Haunted Franklin Castle

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growing number of immigrants found comfort in socializing with those who shared their common background, language and customs. Ethnic cultural and social clubs were the natural result.

Just as Hannes Tiedemann was moving from his Franklin house in 1897, a German men’s singing society, called the Bildungsverein Eintracht Liedertafel, was formed in Cleveland. Over the next twenty years, various German nationalist groups and singing societies, such as the Liedertafel der Sozialistischen Partei, or Socialist Party Singing Society, were formed and eventually merged with one another. This resulted in the Franklin Improvement Company and Bildungsverein Eintracht Club.

On July 22, 1921, the Taylor Waag Company purchased the Franklin Castle from the Shirkey family. A week later, the house was placed in the name of the Franklin Improvement Company and now became home to the Bildungsverein Eintracht Club.

It should be noted that this was just after the Great War, in which Germany was an enemy combatant. The Franklin Castle would now serve as a private clubhouse for German Americans for the next forty-six years. This would be the longest that any person or group would maintain ownership. It would include Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the threat of Communism. What were the German Americans doing inside the castle?

Immediately, major alterations were made to convert the home into a clubhouse. They created one large room on the second floor by removing the walls that divided the parlor, dining room and front hallway. For privacy, the windows were covered with white paint. The wall separating the servants’ parlor from their dining room on the first floor was also removed. Meanwhile, the dry storage room was sealed off and made accessible only by removing a piece of wainscot paneling that covered where the door to the servants’ parlor had been.

A caged door, lock and buzzer were installed on the landing between the second and third level to limit access beyond that point. On the third floor, the wall separating Hannes Tiedemann’s former bedroom from his sitting room was removed. A lengthy bar was constructed in the dressing room off of the sitting room. Finally, the house was completely wired up with electrical lights by running knob and tube wiring through the old gas lines. The gas well was also filled in. According to rumor, old furniture left in the house was used to fill the empty space.

From 1920 to 1933, prohibition of the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages was the law of the land. Renovations to the clubhouse included a security door to the third floor, which contained a bar, and the secreting of the first-floor dry storage room, which contained a liquor still. The Franklin Castle was anything but dry.

The rumors of the tunnel in the carriage house being used to smuggle liquor onto the property from Whiskey Island seem doubtful. The tunnel was not that long and had no outlet on the north end. Besides, the carriage house was being used by Arnold and Walter Dobay from 1922 through 1925 for the Mayer Carburetor Distributing Company. Afterward, the carriage house was converted into the Eintracht Club’s gymnasium.

The house was referred to as Eintracht Hall or the Clubhouse by its members. Many groups met there on a regular basis during the 1920s, including the Sozialistische Liedertafel, a section of Branch 5 of the local German Socialist Party. The Workmen’s Sick and Death Benefit Fund No. 188 Lake Erie Chapter, a group that published the periodical Solidarität, met every second Tuesday. Two singing groups under the direction of Rudolph Schuster, the Freiheit Frauen Gesangverein and the Liedertafel Eintracht, used the hall. The Geselligkeits Klub held meetings there in 1927, and by the 1950s, the German-American Chess Club also met there.

In 1930, the Bildungsverein Eintracht Club bought a tract of land at 11533 Royalton Road in North Royalton, Ohio. Known as Eintracht Farm, it was used for sporting, cultural and social events. Four structures occupied the property: a two-story dance hall and rathskeller, a bowling alley, a fresh-air dormitory and a refreshment booth. The Workmen’s Sick and Death Benefit Society built the fresh-air dormitory on a section of the farm it leased from the club.

The Eintracht Club was, first and foremost, a singing group, and there were many festivals held by the club, celebrating German heritage. Various members, who served as facility managers and caretakers, would live at Eintracht Hall on Franklin for one year at a time. Carl and Anna Fuerhof were caretakers at Franklin Castle in 1937. Their daughter, Elsie A. Ruhrkraut, who was only eleven or twelve at the time, remembered that the home was very big. She recalled playing with a friend in the carriage house and seeing a lot of gymnasium equipment in there but no tunnel. She said the club held meetings during the week. Everyone entered through the side door, and hardly anyone entered through the front. While the men’s chorus practiced on the fourth floor, the women played cards in a room on the third floor.

Mrs. Ruhrkraut recalled the layout of the house. The kitchen was on the first floor in the former servants’ bedroom, with the rest of that floor being used for storage. The room on the second level, formerly the parlor, dining room and hallway, was used as a dance floor. She and her parents occupied the back bedrooms on that level. On the third floor was the bar. Pool tables were located where Hannes Tiedemann’s bedroom and sitting room had been. The back rooms contained card-playing tables. The fourth floor was the ballroom where the singing groups practiced and performed.

When asked about the rumors of rumrunning and illegal moonshine production during the Prohibition era, Mrs. Ruhrkraut laughed but then said that she wouldn’t doubt it. Over the years, she received many newspaper articles about the Franklin Castle from her friends because they knew she had briefly lived there. She remembered reading a story that claimed a murder had taken place in the second-floor hall, but she didn’t know anything more than that. As for ghosts or paranormal activity, she recalled nothing of the sort. She once tried to speak with a reporter about this, but he didn’t seem very interested. She remembered the house creaking a lot but attributed that to an aging structure and settling floorboards.

Gary Krueger, who was ten years old when his grandparents were Eintracht Hall managers, also remembered his experiences there. On the one hand, he said that the house could look awfully scary, though he never saw a ghost or anything like that. On the other hand, he remembered it was a fun place to play. There were pool tables, which were a lot of fun. Often there was an abundance of playmates, as parents would bring their children to the clubhouse. One of the features of the house that he remembered best was the wide stairway, with its ornate woodwork.

Images

Main hall on the second floor of the Franklin Castle, which had formerly served as a hallway, dining room and parlor, with the carriage house of the Franklin Castle being used as a gymnasium, circa 1942. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection.

Krueger never heard any stories of rumrunning or secret tunnels, but Prohibition was before his time. The stories of Nazi spying and a mass execution were ridiculous fabrications. Who would know better than Krueger? It was his grandparents and their friends who occupied the house throughout World War II. The Eintracht Club was a very family-oriented society, and its members were like family.

Jacob Enz became the caretaker of Eintracht Hall in late 1942. The forty-eight-year-old Enz was unmarried and had worked as a gardener much of his life. His tenure at the club was brief. On May 6, 1943, he became the third person known to have died inside Franklin Castle, preceded only by Louise Tiedemann and Albert Mühlhaüser.

Following World War II, relations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were plagued with the specter of suspicion and distrust. It was the beginning of the Cold War. In March 1949, a man named Eugene Dennis and ten other Americans were put on trial in New York City, accused of being communists and attempting to overthrow the U.S. government.

On May 9 of that year, one William Cummings took the stand to testify against the accused conspirators. In 1943, FBI officials placed Cummings as an informant within the rank and file of the Communist Party. He became vice chairman of the organization in Lucas County, Ohio, where in 1945, he heard whispers of rebellion.

According to Cummings, party officials said at a meeting that year that they expected world conditions to bring about a violent revolution in the United States that would result in a dictatorship by the working class. Two Communist Party officials, whom Cummings identified as Adeline Kohl and Paul Presser, said they first estimated this revolution would come to America around 1955. Recent changes in the world, however, led them to conclude that it was much closer than they’d first thought.

William Cummings went on to say that the American Communists had set up secret party schools in 1945. He told the court that the orders for these schools came from the party office in Cleveland in June of that year. The Ohio schools were to be held for one week each on the Eintracht Farm, or Camp Solidarity as he called it, in North Royalton. John LaBlanc, another FBI informant, backed up this testimony. Cummings produced a letter that stated that Pop Mindel, an outstanding communist speaker, would lecture classes in their orientation into Marxism.

This announcement came as a shock to officials at Bildungverein Eintracht. Max Luehr, Eintracht Club president, rebutted by saying that the building in which this was supposed to take place was built by the Workmen’s Sick and Death Benefit group and that the section of the property on which the building stood was leased to them. It was also his understanding that the building was being used as a children’s fresh-air camp. He expressed amazement to learn there was anything going on against the U.S. government and that they never would have permitted it had they known anything about it.

Carl Marx, the Franklin clubhouse manager and Eintracht Farm custodian, recalled that a group had used the fresh-air camp in 1945. Some sort of classes and meetings were held, but he didn’t know what they were doing.

On August 2, 1949, Edward Joseph Chaka was called to the stand to refute Cummings’s and LaBlac’s allegations. Chaka, a Cleveland foundry worker, stated that the testimony about a Communist Party school being held at Eintracht Farm was completely false and that their accounts of the goings-on at the school were inaccurate.

After a nine-month trial, the eleven American Communist Party leaders were found guilty. They were sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000 each. There was an immediate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but on June 4, 1951, the justices upheld the ruling.

While this episode may have changed the image of the Franklin Castle for some people, what happened next would dramatically change its image forever.

The afternoon of June 8, 1953, had been hot and muggy. The forecast of rain seemed to promise some welcome relief, but the thunderstorms advancing across southeastern Michigan and western Ohio had a history of tornadic activity, producing at least one cyclone in Flint, Michigan.

By sundown, tall clouds were building to the west, and Cleveland skies turned to an ominous greenish color. At 9:45 p.m., radar at Cleveland Hopkins Airport detected a tornado forming over the West Park area, 3.7 miles from downtown Cleveland. The funnel touched down and raced in a northeasterly path of destruction. It crossed through the West 117th Street and Lorain Avenue neighborhood and was soon in Ohio City with winds between 207 and 260 miles per hour. It proceeded across the Cuyahoga River, whipped through downtown and, at 10:12 p.m., moved out over Lake Erie around East 40th Street.

The tornado lasted just twenty-seven minutes and left Cleveland’s west side in utter ruin. Nearly two thousand homes were damaged. The human damage was worse, with 379 injured and 17 dead, including a three-and-a-half-month-old baby who was torn from his mother’s arms. Five died when their home on West 28th Street near Franklin collapsed on them.

Ohio City was the worst-hit neighborhood by far. Until then, there had been a line of very old English pin oak trees that formed a beautiful archway over Franklin. After the category 4 tornado, nearly every single tree had been destroyed.

Three area landmarks also suffered major storm damage. St. John’s Episcopal Church lost many of its beautiful features. The YMCA on Franklin was damaged too. The Franklin Castle was also a victim of the storm’s attack.

The point of the turret, including the tall finial that graced its top, was ripped cleanly away, as were the beautiful sandstone dormer located directly above the front entrance and the porte-cochère over the side entrance. The house was soon repaired, though nowhere near to its original splendor. The turret cone was cut short of reaching a point, and the missing dormer was replaced by a shingled triangular-shaped wall. Many years passed before these repairs would be corrected.

During the mid-1950s, rumors of a haunted Franklin Castle began to emerge throughout the neighborhood. One area resident, Nunzio DiMassa, recalled an incident. Then a teenager, DiMassa and a friend were escorting two young ladies past the castle and tried to get them to approach it. Both girls boldly stated that the house was haunted and that neither of them wanted anything to do with it.

Eleonora Kray fondly recalled her memories of the Eintracht Clubhouse in a newspaper article that appeared in the mid-1970s. As a young girl, her parents brought her with them to the house, where she spent many hours playing while the choir practiced. She later joined the drama and gymnastics clubs there. She also remembered singing and playing the piano there and the many wonderful parties held by the club.

“I had a beautiful youth down there as a child,” she stated. “We never heard no spooks, no rattling.”

As club managers, George Warren Fichter and his wife, Ruth, took up residency at 4308 Franklin Boulevard in 1955. George was also employed by a company called Ceramic Research, from which he retired in 1964. Mr. and Mrs. Fichter were to be the last to serve as caretakers of Eintracht Hall. George Fichter died at the Franklin Castle on January 7, 1966.

Almost two years later, on January 3, 1968, the Franklin Improvement Company transferred the title of the Franklin Castle property to the Bildungsverein Eintracht. The property was then immediately sold to the next owners.

The next year, Eintracht Farm in North Royalton was closed and sold off. The remnants of the Bildungsverein Eintracht were reorganized into the Bildungsverein Eintracht Singers in 1988, and the group disbanded in 1993.

The last president of the Eintracht was Elizabeth Horn. According to her, Mannerchor Hall on State Road in Cleveland was the last site for club activities and meetings. She fondly remembered the many parties that they hosted at Eintracht Hall on Franklin, as well as the singing in the ballroom and the dances on the second floor. She remembered cooking in the first-floor kitchen for the many dinners shared and celebrated at the clubhouse.

As far as any ghostly activity goes, neither she nor anyone she knew ever witnessed anything strange at the Franklin Castle. To them, it was just a beautiful house.