Ohio
Girl of the Lilacs
Bucyrus
For some men there is only one woman. It is as if love, once bestowed, is spent and cannot be given ever again. Frank Burbank was that kind of man. Ethel Hanley was the woman he loved. She loved him in return. Their devotion to one another transcended death.
One day in late May 1900, Frank Burbank, a surveyor in the Bucyrus office of the Ohio State Highway Commission, was inspecting land a few miles beyond town that the highway commission had arranged to buy. The acreage was part of a farm owned by a Mr. Hanley.
As Burbank and his assistant, Ted Davis, tramped across the fields, Frank felt the heavy heat that was more reminiscent of a July day. Summer had definitely arrived. The daffodils and tulips had already finished blooming and were now replaced by climbing roses and clematis.
Frank led the way up a hill. At the crest, the men paused to catch their breath. Laughing voices came from a white clapboard house a short distance away. The house was bordered by flowers and shrubs. But what caught Frank’s eye was a girl, radiant in a white ruffled dress. Hair the color of corn silk spilled over her shoulders, and in her arms she cradled a bouquet of fragrant white lilacs.
It was several moments before Frank saw the photographer with the black cloth draped over his head.
This girl with the lilacs was having her picture taken. A woman stood watching from the doorway of the house and two small children romped playfully at the photographer’s feet.
Frank then noticed a rough wooden sign nailed to a nearby tree:
COLD BUTTERMILK SERVED
He turned to Ted Davis.
“Ted, I won’t be going back to Bucyrus,” he smiled, jerking his thumb at the sign. “I need my daily glass of buttermilk.”
Frank never drank buttermilk. Ted knew that. He laughed and reminded his boss that there would be a full moon that night. Then he set off alone back down the path to town.
Mr. and Mrs. Hanley greeted Frank warmly and invited him to stay for dinner. They knew the surveyor by his good reputation. In fact it seemed nearly everyone in the small town knew Frank Burbank to be a hardworking and dependable young man who was saving for further schooling; he planned to become a fully qualified civil engineer.
As Mrs. Hanley bustled around the kitchen, she explained that the photographer had been engaged to take her daughter’s graduation picture. The final stitching of the white organdy dress had not been finished, she said, but that would not show in a photograph. There were many other preparations also to be made for the occasion. Mrs. Hanley was cheerful and easygoing, without pretension, and Frank liked her immediately. She put him at ease and so did her daughter, Ethel. At the dinner table Frank could not take his eyes off her and wondered if the others noticed. At the age of twenty-eight he had fallen head over heels in love at first sight.
After the meal Frank offered to help with the dishes, but Mrs. Hanley would not hear of it. Instead he played with Ethel’s little brother, Sammy, and the child’s orphaned cousin, Addie, who lived with the family.
Later that evening, Frank and Ethel walked down to the meadow and sat on the stone foundation wall of an old hay barn. The rocks held the heat of day and in a number of places wild roses grew, covering the crumbling wall with splashes of pink and red. The lambent light of the rising full moon bleached Ethel’s light hair bone white. When she saw that Frank was looking at it, she unpinned the bun and her long locks cascaded across her shoulders and down her back.
The gesture made a statement, wove a spell.
“Frank, when will you be leaving Bucyrus?” Ethel said, breaking the silence. “I mean when will you finish your surveying work here?”
Frank detected the slightest tremor in her voice and chose his words with care. He stood up and faced her.
“I could stay here, Ethel, in Bucyrus, as long as you want me to,” he said, reaching down to grasp both of her hands in his.
She smiled up at him. Frank pulled her into his arms.
Frank Burbank accompanied the Hanleys to the graduation exercises a few days later. Ethel, as valedictorian, gave the class oration, and Frank thought she looked lovelier than ever in her white dress with the blue sash. Tucked into the sash was a spray of white lilacs he had given her that afternoon. Lilacs and Ethel. They naturally belonged together, like peaches and cream, moonlight and romance. The thought of one reminded him of the other. Lost in these pleasant thoughts, Frank hardly heard what Ethel was saying up on the small stage. He was certain of only one thing: he was going to marry Ethel Hanley.
The next day Frank asked Ethel’s father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He could scarcely conceal his disappointment when her father said no.
“She’s only seventeen,” the old man said, shaking his head. “That’s too young. If you wait two years, until she’s nineteen, I assure you I will give my consent. That’s how old her mother was when we got married.”
He extended his hand to Frank, and the men shook on the promise.
In the fall, Frank Burbank moved to Cincinnati to study engineering. The night before he left Bucyrus, Ethel gave him a copy of her graduation picture. He found a room in a small boardinghouse and worked nights at a newspaper office to earn part of his expenses. The acute loneliness he felt at first was eased by his immersion into his studies and by Ethel’s many letters. Frank kept her photograph on his bedside table. Each time he looked at the smiling girl in white he was intoxicated by the memory of the fragrance of the lilacs she held in her hands. It was as if the flowers had come to life within his room.
Meanwhile, Ethel filled her days and weeks to exhaustion so they would pass quickly. She helped with the housework and the care of the younger children. She was a hard worker who also helped with many of the outside farm chores.
She bore her father no grudge for his refusal to permit her marriage. She knew he had acted with her best interests in mind.
Two years later to the day, Frank Burbank returned to Bucyrus, a bona fide engineer. Ethel took the buggy to meet his train. As they drove up the hill toward the Hanley farm, Ethel needed to keep a strong hand on the reins.
“That’s a new horse, isn’t it?” said Frank.
Ethel laughed. “Yes, and he’s so nervous he shies at his own shadow. Don’t you, Bill?”
Frank grew uneasy. Skittish horses were always undependable.
The Hanleys rejoiced in Frank’s homecoming and set the wedding date for Ethel’s birthday, the fifth of June, two weeks away.
The following Sunday afternoon Ethel planned to show Frank a small house that was for sale out on Mansfield Road. Her father had taken the horse out that morning to drive her mother to church in Greggsville. She asked her father if Bill would be too worn out to be hitched up again so soon.
“I don’t think so,” said her father, “but he’s real jittery for being twelve years old. He acts like a two-year-old. Better let Frank drive. And tell him to be careful.”
Ethel went upstairs to change into the new dress she had bought to surprise Frank. It was white, of course, with a lace-trimmed ruffle at the waist. She put on a pale-blue straw bonnet with loops of dark-blue satin on the brim. As a final touch she pinned a spray of white lilacs to the ribbon.
Frank caught sight of Ethel starting down the stairway and caught his breath. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She ran toward him and he swept her up into his arms.
The air was humid and still, the sun warm on their skin, a perfect day for a drive. Spring had been unseasonably long again that year and, in the protracted heat, the flowers had begun to lose color. The snowy apple blossoms had turned brown and the lilacs in the dooryards were starting to fade.
Setting off down the road, Bill trotted along at a steady, comfortable pace. Frank held the reins loosely. Ethel sat beside him on the buggy seat, commenting on the scenery and the houses of people she knew as they passed.
They had not gone far when Frank pulled to the side of the road to permit a fringed-top surrey to pass. A young woman with fiery-red hair and a large, green bow on her saucy bonnet waved from the front seat.
“Hello, Ethel!” the girl called.
Ethel returned the greeting. After the surrey had passed, she turned to Frank.
“That was my friend, Zelia Murdock. You met her at the graduation dance. Remember?”
“I saw only one girl at the dance.” Frank grinned and reached to squeeze Ethel’s hand. “But a red-haired girl driving a white horse is a good luck omen, I think. Let’s make a wish, shall we?”
They both laughed. Frank commented on the newly painted silo on the Hawkes’s farm and the nice condition of the Murdock home directly across the road. It was neat and attractive, but he promised Ethel that one day they would have an even finer place.
Just beyond the two farms was Hawkes’s Hill, at the bottom of which was a stone bridge spanning a narrow, weed-choked stream.
As Bill started the descent, a boy on a bicycle shot across in front of them from a side road. Frank tightened the reins and pulled up some. Bill shied and snorted anyway, then reared up and leaped forward, snapping the horizontal crossbar of the buggy to which the harness traces were attached.
Wild with fright, the horse plunged down the hill, sending the careening buggy slamming against a bridge parapet. Ethel was thrown from her seat and struck her head on the bridge abutment. She died instantly.
Frank Burbank left Bucyrus immediately after Ethel’s funeral. For three years he moved around the country, working in one city after another, trying in vain to shake his grief. He carried in his mind the picture of his beloved lying crumpled in his arms at the foot of Hawkes’s Hill.
Then one day in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he decided that he was done living such a nomadic life. He wrote to his former boss, Will Taylor, in Bucyrus. Was there an opening in the state highway commission there? If so, he wanted it, whatever the job was.
And so Frank returned. The job he was offered was keeping the books for the commission, hardly worthy of his advanced education, but it was enough. He did occasional surveying and on Sundays took long walks alone in the countryside.
Except for visits to the Hanleys, Frank saw few people socially. Mrs. Hanley often remarked to her husband how much Frank had changed. He never smiled and the light had gone out of his eyes; his whole face seemed immobilized, as if set in concrete.
One day in October, when the maples flamed in the woodlots, Frank walked along the highway’s edge. A buggy pulled up beside him and a young woman called out. “Hello there. Aren’t you Frank Burbank?”
He looked up at the woman holding the reins and nodded. She smiled down at him. “I’m Zelia Murdock. I’ll be happy to give you a ride into Bucyrus.”
Frank did not know if she had changed, but he doubted that he would have recognized her had she not introduced herself.
“I’m going to the Hanleys for supper, Miss Murdock,” said Frank.
“Get in,” she said. “I’ll be glad to drive you there.”
The waning light gilded wisps of red hair that curled beneath the brim of her bonnet. Frank hopped up beside her and the horse trotted on down the road.
After supper, Frank sat in the kitchen watching the children play and listening to Mrs. Hanley’s small talk that once made him feel so comfortable. Now the words seemed harsh and distant, like he was listening from a great distance. Part of the time he sensed that she was questioning him, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
When he left, he stopped at the lilac bush beside the millstone. Snapping off a bare twig, he passed it beneath his nose and sighed.
“The scent of lilacs is strong tonight,” said Frank, thinking he was alone.
But from the darkened doorway, Mrs. Hanley saw and heard and was perplexed.
No one was surprised when the marriage of Zelia Murdock and Frank Burbank took place. Zelia was headstrong and always got what she wanted. In Frank she got a consort with whom she had three children. That was all, though. She did not capture his heart as Ethel had, nor even share his thoughts; she seemed not to care for such depth of intimacy.
Zelia inherited wealth and, with hired help to care for the large house and to look after the two boys and their sister, she devoted her time to various clubs and social pursuits. She organized her life around her own interests. Frank was left to his own devices.
The first thing Frank did upon moving onto the Murdock farm was to plant white lilac bushes. Some he bought from nurseries, some he bought from farmers who were thinning out dooryard hedges, and others he dug up from old, abandoned places. In every free moment he wandered the hills and valley of the Scioto River searching for yet another lilac bush.
On a raw March day filled with strong winds, Frank went to the Hanley farm, where he had offered to help unload fertilizer. By late afternoon the men finished the work and Frank climbed into his buggy to leave for home. As he was about to drive off, he thought he saw a woman standing down by the old hay barn foundation. Frank climbed out of the buggy and tied the reins to a hitching post. He started down the path to see who it could have been at this hour and on such a foul day. He had gone only a few steps when he was overcome by the heady perfume of lilacs.
He turned to look back at the big lilac bush. The branches were bare. When he looked again toward the place where the barn had stood he saw her clearly. A young girl in a white dress and a wide, blue bonnet smiled up at him. He cried out and ran toward her. But the apparition faded, swallowed by the shadows of the coming night. Frank Burbank sat for a long time on the cold stones of the crumbling wall, his head cradled in his arms.
The hunting was good that fall; quail and partridge were especially plentiful. On a November afternoon Frank took his gun and his setter, Sport, out to try his luck. The air was clear and crisp.
When Frank reached a dense thicket at the foot of the hill on which the Hanley farm lay, he whistled for the dog, which had raced on ahead.
The setter came bounding up to him trembling and whining with hackles raised. Frank looked in the direction the dog was staring. A girl in a white dress was coming toward them down the steep hill, from the direction of the Hanley farmhouse. She approached slowly; her feet did not quite seem to touch the ground. The network of branches and twigs that blocked her way never bent to permit her passage; the apparition passed right through them. Then, for just a moment she stood smiling, a luminous figure pierced by sapling twigs.
Frank once asked Mrs. Hanley if she had ever been aware of her daughter’s presence.
The woman nodded. “Once I thought I saw her walking down by the ruins of the old hay barn.”
Mrs. Hanley sighed and looked away. “But I guess it was just a trick of the moonlight.”
When Frank Burbank’s daughter, Joan, turned eighteen, Zelia gave a dinner-dance in her honor. Before the guests began to arrive, Frank wandered into the dining room. Joan stood by the bay window. Her father thought she looked radiant in her new apple-green silk gown and told her so.
“Daddy,” she began, “something strange is going on in the garden. A woman has been pacing out there by the white lilac hedge. She’s young, about my age, and she’s wearing a white dress and a broad-brimmed bonnet. She seems to float in and out of the lilacs. At first I thought it was one of my friends playing a trick on me, but when I went out I couldn’t find anybody. I’m sure I saw her. I was standing right here watching.”
Frank looked out but saw no one.
The doorbell rang and Joan hurried to answer. Frank did not greet the guests. Too many people around often oppressed him, even his own children whom he loved.
No, it was the soft, fragrant air of May that made him restless. At times his restlessness, his loneliness, seemed unbearable. He stared now into nothingness until Zelia came for him.
After dinner, more guests arrived and the dancing began. Frank knew the party would last far into the night for Zelia was an untiring hostess. He slipped unnoticed out the back door and for a while walked aimlessly through the gathering twilight. Then he struck out along the brook that skirted the Hanleys’ hill.
Far ahead he saw a light in their kitchen.
Before Frank realized how far he had come, he reached the thicket at the base of the hill. He stopped suddenly. A girl in white was dancing on the hillside. With her arms extended, she glided in and out among the trees.
Frank’s eyes misted and his heart ached with a young man’s desire. Tonight Ethel would not elude him. He sprang forward; the figure floated backward, gesturing for him to follow.
He fought the tangled branches, his eyes riveted on the apparition that kept receding farther up the hillside. He had almost reached her when she raised her arm and tossed something toward him. Whatever it was fell at his feet. He stooped over to pick it up. When he looked again, she was gone.
In his hand he held a spray of fresh lilacs.
H. P. and Son
Cleveland
Cleveland businessman H. P. Lillibridge was at work one morning, dictating a letter, when he saw the image of his son hovering a few feet from his desk, his face covered with blood.
Lillibridge paled and put a hand to his head. It was throbbing. When his secretary asked if he was ill, he said no. But he knew then that his boy, Joe, serving as the captain of a freighter somewhere at sea, had been seriously injured or worse.
Lillibridge hurriedly finished his dictation and went home to lunch.
He picked at his meal uncaringly then took a brisk walk to calm himself. He and his son were very close. They shared the same likes and dislikes, habits and opinions, and often, each knew what the other was thinking and feeling. People often remarked that they seemed more like brothers than father and son. Joe captained a freighter as his father had in his own youth; each man started as a common sailor. Lillibridge wrote to his son regularly, and Joe, who had no time for long letters, kept a daily log that he mailed to his father whenever he was in port.
That afternoon back at his office, H. P. sat at his desk and wrote a detailed account of all he had seen in his vision. Putting the paper in an envelope, he sealed it and addressed it to himself. Then he sent for Willis, the cashier.
“Willis,” he began, tapping the envelope against his fingers, “please seal this in a large envelope, address it to yourself, and put it in the safe.”
“Yes, sir, of course.”
“Right away, please.”
“I understand, sir,” said Willis, taking the envelope.
But Willis did not understand. He had never before been asked to carry out such an odd assignment. A double-sealed letter in the safe with the money and important company papers?
Willis remarked about the peculiar request to the secretary. She too was perplexed. She told Willis that their boss had seemed confused that morning and she wondered if he had suffered a stroke.
But Willis did as he was told. The envelope was mailed, then received by him and secured in the safe. Days passed and every time Willis opened the safe he saw the large envelope and wondered anew at its contents.
Seven weeks after Lillibridge wrote the letter, Joe Lillibridge’s latest log arrived from Melbourne, Australia. H. P. called his brother, who was one of his partners, to his office, then summoned the cashier to bring his sealed letter from the safe.
Willis delivered the envelope, leaving a damp thumbprint in one corner. Standing to one side of the desk, he watched Lillibridge slit the envelope open cleanly with a silver letter opener. Lillibridge shook out the sheets of paper, adjusted his glasses, and began reading in a clear voice to his brother and his cashier.
Weeks earlier, H. P. Lillibridge wrote that he had seen a vision of an uprising on his son’s ship during which Joe was struck twice in the head by a piece of iron pipe. Joe was badly injured and bleeding profusely.
Lillibridge put aside the letter, then turned to his son’s log. Lillibridge’s brother and the cashier paled as they listened to Joe’s account of a mutiny aboard his ship; it paralleled the father’s account in nearly every detail except that Joe survived his serious injuries. Allowing for time and date differences, the father had “seen” his son’s apparition at the exact time of the mutiny.
Four years later, Joe Lillibridge died of sunstroke in the South Seas. But his close association with his father extended beyond the grave. H. P. Lillibridge said he frequently received messages directly from Joe and often saw his ghost. On one occasion the apparition warned his father to avoid an unsafe business deal. He heeded the advice, which had proven to be prescient.
H. P. and Joe Lillibridge remained “close,” until H. P.’s own death many years later. It made him certain that the bonds between parents and children can remain close even beyond death.
An Invitation
Willis
The hobo was not sure how many miles he had ridden in the boxcar before he decided to go back. He did not know exactly why, but there was something in young Sam’s face that disturbed him, something that communicated an unspoken need. The man recalled that he had been about Sam’s age when his own father had died. So when the engineer slowed the train at a rural crossing, he jumped off and hitchhiked from the middle of nowhere back to Willis, Ohio.
On the trip back, he wearily reflected on the bizarre events of the day before. It seemed as if it was all part of a dream, yet as he processed the entire evening’s events, he realized that everything had indeed taken place.
During a driving rainstorm the previous night, the hobo had crawled off a freight train in the now-vanished village of Willis. Shivering in a light jacket and thin pants, he sloshed through the deserted rail yard. Suddenly, someone spoke to him. “It’s sure a bad night.”
The hobo looked up to see a man wearing a slicker with a rain hat pulled low over his forehead.
“You got a place to stay?” asked the man. “If you don’t you’d better come home with me for the night.”
The hobo thanked him and then followed him down the street. Neither of them spoke. After walking two blocks, the man in the slicker turned and walked up to the porch of a house. Stepping aside, he told the stranger to go on in.
He did as he was directed. A woman and her two children were preparing dinner in the kitchen. Giving the tramp a quick smile, she indicated a chair just inside the back door.
“My name is Sarah and this is my daughter, Lucy, and my boy, Sam,” she said. “Lucy, set another place at the table for the nice man.”
When the hobo sat down, he felt the water drain out of his cracked and weathered shoes; he hoped no one would notice the puddles on the floor. He glanced nervously toward the door. Where was the man who had invited him?
“Sorry for the water, ma’am. I ain’t meanin’ to make work for ya,” said the tramp. “A nice gentleman brought me here. He said to go on in. Looked like he went around the other side of the house.”
The woman nodded.
“Yes, I know. We don’t eat fancy, but we can always feed an extra.” She smiled, stirring some extra carrots and onions into the stew simmering on the stovetop. Neither she nor her children seemed scared or disturbed at the sudden appearance of a disheveled hobo turning up on their doorstep.
The stranger sat quietly and observed the young family finish the dinner preparations. He took in the mouthwatering smells and realized only then just how hungry he was. The only sound to be heard was that of the skillet sizzling in a wreath of smoke.
“Where you headed?” asked Sarah.
“Out west. Have to find me a job,” he volunteered.
“Doing what?”
The hobo’s cheeks reddened. “Whatever I can git.”
Lucy clattered the plates and silverware onto the table while her little brother, Sam, carefully set out the bread and butter and pulled up the chairs. The hobo kept his eyes fixed on the door. What had happened to the man who had brought him here? He told him he would join him in a few minutes. In the silence, the hobo noticed something else rather odd—there were only four place settings. Was the other fellow not going to join them?
Sarah noticed the visitor’s agitation. As they ate, she spoke openly to the hobo.
“It was my husband brought you here. He likes to wander around the rail yard on stormy nights. Most times he brings a tramp or two home with him. But don’t be nervous—it’s fine that you’re here. Tell me if you want more to eat.”
The stranger stared into his lap, his fingers rolling the paper napkin into a tight, damp ball. He had followed a man down the street and now that man had disappeared. The hobo heard the snap of wood in the kitchen range.
When he looked up, he saw young Sam’s eyes upon him, eyes that seemed too old for such a small and somber face.
After the meal was finished, Sarah orchestrated the cleanup, with the hobo chipping in. Once everything was put away, she called to Sam. “Son, show our guest to the spare room.”
The tramp liked the sound of the term “our guest.” No one had ever called him that before.
The room he was taken to was spotlessly clean and the bed comfortable. Yet for some reason he could not sleep. As he was just dozing off, he heard footsteps coming down the hall. They stopped at his door. A minute later he heard whoever it was walking back down the hallway. The hobo thought it might be one of the children, and he rolled over in bed.
But then sometime later came a knock on the door so hard that that he was shaken from his sleep. He got up and cracked open the door but saw no one. The pounding came again. This time he threw open the door. No one was there; the corridor was empty. But just as he was shutting the door, he felt something cold and wet brush past him. He did not sleep the rest of the night.
In the morning, a warm sun shone. The hobo was boneweary from lack of rest. He got dressed and made his way downstairs. He thanked Sarah and set off for the depot. He reached the tracks as a westbound freight rumbled in. The tramp spotted an empty boxcar with a partially opened door. He was just about to leap aboard when he heard a small voice behind him.
“Here’s your cap, mister.”
The hobo turned around. Sam, squinting into the sunlight, held the old, sweat-stained black watch cap.
“Thanks, kid.”
The train was picking up speed. Another open boxcar came into view. Sam just stood there, watching.
“I’ve been meanin’ to ask you something, kid,” the hobo shouted above the din of the moving train. “But if it ain’t none of my business, you tell me.”
Sam remained motionless.
“I was wonderin’ why your old man never came back last night. Maybe he come home late and I missed him?”
Sam’s eyes widened. He spoke steadily and without emotion. “My father’s dead, mister. He was killed in an accident in this here rail yard almost six years ago.”
The hobo nodded. As the train moved away, he returned Sam’s friendly wave.
“So long, kid! And tell your old man thanks . . . ,” he bellowed as he leaped aboard the last boxcar.
Franklin Castle
Cleveland
Hannes Tiedemann and his wife, Luise, realized their lifelong dream back in 1881—the construction of their turreted home at 4308 Franklin Boulevard NW in Cleveland. The “castle,” as they called it, had been planned and built exactly to their specifications. The Tiedemanns were overjoyed.
Some local residents claim that the old couple liked their house so much that they never left, even after their deaths.
Bizarre stories of psychic disturbances have been told for over a century about this mansion on “Millionaire’s Row.” Scores of newspaper articles and television programs have documented its haunted history.
What do the stories contend? That doors fly off their hinges without being touched, lights go on and off by themselves, chandeliers slowly swing when the air is still. Mirrors fog for no apparent reason, and voices murmur in empty rooms. From time to time a woman in black is seen peering out a narrow window in the front tower room. A little girl—perhaps the Tiedemanns’ daughter Emma—begs visiting children to come play with her. She died of diabetes at the age of fifteen, a decade after the family moved in.
The history of the so-called Franklin Castle is a mixture of fact and legend, blurred by incomplete or missing records. It is known, however, that the Hannes Tiedemann family built it and lived there for nearly thirty-three years, that Hannes built his fortune from wholesale grocery and liquor businesses, and that in his later years he became a bank executive.
It is also a house touched by immense sorrow.
In addition to his daughter dying there in 1881, Hannes Tiedemann’s eighty-four-year-old mother, Wiebeka, died in the house the same year. She might be the woman in black passersby see on occasion staring out one of the upper-floor windows. Two years later, three more children in the family died. Their father claimed they had been ill, but neighbors suspected there was more to the deaths than that.
The grief-stricken Luise Tiedemann busied herself with her house, adding secret passageways, hidden rooms, and turrets and gargoyles that made the house appear very much like a gothic haunted castle. Luise even added a huge ballroom on the fourth floor.
After Luise’s death, Tiedemann sold the place to a family named Mulhauser, remarried, and moved elsewhere. He died in 1908, outliving every member of his immediate family.
In 1913 the Mulhauser family sold the castle to the German Socialist Party, which used it for meetings and parties. The Socialists owned it for fifty-five years, but for most of that time the house was considered unoccupied.
A Cleveland nurse recalled caring for an attorney who supposedly lived at 4308 Franklin Boulevard in the early 1930s. She remembered being terrified by the late-night sound of a small child’s crying. The servants refused to talk about it, dismissing the cries as the mews of a desperate cat. But forty years later, the nurse told a reporter that she would “never set foot in that house again.”
In 1968 Mrs. James C. Romano bought the Tiedemann castle and she, her husband, and their six children moved in. Mrs. Romano always admired the huge stone house and planned to open a restaurant in it. She quickly changed her mind.
On the day they moved in, their two young sets of twins went upstairs to play. Soon they came down to ask if they could take a cookie up to their friend—a little girl in a long dress. She was crying. This happened a number of times, but every time Mrs. Romano looked for an extra child she found none but her own.
Mrs. Romano sometimes heard organ music, although there was no organ in the house. In bed late at night, there was the heavy tramping of footsteps as if an army platoon was marching back and forth on the third floor, originally a ballroom, where her two grown sons by a previous marriage slept. Sometimes, when no one was up there, she still heard voices and the clink of glasses. She finally refused to set foot on both the third and fourth floors when she was alone, and she forbade her children from playing up there.
Mrs. Romano’s fears about the third floor may have been well founded.
Barbara Dreimiller, a Cleveland writer, had a chilling experience there. During a visit, she and three friends had just reached the third floor when they saw a vaporous object, like a blanket of fog, drifting ahead of them.
The friends hung back, but Dreimiller bravely walked toward it. Before she could reach it, she seemed to grow faint. Her friends pulled her free of the sickening cloud just before she passed out. They found no source for the vapor.
One Halloween, the telephone awakened Mrs. Romano at midnight. She picked up the receiver and heard, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
The voice, she recalled, was deep and hollow as though it “came from the grave.” She screamed and dropped the phone. After that incident she vowed never to answer the phone when she was alone in the house.
“A week later,” said Mrs. Romano, “I woke up from a deep sleep and found myself in the middle of the floor screaming so loud I lost my voice. And someone was screaming right along with me.”
James Romano, who was an electrician by trade, rewired the entire house. Yet light bulbs burned out in a week’s time and fixtures burst into flames.
Mrs. Romano consulted a Catholic priest.
He told her she was possessed, at times, by the spirit of Luise Tiedemann and that it was the ghost of little Emma Tiedemann who slammed doors and raced up and down the stairs. The priest felt there were many evil entities in the house and advised the family to leave.
Mrs. Romano’s grown sons needed no urging. They moved out after something pulled the covers off their beds in the third-floor bedroom.
James Romano remained calm and philosophical about the house.
“When you buy a castle, you get the ghosts. It’s Halloween at our place 365 days a year.”
His wife never adopted such a casual attitude. She felt certain the house held dark, brooding secrets. She was too upset to try to learn what they were.
“It isn’t something to mess with,” she said.
Eventually she became physically ill and admitted the house was getting the best of her. In September 1974 the Romanos sold the place to Samuel Muscarello.
The new owner planned to turn it into a Universal Christian Church and, to raise money, opened the house to tours.
A Cleveland radio disc jockey and a photographer emerged from their tour visibly shaken.
The radio announcer would not discuss his experience, but he turned down an offer of three hundred dollars to spend the night in the castle.
For his part, the photographer said he was sitting downstairs with the owner when he heard a woman’s voice call his name.
He ran up the stairs but found no one. The only other people in the house were two floors higher and their voices could not be heard.
John Webster, a Cleveland broadcast executive, told psychic investigators Richard Winer and Nancy Osborn Ishmael that when he visited the castle to gather material for a special program on its hauntings, a large tape recorder was torn from his shoulder and thrown down the stairs, smashing into pieces.
During the visit of a television news cameraman, a hanging lamp turned in a slow circle. Ted Ocepec did not think vibrations from outside caused it.
“I just don’t know,” he said, “but there’s something in that house.”
Even owner Muscarello grew uneasy. He heard strange sounds and discovered articles taken from one place and put down in another. His plans for the church did not work out and he sold the castle.
In 1978 former Cleveland Police Chief Richard D. Hongisto and his wife, Elizabeth, bought the property. They thought the twenty-room home, with its beautifully carved paneling and original wood plank floors, would be a perfect place to live, easily spacious enough for the large parties they liked to give.
Yet less than a year later the Hongistos abruptly sold the mansion to George Mirceta, a buyer who was unaware of its haunted reputation. He had bought the Gothic castle for its solid construction and architectural whimsy.
Mirceta lived alone in the house during the week and conducted tours on weekends. At the end of each two-hour tour, he passed out cards and asked the visitors to jot down phenomena they had observed—some reported seeing a woman in black in the tower room; others saw a woman in white. Still others complained of becoming temporarily paralyzed or of finding themselves babbling incoherently.
Mirceta told reporters that he heard babies crying and saw chandeliers swaying. Still, he claimed to be unafraid—he would not live there, he said, if the castle was haunted. “There has to be a logical explanation for everything.”
Franklin Castle has continued to change tenancy and ownership. Most recently the castle, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was purchased by a European artist with the stated intention of turning it into a multiple-family dwelling. In 2015 a ghost hunting expedition from a cable television channel spent several hours there. Included in their report was a claim that they heard a disembodied voice.
“Get out!” it cried.
The Ethereal Innkeepers
Granville
Shutters bang on windless nights. Stairs creak. Floorboards groan. At first, Mary Stevens Sweet thinks the noises are the natural complaints of the rambling, old house settling down for the night. It is the late 1920s and Sweet has just taken over the management of the historic Buxton Inn in Granville, Ohio.
Several weeks later, Sweet senses a presence on an upstairs outside balcony early in the morning, peering over the railing to the lilac bushes below. In the evening, something follows her into the ballroom where once the night was filled with fiddle music and the rhythmic beat of dancing feet performing an old quadrille.
Before long, Buxton Inn guests say they are being awakened to find a forlorn figure leaning against their bedpost. The flowered wallpaper makes it obvious the unannounced guest is quite transparent.
Other guests are startled when they spread their hands to the fire on the hearth and see a pair of pale, indistinct hands warming themselves beside their own.
There is no doubt in Mary Sweet’s mind now. This inn is haunted.
The Buxton Inn was built in 1812 by pioneer Orrin Granger, a Massachusetts native who moved to Ohio to seek a better life for his family. Originally, the inn served as a post office and stagecoach stop. Drivers cooked their meals in the massive open fireplace in the basement and bedded down there on straw pallets. Through the years throngs of travelers of all sorts crowded the old inn, leaving the residue of their memories and emotions imprinted on the structure. Identifying a ghost might be difficult given such circumstances.
In the Buxton Inn, identification came relatively soon, in an unexpected way. Fred Sweet, Mary’s son, woke up hungry one night, so he crept downstairs to raid the pantry. He reached for the pie shelf, but it was empty. A ghost stood in the larder, devouring the last wedge of apple pie.
Sensing the young man’s disappointment, the ghost drew up two chairs and in a thin, reedy voice introduced himself as Orrin Granger, the builder. The apparition then regaled Fred with tales of the olden days when carriages rolled along the Granville Pike and stopped at the Buxton Inn for fresh cider and rashers of bacon.
The friendly ghost confided that it approved of the way Mary Stevens Sweet was running the place, retaining the authentic nineteenth-century atmosphere and blending it with new, attractive furnishings and tasteful food.
“No need for me to hang around any longer,” said Granger. With a wave of his hand and a gentle smile, he was gone.
Years later, a psychic glimpsed the ghost of Orrin Granger again in the house. She described a gray-haired gentleman who looked like a country squire. He wore knee breeches and white stockings and was dressed in blue.
In 1972 Orville and Audrey Orr purchased the Buxton Inn. The Orrs had heard tales of a ghostly lady in blue haunting the old hotel but were determined not to forfeit the purchase because of a “spook” wandering the premises.
Orr, a soft-spoken former minister, spent two years restoring the inn to its original state, even to the vivid-pink clapboard siding. During that time he hired several young carpenters to finish work on the house. One summer evening as they packed their tools for the day, Orr told them the stories he had heard about a lady in blue and how she had frightened unsuspecting guests. The workmen laughed and said they did not believe in ghosts. Proof. That is what they demanded. Proof.
That was not long in coming.
One day an attractive young woman in a blue dress opened the second-floor stairway door, walked across the back balcony, and started down the steps. Then she evaporated before the workmen’s eyes. Proof they wanted, proof they got.
The blue lady repeated her visit the next day and every evening thereafter, promptly at six o’clock. The workmen made sure they were finished before then.
Who is this woman?
She is generally believed to be Ethel Houston “Bonnie” Bounell, the establishment’s vivacious innkeeper from 1934 until her death in 1960.
Bonnie was an immensely popular woman whose elegant looks lent an air of sophistication to the bucolic Buxton Inn. In her earlier years she had been a singer of light opera. Those who had known her remembered her hats and her lovely pastel dresses.
In fact, blue was Bonnie’s favorite color.
More specific information hinting at the ghost’s identity came later from a Cincinnati medium, Mayree Braun, and a founding member of the Parapsychology Forum of Cincinnati, who once toured the house. Although the Buxton Inn was unfamiliar to her and she knew nothing of its history, Braun reached some startling conclusions.
She described seeing, clairvoyantly, a woman in blue, from modern times, accompanying her and Audrey Orr from room to room. The psychic said the woman was beautifully attired, had once been on the stage, and obviously liked hats. Mrs. Braun also remarked that the spirit was pleased with the restoration work the new owners were doing, especially the work done in the ballroom. The medium seems to have unknowingly described Bonnie Bounell.
While medium Mayree Braun had identified this “lady in blue” as Bounell, another medium, Peggy Little, a Columbus area psychic and member of the British Spiritualist Church, said the ghost of a lady she had seen in the inn was wearing blue clothing of a much older fashion. Although unable to see the bodice of the gown, she did see a floor-length, blue-gray skirt and heard the rustling of its folds as the wearer swept across the floor. Peggy Little also saw a white cap on the woman’s head. She thought it might be Mrs. Orrin Granger, the wife of the original owner of the inn. Or was it Bonnie in another elegant gown?
Orr himself witnessed unexplained incidents in the house. During the long renovation period, he often heard footfalls on the stairs and the slamming of doors in upstairs rooms when no other human being was around. Sometimes he even heard what sounded like coins being dropped on the pegged wooden floors.
Orr had never been scared of the presence, but once he did lose his patience. He had spent an entire evening alone in the inn and was preparing to leave when someone opened the front door, walked upstairs and across the second-floor balcony, opened the back door, and proceeded down the back outside staircase. An incredulous Orr determined no one had entered. All the doors were bolted and every window latched. The Buxton Inn was secure. Or was it? Tired and somewhat exasperated, Orr shouted at his “guest,” “If you want this place you can just have it.” Later he rethought the offer.
On many occasions he encountered a shadowy male figure in various parts of the house. Orr finally decided that this was probably the ghost of Major Buxton, the inn operator from 1865 until 1905, and the person for whom it was named. The ghost of Major Buxton seemed quite harmless.
“When we first purchased the building, employees would even set a place for the major at the table,” said Orr. “One waitress claims to have seen the major sitting in a rocking chair before the fireplace.”
The Grangers, Bonnie Bounell, and Major Buxton may be the most prominent ghosts who haunt the Buxton Inn. But some say that there are other “visitors” whose identities may never be known.
In the Tavern, located in the original basement of the house, stage drivers cooked and bedded down long ago. There, psychics observed many spirits, especially between nine thirty and eleven thirty at night when the energy level in the inn slows down.
Peggy Little saw ghosts congregate on the stairs during the evening hours.
“It’s almost as if they were a wall of feeling,” she told one reporter.
Newspaper photographer Gordon Kuster Jr., of Granville, might agree. Kuster, visiting the inn in 1979, observed a pitcher fly off a table and crash to the floor.
There is something about the Buxton Inn that seems to attract and retain its old caretakers. In 2014 Orville and Audrey Orr sold the Buxton Inn to a group of investors intent on preserving the building and restoring the inn and the restaurant to its long-ago splendor. Guests continue to report odd experiences at the historic inn, especially in room number 9, where they say they smell perfume and wake up to the feeling of a cat snuggling up against them at night. It seems that the ghosts of Bonnie Buenell and her feline companion remain very much in residence at the Buxton Inn.
The Pirate’s Mistress
Scioto River Valley
The bottomlands of the Scioto River valley in central Ohio are rimmed by forested cliffs lush with undergrowth. Many years ago travelers reported seeing the ghost of a lithe, young girl gliding among the trees. At night they heard screams coming from the vicinity of a ruined mansion, followed by silence, another shriek, and then stillness.
Some said the ghost was the spirit of the little Spanish girl that John Robinson was alleged to have murdered. At least they thought he had killed her. Authorities never did find her remains.
John Robinson entered this wild, inhospitable Ohio country in 1825. He arrived at the village of Delaware, Ohio, with a party of trappers. The village at the time was only a few log huts strung along a portage between the Ohio River and the town of Sandusky on Lake Erie.
Robinson himself was not a trapper, and he was not friendly with any of his traveling companions. He left them without so much as a good-bye or a wave of the hand, stopping for the night at the local tavern, two heavy packs in tow.
The villagers were suspicious. Most foot travelers crossing the wilderness carried the lightest of loads. And while the tavern keeper, the blacksmith, and the stable boy welcomed the stranger and asked about his plans and what assistance he might require, Robinson remained distant.
In the morning, the newcomer rented a saddle horse and set out to explore the local bottomlands and bluffs. In the depths of the nearly impenetrable forest, Robinson found the retreat he sought, a vast acreage of high-bluff country that afforded a splendid view of the valley below. He took title to the property that night and as soon as the deed was executed, he began designing a mansion grander than any home in Ohio. It was clear he had wealth beyond imagination, but he never revealed where he had gotten his treasure.
Once the plans were ready, Robinson hired an army of stone and brick masons. They blasted from a hillside and cut and laid the rock with utmost precision. Stone by stone, foot by foot, the magnificent building rose in the forest. A master craftsman, Robinson finished the interior himself, carving mantels and cornices and the balustrade for the staircase from virgin oak and embellishing them with intricate patterns of astonishing beauty.
Soon wagons arrived, bringing furnishings imported from Europe—heavy brocade draperies, gilded tables and chairs, desks and chests, trunks filled with linens, silver and dainty bone china. One large leather trunk held easels, canvases, brushes, and oils, while other chests contained books for the library. Such opulence was unheard of in the wilderness of the 1820s.
Indeed Robinson planned for every eventuality, even the most certain of all—behind the house he had built a lavish mausoleum as his final resting place.
When everything was finally finished, Robinson paid his bills in gold pieces. Now the villagers knew the contents of the leaden sacks Robinson had dragged into the tavern. The workmen were dismissed and the new homeowner retired within his house and bolted the doors.
The little community waited for an invitation to the housewarming that never took place. Masons and carpenters who had worked on the house were angered; local officials who had helped Robinson procure the land were puzzled by the rejection. An occasional neighbor who stopped by the mansion to welcome its owner to the area was rudely turned away.
But one day Robinson summoned a workman to make some repairs in the house. The man noticed the walls of the rooms were covered with the owner’s paintings, sweeping landscapes of rolling hills and baronial castles and great medieval halls reminiscent of Great Britain. Robinson indicated that he worked at his easel every day from morning to night.
The one painting that astonished the workman the most covered an entire wall of the library. Its setting was the deck of a pirate ship. Dark, heavy-bearded sailors gathered on the stern of the vessel, the officers forward. In the center, the captain struck a swashbuckling pose, sword and pistols at his side, a bold and crafty look on his bronzed face. The workmen recognized the man in the painting immediately—it was Robinson himself. Even in the dim light, the likeness was unmistakable.
Rumors flew. A pirate captain in Delaware County? How could that possibly be? Romantically inclined persons pondered chests overflowing with gold buried on the mansion grounds. And silver. Perhaps even rare jewels and gems. Others thought Robinson must be the black sheep of an aristocratic English family to account for his other paintings with their typical historical English themes.
When Robinson was not painting, he roamed the forest, searching for rare stones and unusual rocks. A neighbor sometimes caught sight of him studying a specimen, turning it over and over in his strong, callused hands.
Then one day local residents glimpsed a most unexpected stranger in the woods near the Robinson mansion—an exotic young girl, small and dainty with hair and eyes as black as the raven’s wing and a pale complexion faintly tinged with olive.
In a brocade gown with lace-trimmed sleeves, some said she resembled a Spanish countess. There was a certain nobility in the tilt of her head and the way she moved silently through the light and shadow of the forest. Like Robinson, who had arrived two years earlier, the girl’s presence in such a rough landscape was astonishing. Not a single trader had met her on the portage paths.
Rumor had it that the senorita (at least everyone assumed she was not a senora) served as a model for the artist’s paintings, that her portrait would be his masterpiece, the crowning achievement of his life’s work.
Sometimes, in the waning light of summer afternoons, Robinson and the girl would be glimpsed seated side by side on a stone bench in a clearing at the brow of a hill. But more often the girl was alone, darting like a small bird among the trees, or wandering the willow-fringed banks of the Scioto River.
When the days shortened and the leaves fell, the girl was seen no more. Yet those who lived in the region said she was not silent. They claimed that the girl was dead. Night after night her chilling cries shook the forest and trembled above the valley floor. Word spread that Robinson had beaten her mercilessly when she displeased him and she died from the blows. The settlers were alarmed, but in this age before any organized law enforcement, no one was willing to interfere.
Early snows laced the barren trees and filled the forest. The land lay silent. The great stone Robinson house was silent too. And sinister.
Throughout the long winter, the villagers spoke of Robinson and his companion, of their strange behaviors. Not once that winter had the pair been observed.
With the coming of spring, the snows melted and the river ran full; the trees leafed out and the birds returned. But still no sound came from within the mansion.
John Robinson was nowhere to be found.
Weeds choked the path to the front door, and vines and lichen clung to the damp foundation stones. Over all was an air of desolation.
At last a few hardy farmers banded together and approached the house. They banged on the thick, forbidding oak door. No one came. Using a fallen tree as a battering ram, they crashed through and tumbled inside. There was no sign of life anywhere, only what remained of a furious struggle.
In the library, filled with Robinson’s books and paintings, chairs and tables were overturned; the easel lay smashed on the floor. One wall bore the bloodied prints of tiny, slender fingers.
Just above the bloodstains hung the life-sized portrait of the mysterious, albeit nameless Spanish girl.
As the men stared, they later swore the colors of the painting seemed to intensify; her eyes flashed darkly and her lips moved as if to speak. The farmers turned and ran back to the village with their story. By nightfall everyone in and around Delaware knew the mansion now was haunted. The midnight stillness of that night and every night to come was pierced by the mournful cries of the sad senorita.
As the days passed, search parties scoured the woods of John Robinson’s estate for some trace of the girl. Only her portrait and a few of her belongings left in the house testified to her life.
Robinson’s disappearance was just as mystifying. He left his forest kingdom as stealthily as he had come into it. His hand-carved casket was found in his workshop. Behind the house the mausoleum was filled with snakes.
In time, the neighbors could not resist the temptation anymore and swarmed over the mansion, determined to unearth the fortune they believed Robinson the pirate had taken in plunder and buried there. For months zealous plowmen and woodcutters swung picks, spades, and shovels, overturning stones, uprooting young trees and even undermining the foundation of the very house itself. Others ransacked its interior, tearing out the handsome paneling, pulling down the carved staircase, and stripping the walls bare in their frenzied search for Robinson’s ill-gotten gains.
Yet not a single coin was ever found. Time and disregard eventually finished what the treasure hunters had begun, and the mansion was reduced to rubble.
Only the ghost of the young senorita lingers. Legend has it that she still walks the banks of the Scioto River in the twilight of a late, summer evening. And sometimes, in the gathering gloom, a scream, her scream, shatters the stillness and echoes down the valley.
Old Raridan
Jackson and Pike Counties
Whether it is the “elephant’s graveyard” or the dying place of the American bison, humans have searched for centuries to locate the sites within each region toward which old and wounded mammals struggle, driven by some instinctual urge during their final days.
In southern Ohio, somewhere within present-day Jackson and Pike Counties, its location lost to time, old-timers told of such a graveyard for the magnificent gray wolf.
The earliest explorers identified this place and called it Great Buzzard’s Rock, a high, granite, flat-topped hill. Later generations knew it as Big Rock.
It was the dying place of the wolves.
Bones of hundreds of gray wolves lay strewn across its surface. Buzzards floated in the skies above, waiting for new arrivals.
Until the end of the Revolutionary War, wolves in the region were of little concern to man. There were few people, and the occasional explorer shot a wolf only when it posed a threat. All that changed, however, as civilization edged westward. Pioneers began pushing into the fertile Ohio River Valley, bringing livestock and villages with them.
Wolves were not welcomed in or around frontier settlements. They preyed on livestock as pioneers killed deer for meat, diminishing the herds that were the wolves’ primary food source. Settlers slaughtered wolves whenever and wherever they could. Every new settlement pushed the wolves farther and farther westward.
Each wolf pack had its own leader. In about 1796, settlers in what would later become Jackson and Pike Counties when Ohio became a state began to notice that one pack of several dozen wolves in particular followed a magnificent gray wolf.
They called him Old Raridan, the king of wolves.
How he got his name is not known, only that this awesome beast, larger and more powerful than his comrades, often prowled in the distance after a particularly bountiful kill of unsuspecting farm animals. He knew instinctively what the hunters’ guns could do and always kept safely out of range.
To avenge the increasingly frequent raids by Old Raridan’s pack, groups of a dozen or more hunters would set off after him, their hounds baying in pursuit. Although many wolves and hounds were slain, Raridan always eluded capture. His fatally wounded followers made their painful way to Big Rock, where they died.
Not even the bravest man dared follow a dying wolf to that strange and haunted place. Nor would a tracking hound come within a mile or more.
As Old Raridan’s fame grew, so did the number of hunters seeking to put an end to his ways. His time was running out.
Every man wanted to be known as the one who killed the King of the Wolves.
At last, only a few tough old wolves survived, among them Raridan and his mate. The bones of their followers littered Big Rock. Then, sometime in 1801 word spread through the Ohio Valley that only Raridan and his mate still lived. The rest of his pack had moved on westward. Hatred for the old wolf, fanned over many years, became a fury so intense that even godly preachers prayed for his death. People talked of little else. Even women and children took part in the feverish search for Raridan.
Vastly outnumbered, and with the infirmities of old age, Raridan found even his skill and cunning, learned through hundreds of battles, could not save him. An army of men with dozens of hounds now stalked the woods, searching him out.
And then it happened.
Hunters cornered Raridan and his mate in some low hills near the Ohio River. The wolves killed several hounds, but in the process Raridan’s loyal mate, the she-wolf, was wounded. Raridan would not leave her behind. Instead, they turned in the direction of Big Rock.
The hounds held to the trail as hours of tracking wore on. For every wound the hounds inflicted on the aged wolves, one of their number lost his life.
Just a mile from Big Rock, the hounds encircled the pair. Raridan let out a howl that froze the marrow in the hunters’ bones and snapping and snarling rushed the dogs, slashing in fury inch by bloody inch to reach the foot of the trail leading to Big Rock.
The fight was merciless but Raridan held on, protecting his mortally wounded mate. Then just as suddenly as the baying hounds had been in the center of the fight, they fell back.
Suddenly a shot rang out. The she-wolf dropped, a bullet in her heart. Then a second shot sounded. Old Raridan’s right hip exploded in a sickening shower of gray fur, flesh, and bone.
The warrior staggered toward his companion, his life ebbing from a dozen wounds.
He raised his scarred and bloodied head, once majestic and unbowed, and surveyed the men who had destroyed his empire. His stare became a final challenge.
“Here I am, take me!” he seemed to taunt his enemies.
Not more than fifty paces distant, the hunters could easily have finished off their quarry. Yet not one did.
The old wolf turned back toward the trail to his final destination.
“Ooooooowwwwwwwhhhhhoooooo!”
Raridan raised his voice in one last cry.
From the top of Big Rock floated an answer, almost an echo, yet more ethereal. It seemed to give the old wolf new energy, for he gently fastened his powerful jaws around the nape of his mate’s neck and dragged her up the trail to the dying place of the wolves.
Old Raridan is more than a folktale to many who have seen his specter prowling that ancient forest kingdom. When the moon is full, his splendid cry drifts with the wind across Big Rock, where the shadowy form of that giant creature stands defiant against the darkening sky.