunted Franklin Castle, the site of killings and ghosts, and his own experience with a ghost messing with his stereo and a ghostly figure appearing in his window.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back, George nor with You author an investigative historian,
William Crachie's with US owner and operator and host of
these strange and Spooky Cleveland tours. He spends much of
his time investigating the origins of ghostly legends and urban lore,
and for six years was the resident historian of Cleveland's
famed Franklin Castle Beautiful Place, which is regarded by many
(00:27):
to be the most haunted house in Ohio. William, welcome
to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Good evening, Good evening, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
How did you get involved in these spooky things? Oh?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
That goes way back to it. I was about about
five years old or so. My family we're driving home
from my grandparents' house over here in Cleveland, heading back
home day on Lake and mom and dad decided they
would take the scenic round and that took us past
the Franklin Castle. Five years old and we get stopped
(01:02):
at the light there at the intersection, and my my
dad points straight ahead and says, hey, kids, look that's
a that's a real haunted house. And I'll tell you what.
My my joh just about hit the floor of the van,
and I'm like, wait, what ghosts are real? This is
a real thing. My dad never said anything that profound.
So I started asking a million questions of course that
(01:22):
he and my mother couldn't answer, and I was just
like so blown away by that. So after that, I
was like, I was just hooked, honestly.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So tell us about Franklin Castle. It's a beautiful place.
I've seen many pictures on there from their website. But
what happened a long time ago?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Yeah, Yeah, Franklin Castle. Yeah, it's a It's a beautiful
sandstone four storage structure on the west side of Cleveland
in the in the Ohio City neighborhood. So there are
there are all these stories about this house. Stories talk
about the original the original builder of the house. Legend
says that he was responsible for the number of deaths
(02:02):
of his family members a number of children, pushed his
wife to drink herself to death as another story. Another
tale talks about him having a mistress, a girl named
Rachel who it's It's accused of him of strangling on
her wedding night after she rejects his advances. Stories say
(02:24):
that he Ultimately Uh moves away from the house but
dies alone after remarrying a second time, and then his
second wife leaves him, realizing what kind of an abusive
man he is, and that he died. He dies alone
walking through a park.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
That's that's one of the stories that a lot of
a lot of the legends traced back to the original owner,
this man, his name was Honess Teeman Uh. And then
and then in later years there's stories that there was
a legal liquor production during the Prohibition era, that the
house was owned by Nazi organization, and in the years
leading up to World War Two there was no Nancy
(03:00):
spying going on in the house, and even a mass
execution spies in a hidden room up on the third floor.
We're We're then told that by the nineteen sixties it
comes into the hands of a family named the Romanos,
and that the day of the Romanos move in, they
start almost immediately experiencing paranormal activity, everything from witnessing a
(03:25):
little girl sitting near the top of the stairs a
girl in a white dress who's crying, to seeing a
woman in a black dress near the tower window up
in the third floor, doors open and close on their own.
They have lights that burn out. Within a couple of
weeks time, the things start moving around on their own footsteps,
ghostly footsteps, and disembodied voices echoing from empty rooms. Eventually
(03:51):
the family moves out, and then after that it starts
just changing hands every couple of years. One person even
does renovation and this some of some some discover human
remains in one of the hidden rooms upstairs in the
(04:12):
third floor. Uh, it's it's it really, it really is
a such a colorful story of that house. It was
later it was it was owned by Judy Garland's widowed husband.
A man named Michael Devinko had it for about years,
sells it to a a woman named Michelle Heiberg. She's
(04:33):
one of the earliest employees of Yahoo dot com. She
she loved this house when she was a kid. Buys
a house, starts fixing it up, and then somebody breaks
in and sets it on fire and towards just the
place and did extensive damage. And it said, board it
up for about a decade, and then the current owners
purchased it and started fixing it up. So it's it's
(04:53):
an incredible story. The back the legend, the backstory, of it,
but hardly a word of the original backstory way back
all those years ago. It is true. It's legend, and
it's war.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And it's I did find a lot of stuff aside,
So when you start doing research back in then nineties,
you tend to find a lot of stuff over the years.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
How old is a place for you?
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Well, it was built in eighteen eighty one, that's when
they broke ground on it, and it was completed in
very early eighteen eighty three. It's not the first house
to stand on the site though. There was a house
built between eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty one, and that's
the house that the Titamans lived in for the better
part of fifteen years before building the Franklin Castle. So
(05:42):
some of the people that are in the family that
died didn't even die in the Franklin Castle because it
wasn't even built yet. We're talking a couple of infant
children and mister and missus Tiedeman's daughter Emma, she died
when she was fifteen years old casualty in that first house,
(06:04):
and it was she died from diabetes. It was some
people suggested that Tiedeman himself might have had a hand
in her death, but it's pretty well documented that that
was her cause of death. And while she was shortly
before she died, mister Teeteman and his wife they broke
ground on a new house that they were building out
in Lakewood, one of the suburbs just to the west
of Cleveland. They probably had hopes that their daughter would
(06:26):
have lived to have seen it, but she didn't. She
passed away before that was even completed. And then when
it was finished, mister Tiedeman and his wife they moved
their family out to Lakewood for the next couple of years,
tore down that first house in Cleveland, and that's when
we see the Franklin Castle being built eighteen eighty one
to eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
And I know you're going to want some after hearing this.
This is an amazing story.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
We've got Stephen and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
Now I understand that Malachi, who is eight almost nine
years old now, was suffering with not just one or
two warts, but I mean as significant again, outbreak of
warts all over his body, so significant it impacted his
ability to really function.
Speaker 6 (07:05):
Yeah, yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil
to right. It was Tie's book actually that got me
thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
I'm not surprised.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
It is an amazing immunal modulator, and so I can
see that it would work. And so at what point
did you see that there was actually improvement it's really
going to work.
Speaker 6 (07:22):
Well, look, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.
You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller
and then going down to the with just little red marks.
The whole things are gone and we're talking about what's
you know one the size of the wanner. I thought,
no way, that's gonna Wow. That's just been miraculous to
see him get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Yes, how wonderful.
Speaker 6 (07:44):
It's great to see him so happy and.
Speaker 5 (07:45):
Yeah, confident, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Friends that have seen it, that is blown away.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Ti, this is awesome.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 7 (07:52):
Another amazing story. Why we're talking about Carnivora. Call them
to awaken your immune system and protect yourself now called
eight three six eighty seven thirty five. That's one eight
six six eight three six eighty seven thirty five, or
visit Carnivora dot com. C A R N I v
O R A Carnivora dot com.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Well, you lived there for six years? Did you see
anything strange or anything happen?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Did I ever? I should say that, Uh, And I
obviously I wasn't. I wasn't the first.
Speaker 6 (08:27):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
There were reports beyond the things that I said earlier.
One one person even witnessed a fantom missed on the
top of a staircase at one point. Yeah, I did.
I did see a number of things. I did have
a number of things happen to me, not not so much.
I didn't see the phantom missed, although when one television
(08:51):
show came in and recorded and at the end in
the reveal, they showed that they saw something like that.
But one night. It was the first year that I
was living there, and I was only there seasonally from
at the time, from about late October till late April.
The rest of the season, during the summer months, I
worked as a park Rangert Perry's Victory at put In
(09:12):
Bay Wonderful Monument, so I was there during the best
time during the off season, during the cold winter months. Well,
one night, I'm sitting in the office and I had
my desk in there, and I'm plugging away on my laptop,
and there are lights out in the hallway. Now they
come on on motion sensors, and they suddenly turned on,
(09:33):
but you actually you have to be out in the
corridor for these to come on. And I'm a little
beside myself. I'm kind of looking over my shoulders. I'm like, okay,
what's going on here? Then the lights turn off. Then
a few minutes later, I heard a very loud crashing
sound coming from downstairs in one of the main rooms,
and I went down there expecting somebody had broken in,
(09:58):
so I grabbed I ended up grabbing fire extinguisher, something
to use as a weaponing case, as an intruder, and
I went down into the main room and there were
no lights in there yet, and I didn't have a
flashlight on my phone. I was forty sixteen, so I
can't see anything in there, and it's pitch black, no
(10:20):
working lights in the room. So I end up going
back upstairs. I checked all the doors, everything was locked up,
and I went back to work. Well about an hour later,
the lights turned on again, and then they turn off
out in the hall out in that corridor, and then
a few minutes later there's another loud crashing sound from downstairs.
So I got one downstairs and I'm looking through the darkness.
(10:40):
I can't see anything. I end up calling my friend Matt,
he lives on the next street. He comes over. I'm like, yeah,
we got activity in the house. Dude, you're not gonna
believe it. Come on over. Of course, he arrives with
and everything stops, but he does have a flashlight and
we go into that main room and I can almost
immediately see what the two crashing sounds were. There was
(11:01):
a she'd apply up against one window across the room,
blocking it off, that is now lying about twelve feet
away in the middle of the room, lying on the floor.
What had been standing in the middle of the room
where it's lying was a six foot five or glass
step ladder that the electrician was working off of earlier
in the day. That is now clear across the room,
lying up against the wall. And I just look at
(11:24):
this and I'm just beside myself, and I said, okay,
let's go to the pub. So I went upstairs. I
just wanted to get out of there for a little bit,
pause my music. We went up to mcmaar's and come
back a couple hours later, and I walk in and
not only is my music now unpause, I had my
music playing earlier. It's not only is it unpaused, my
speakers are cranked all the way up. And I'm just
(11:47):
I'm like, okay. I did not leave it like that.
And at the time, I was the only person in
Kuyahoga County that had a key to the house, so
I was completely beside myself. That's mild as any activity went.
There were other times where I was upstairs trying to
sleep and I woke up to somebody running up the stairs.
(12:09):
There's a staircase.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Was it ongoing?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
William?
Speaker 3 (12:13):
These events, you know, these happened on and off during
the course of the six years that I was there,
and they still continue to this day. I was in
there just a couple of weeks ago and we had
some lights flickering on us and someone else hurt someone
walking around. And just last week and somebody had somebody
(12:34):
whisper in their air while we were upstairs talking. Two
girls heard this. So it would happen as frequently, as
I would say, every five minutes, when a light starts
to turn on and then turn off, then five minutes
later it turns on again, turns off, or it could
be as infrequently as every five weeks. Honestly, there would
(12:55):
be lulls where nothing happens at all, and it's the
house is nice and quiet, and then the next thing
you know, you hear a door slam near the front
of the house, and you like, go check it out.
What was that? And of course there's nobody there, And
there's nobody in the house except for you. You're the
only one. I woke up one morning somebody running up
(13:18):
the stairs. I thought it was a carpenter. I thought
it was his sun And then a few minutes later
I hear someone running back down the stairs and it's
a little child, laughing as they're running downstairs. So I
just figured he'd brought his family with him. I go
into the hall and the whole place is dark. There's
nobody there. I look at my clock. It's about four
twenty five in the morning. There is nobody there for
(13:40):
another three hours. So I was witnessed to that. That
was incredible. But one of the most chilling things that
happened to me in that house was waking up in
the middle of the night and I had a cabinet
in the corner with an old mantle clock on top
of it. Very special about it as a gift to
(14:00):
my great gray or to my grandparents when they got
married in the thirties. But I'm looking at this clock
and there is a bluish white light reflecting off the
front of the glass of this old clock. And at
first I thought maybe a street light. But I sat
up and I looked over, and that's not what it was.
I thought, maybe somebody is messing with me, shining a
flashlight in the window. But I'm up on the third floor.
(14:23):
This isn't happening. My eyes start to clear, and I'm
staring at this bluish white light. It takes on the
face of a man with big sideburns staring at me.
Imagine Jacob Marley's ghost on the door knocker and a
Christmas Carol, but without the bandage. And he has this
(14:45):
looked staring at me, just reflected off the glass. Then
he drops his head down, raises his eyebrows and has
this cringe and gives me this got off a lair.
And I just look looking at this and I said nope, no, no, no,
no no, And I just rolled over real quick and
I hid my face from this and I'm like, I'm
(15:06):
not seeing this. I am not seeing this. This is
not real. I'm not seeing this, and I'm not about
to turn around and look at it again. And I
just said I'm going to bed, I'm going back to sleep.
And the next morning it was, of course gone, and
I never saw it after that, Thank goodness, because it
was quite unsettling. And now I have photos of almost
(15:30):
everybody who had ever lived in that house. I mean,
you spend twenty five thirty years doing research on a
place like that, you tend to accumulate some things like that.
This person, whoever this was, does not look like anybody,
anybody at all that I have photos of that lived
in the house. Doesn't look like anyone from the Tietaman family.
(15:51):
Doesn't look like the second owner. There was a their
name was Mohauser. It doesn't look like Missus mohauser an
her children, her brother, doesn't look like him. Doctor Shirky,
the third owner, doesn't look like him either. I have
no idea who this person would have been, but it
was a little unsettling, to say the least.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Has everybody, will you who has lived in that house
seen something?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Not everybody not as such. I had interviewed numerous people,
as had John Myers, my co author on the book
Haunted Franklin Castle, and some people came forward immediately and said, oh, yes,
(16:40):
I saw this, I saw that this happened to me.
But some people would say, well, we were there the
entire time, we never had anything happen to us. There
were years where it was used as a There was
a German saying society that had it from nineteen twenty
one to about nineteen sixty seven sixty eight, and a
(17:01):
number of people that I interviewed who were there numerous
times during that era said that they never had anything
happen to them. But meanwhile, I have some friends who
are descendants of the third owner, doctor Shirky, and his family.
(17:22):
My friends tell me that their great grandmother, doctor Shirky's
daughter in law would tell them when they were young
that they moved out of the house. Things were moving
around on their own, and they were having their blankets
pulled off them while they were trying to sleep. And
the Shirkey family had the house from nineteen fifteen to
nineteen twenty one, so they were only the third owners,
(17:46):
and stories of the haunting really didn't emerge early until
the late nineteen sixties when the Romano family moved in.
So this was when my friends told me this, that
their great grandmother used to tell them this. This blew
my mind. This what's the story of the haunting? Fifty
years earlier than anybody had ever imagined or had ever heard.
(18:09):
Of course, a lot of times you wouldn't go telling people, Hey,
our beautiful house is haunted. You didn't say that very
often because, of course, especially back then, if you did,
you ended up with a whole army of people and
curiosity seekers in your front yard. And of course it
would make the papers. It did quite frequently in the
(18:29):
later years when the Romanos bought it. But back then,
you go back another fifty years earlier, Yeah, you would
have papers having a field day with it, day after
day running stories about the haunted house on Franklin. And
you get every colorful, imaginable person showing up at the
door offering to do battle against the ghost or drive
(18:50):
them from your home, or you get like fifty to
one hundred people wanting to come inside every evening to
see the ghosts. So and then your family doesn't get
a moment's piece, is it.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Is it primarily a tourist location.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Uh, well, I it is. Uh it is open for
overnight stays. Uh so, so people can't stay and the
owners have converted part of the house three suites. There
are three guest suites that are available, but also we
do host haunted history tours there.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
There are tarot rehinging events there and towards attached and
then the owners also have special events. They have some
coming up this this fall that are that are planned
for the house. So uh, but it's it's not a
private residence anymore, even like when I was living there.
(19:48):
I was there, like I said, six months at a
time for the better part of six years. But it's yeah,
so it's not exactly a private residence in that sense.
But I wouldn't say a tourist attra action quite either.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
Though.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
It's it's being wonderfully restored right now. That's they're they're
the owners are nearing the conclusion of the restoration of
the house too.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Listen to more Coast to Coast a m every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
coastam dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back, George nor with You author an investigative historian,
William Crachie's with US owner and operator and host of
these strange and Spooky Cleveland tours. He spends much of
his time investigating the origins of ghostly legends and urban lore,
and for six years was the resident historian of Cleveland's
famed Franklin Castle Beautiful Place, which is regarded by many
(00:27):
to be the most haunted house in Ohio. William, welcome
to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Good evening, Good evening, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
How did you get involved in these spooky things? Oh?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
That goes way back to it. I was about about
five years old or so. My family we're driving home
from my grandparents' house over here in Cleveland, heading back
home day on Lake and mom and dad decided they
would take the scenic round and that took us past
the Franklin Castle. Five years old and we get stopped
(01:02):
at the light there at the intersection, and my my
dad points straight ahead and says, hey, kids, look that's
a that's a real haunted house. And I'll tell you what.
My my joh just about hit the floor of the van,
and I'm like, wait, what ghosts are real? This is
a real thing. My dad never said anything that profound.
So I started asking a million questions of course that
(01:22):
he and my mother couldn't answer, and I was just
like so blown away by that. So after that, I
was like, I was just hooked, honestly.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So tell us about Franklin Castle. It's a beautiful place.
I've seen many pictures on there from their website. But
what happened a long time ago?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Yeah, Yeah, Franklin Castle. Yeah, it's a It's a beautiful
sandstone four storage structure on the west side of Cleveland
in the in the Ohio City neighborhood. So there are
there are all these stories about this house. Stories talk
about the original the original builder of the house. Legend
says that he was responsible for the number of deaths
(02:02):
of his family members a number of children, pushed his
wife to drink herself to death as another story. Another
tale talks about him having a mistress, a girl named
Rachel who it's It's accused of him of strangling on
her wedding night after she rejects his advances. Stories say
(02:24):
that he Ultimately Uh moves away from the house but
dies alone after remarrying a second time, and then his
second wife leaves him, realizing what kind of an abusive
man he is, and that he died. He dies alone
walking through a park.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
That's that's one of the stories that a lot of
a lot of the legends traced back to the original owner,
this man, his name was Honess Teeman Uh. And then
and then in later years there's stories that there was
a legal liquor production during the Prohibition era, that the
house was owned by Nazi organization, and in the years
leading up to World War Two there was no Nancy
(03:00):
spying going on in the house, and even a mass
execution spies in a hidden room up on the third floor.
We're We're then told that by the nineteen sixties it
comes into the hands of a family named the Romanos,
and that the day of the Romanos move in, they
start almost immediately experiencing paranormal activity, everything from witnessing a
(03:25):
little girl sitting near the top of the stairs a
girl in a white dress who's crying, to seeing a
woman in a black dress near the tower window up
in the third floor, doors open and close on their own.
They have lights that burn out. Within a couple of
weeks time, the things start moving around on their own footsteps,
ghostly footsteps, and disembodied voices echoing from empty rooms. Eventually
(03:51):
the family moves out, and then after that it starts
just changing hands every couple of years. One person even
does renovation and this some of some some discover human
remains in one of the hidden rooms upstairs in the
(04:12):
third floor. Uh, it's it's it really, it really is
a such a colorful story of that house. It was
later it was it was owned by Judy Garland's widowed husband.
A man named Michael Devinko had it for about years,
sells it to a a woman named Michelle Heiberg. She's
(04:33):
one of the earliest employees of Yahoo dot com. She
she loved this house when she was a kid. Buys
a house, starts fixing it up, and then somebody breaks
in and sets it on fire and towards just the
place and did extensive damage. And it said, board it
up for about a decade, and then the current owners
purchased it and started fixing it up. So it's it's
(04:53):
an incredible story. The back the legend, the backstory, of it,
but hardly a word of the original backstory way back
all those years ago. It is true. It's legend, and
it's war.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And it's I did find a lot of stuff aside,
So when you start doing research back in then nineties,
you tend to find a lot of stuff over the years.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
How old is a place for you?
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Well, it was built in eighteen eighty one, that's when
they broke ground on it, and it was completed in
very early eighteen eighty three. It's not the first house
to stand on the site though. There was a house
built between eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty one, and that's
the house that the Titamans lived in for the better
part of fifteen years before building the Franklin Castle. So
(05:42):
some of the people that are in the family that
died didn't even die in the Franklin Castle because it
wasn't even built yet. We're talking a couple of infant
children and mister and missus Tiedeman's daughter Emma, she died
when she was fifteen years old casualty in that first house,
(06:04):
and it was she died from diabetes. It was some
people suggested that Tiedeman himself might have had a hand
in her death, but it's pretty well documented that that
was her cause of death. And while she was shortly
before she died, mister Teeteman and his wife they broke
ground on a new house that they were building out
in Lakewood, one of the suburbs just to the west
of Cleveland. They probably had hopes that their daughter would
(06:26):
have lived to have seen it, but she didn't. She
passed away before that was even completed. And then when
it was finished, mister Tiedeman and his wife they moved
their family out to Lakewood for the next couple of years,
tore down that first house in Cleveland, and that's when
we see the Franklin Castle being built eighteen eighty one
to eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
And I know you're going to want some after hearing this.
This is an amazing story.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
We've got Stephen and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
Now I understand that Malachi, who is eight almost nine
years old now, was suffering with not just one or
two warts, but I mean as significant again, outbreak of
warts all over his body, so significant it impacted his
ability to really function.
Speaker 6 (07:05):
Yeah, yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil
to right. It was Tie's book actually that got me
thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
I'm not surprised.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
It is an amazing immunal modulator, and so I can
see that it would work. And so at what point
did you see that there was actually improvement it's really
going to work.
Speaker 6 (07:22):
Well, look, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.
You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller
and then going down to the with just little red marks.
The whole things are gone and we're talking about what's
you know one the size of the wanner. I thought,
no way, that's gonna Wow. That's just been miraculous to
see him get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Yes, how wonderful.
Speaker 6 (07:44):
It's great to see him so happy and.
Speaker 5 (07:45):
Yeah, confident, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Friends that have seen it, that is blown away.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Ti, this is awesome.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 7 (07:52):
Another amazing story. Why we're talking about Carnivora. Call them
to awaken your immune system and protect yourself now called
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Speaker 2 (08:14):
Well, you lived there for six years? Did you see
anything strange or anything happen?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Did I ever? I should say that, Uh, And I
obviously I wasn't. I wasn't the first.
Speaker 6 (08:27):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
There were reports beyond the things that I said earlier.
One one person even witnessed a fantom missed on the
top of a staircase at one point. Yeah, I did.
I did see a number of things. I did have
a number of things happen to me, not not so much.
I didn't see the phantom missed, although when one television
(08:51):
show came in and recorded and at the end in
the reveal, they showed that they saw something like that.
But one night. It was the first year that I
was living there, and I was only there seasonally from
at the time, from about late October till late April.
The rest of the season, during the summer months, I
worked as a park Rangert Perry's Victory at put In
(09:12):
Bay Wonderful Monument, so I was there during the best
time during the off season, during the cold winter months. Well,
one night, I'm sitting in the office and I had
my desk in there, and I'm plugging away on my laptop,
and there are lights out in the hallway. Now they
come on on motion sensors, and they suddenly turned on,
(09:33):
but you actually you have to be out in the
corridor for these to come on. And I'm a little
beside myself. I'm kind of looking over my shoulders. I'm like, okay,
what's going on here? Then the lights turn off. Then
a few minutes later, I heard a very loud crashing
sound coming from downstairs in one of the main rooms,
and I went down there expecting somebody had broken in,
(09:58):
so I grabbed I ended up grabbing fire extinguisher, something
to use as a weaponing case, as an intruder, and
I went down into the main room and there were
no lights in there yet, and I didn't have a
flashlight on my phone. I was forty sixteen, so I
can't see anything in there, and it's pitch black, no
(10:20):
working lights in the room. So I end up going
back upstairs. I checked all the doors, everything was locked up,
and I went back to work. Well about an hour later,
the lights turned on again, and then they turn off
out in the hall out in that corridor, and then
a few minutes later there's another loud crashing sound from downstairs.
So I got one downstairs and I'm looking through the darkness.
(10:40):
I can't see anything. I end up calling my friend Matt,
he lives on the next street. He comes over. I'm like, yeah,
we got activity in the house. Dude, you're not gonna
believe it. Come on over. Of course, he arrives with
and everything stops, but he does have a flashlight and
we go into that main room and I can almost
immediately see what the two crashing sounds were. There was
(11:01):
a she'd apply up against one window across the room,
blocking it off, that is now lying about twelve feet
away in the middle of the room, lying on the floor.
What had been standing in the middle of the room
where it's lying was a six foot five or glass
step ladder that the electrician was working off of earlier
in the day. That is now clear across the room,
lying up against the wall. And I just look at
(11:24):
this and I'm just beside myself, and I said, okay,
let's go to the pub. So I went upstairs. I
just wanted to get out of there for a little bit,
pause my music. We went up to mcmaar's and come
back a couple hours later, and I walk in and
not only is my music now unpause, I had my
music playing earlier. It's not only is it unpaused, my
speakers are cranked all the way up. And I'm just
(11:47):
I'm like, okay. I did not leave it like that.
And at the time, I was the only person in
Kuyahoga County that had a key to the house, so
I was completely beside myself. That's mild as any activity went.
There were other times where I was upstairs trying to
sleep and I woke up to somebody running up the stairs.
(12:09):
There's a staircase.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Was it ongoing?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
William?
Speaker 3 (12:13):
These events, you know, these happened on and off during
the course of the six years that I was there,
and they still continue to this day. I was in
there just a couple of weeks ago and we had
some lights flickering on us and someone else hurt someone
walking around. And just last week and somebody had somebody
(12:34):
whisper in their air while we were upstairs talking. Two
girls heard this. So it would happen as frequently, as
I would say, every five minutes, when a light starts
to turn on and then turn off, then five minutes
later it turns on again, turns off, or it could
be as infrequently as every five weeks. Honestly, there would
(12:55):
be lulls where nothing happens at all, and it's the
house is nice and quiet, and then the next thing
you know, you hear a door slam near the front
of the house, and you like, go check it out.
What was that? And of course there's nobody there, And
there's nobody in the house except for you. You're the
only one. I woke up one morning somebody running up
(13:18):
the stairs. I thought it was a carpenter. I thought
it was his sun And then a few minutes later
I hear someone running back down the stairs and it's
a little child, laughing as they're running downstairs. So I
just figured he'd brought his family with him. I go
into the hall and the whole place is dark. There's
nobody there. I look at my clock. It's about four
twenty five in the morning. There is nobody there for
(13:40):
another three hours. So I was witnessed to that. That
was incredible. But one of the most chilling things that
happened to me in that house was waking up in
the middle of the night and I had a cabinet
in the corner with an old mantle clock on top
of it. Very special about it as a gift to
(14:00):
my great gray or to my grandparents when they got
married in the thirties. But I'm looking at this clock
and there is a bluish white light reflecting off the
front of the glass of this old clock. And at
first I thought maybe a street light. But I sat
up and I looked over, and that's not what it was.
I thought, maybe somebody is messing with me, shining a
flashlight in the window. But I'm up on the third floor.
(14:23):
This isn't happening. My eyes start to clear, and I'm
staring at this bluish white light. It takes on the
face of a man with big sideburns staring at me.
Imagine Jacob Marley's ghost on the door knocker and a
Christmas Carol, but without the bandage. And he has this
(14:45):
looked staring at me, just reflected off the glass. Then
he drops his head down, raises his eyebrows and has
this cringe and gives me this got off a lair.
And I just look looking at this and I said nope, no, no, no,
no no, And I just rolled over real quick and
I hid my face from this and I'm like, I'm
(15:06):
not seeing this. I am not seeing this. This is
not real. I'm not seeing this, and I'm not about
to turn around and look at it again. And I
just said I'm going to bed, I'm going back to sleep.
And the next morning it was, of course gone, and
I never saw it after that, Thank goodness, because it
was quite unsettling. And now I have photos of almost
(15:30):
everybody who had ever lived in that house. I mean,
you spend twenty five thirty years doing research on a
place like that, you tend to accumulate some things like that.
This person, whoever this was, does not look like anybody,
anybody at all that I have photos of that lived
in the house. Doesn't look like anyone from the Tietaman family.
(15:51):
Doesn't look like the second owner. There was a their
name was Mohauser. It doesn't look like Missus mohauser an
her children, her brother, doesn't look like him. Doctor Shirky,
the third owner, doesn't look like him either. I have
no idea who this person would have been, but it
was a little unsettling, to say the least.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Has everybody, will you who has lived in that house
seen something?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Not everybody not as such. I had interviewed numerous people,
as had John Myers, my co author on the book
Haunted Franklin Castle, and some people came forward immediately and said, oh, yes,
(16:40):
I saw this, I saw that this happened to me.
But some people would say, well, we were there the
entire time, we never had anything happen to us. There
were years where it was used as a There was
a German saying society that had it from nineteen twenty
one to about nineteen sixty seven sixty eight, and a
(17:01):
number of people that I interviewed who were there numerous
times during that era said that they never had anything
happen to them. But meanwhile, I have some friends who
are descendants of the third owner, doctor Shirky, and his family.
(17:22):
My friends tell me that their great grandmother, doctor Shirky's
daughter in law would tell them when they were young
that they moved out of the house. Things were moving
around on their own, and they were having their blankets
pulled off them while they were trying to sleep. And
the Shirkey family had the house from nineteen fifteen to
nineteen twenty one, so they were only the third owners,
(17:46):
and stories of the haunting really didn't emerge early until
the late nineteen sixties when the Romano family moved in.
So this was when my friends told me this, that
their great grandmother used to tell them this. This blew
my mind. This what's the story of the haunting? Fifty
years earlier than anybody had ever imagined or had ever heard.
(18:09):
Of course, a lot of times you wouldn't go telling people, Hey,
our beautiful house is haunted. You didn't say that very
often because, of course, especially back then, if you did,
you ended up with a whole army of people and
curiosity seekers in your front yard. And of course it
would make the papers. It did quite frequently in the
(18:29):
later years when the Romanos bought it. But back then,
you go back another fifty years earlier, Yeah, you would
have papers having a field day with it, day after
day running stories about the haunted house on Franklin. And
you get every colorful, imaginable person showing up at the
door offering to do battle against the ghost or drive
(18:50):
them from your home, or you get like fifty to
one hundred people wanting to come inside every evening to
see the ghosts. So and then your family doesn't get
a moment's piece, is it.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Is it primarily a tourist location.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Uh, well, I it is. Uh it is open for
overnight stays. Uh so, so people can't stay and the
owners have converted part of the house three suites. There
are three guest suites that are available, but also we
do host haunted history tours there.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
There are tarot rehinging events there and towards attached and
then the owners also have special events. They have some
coming up this this fall that are that are planned
for the house. So uh, but it's it's not a
private residence anymore, even like when I was living there.
(19:48):
I was there, like I said, six months at a
time for the better part of six years. But it's yeah,
so it's not exactly a private residence in that sense.
But I wouldn't say a tourist attra action quite either.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
Though.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
It's it's being wonderfully restored right now. That's they're they're
the owners are nearing the conclusion of the restoration of
the house too.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Listen to more Coast to Coast a m every weeknight
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