12

WONDERLAND

Dolores Shaw was born on March 1, 1925, in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. At a young age, she came to Cleveland, where she met and married William E. Ocheltree. Born to them were two sons: Kenneth and William Jr. One day, while going down Franklin Boulevard, she came across the large and brooding home with its windows painted over. Her first impression was that she couldn’t believe how dirty the windows of her house were.

James C. Romano was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 17, 1926, and grew up on the west side. He was married as a young man and had two children as well: Vincent and Christine. When James was still a boy, he would occasionally walk down Franklin Boulevard. Whenever he approached the turreted sandstone house that sat at no. 4308, he would run past as quickly as he could in fear. Little did he know, one day he would own that house, and his fears may have been well founded.

After a number of years, William and Dolores were divorced. Soon afterward, Dolores became acquainted with James Romano, who was also now single. The two became very close and on June 20, 1964, were wed. Almost immediately, they began to extend their already extended family. Over the next five years, Dolores gave birth to two sets of twins, Jimmy and Dee Dee, followed shortly after by John and Jeff. A fifth child, Debbie, was born shortly after the Romanos moved into the Franklin Castle.

Nearing the end of the 1960s, James and Dolores purchased a storefront located on Lorain Avenue near West 44th Street, where they briefly operated Romano’s Restaurant. The City of Cleveland would use eminent domain to purchase this property from them and tear down the building to make way for a methadone clinic. Still desiring to run a restaurant, the Romanos searched the neighborhood for a new location.

They once again found themselves standing outside the house at 4308 Franklin Boulevard. Mrs. Romano had passed the home several times recently and one day noticed it was for sale. After she mentioned the house to her husband, they agreed it would make a wonderful location for a restaurant. On January 3, 1968, the Bildungsverein Eintracht Club sold the house to James and Dolores Romano.

Previous stories about the Romano family state that on the day they moved in, two of the children came down from the third floor to ask their mother if they could have a cookie for their friend, the little girl sitting on the stairs crying. When Mrs. Romano investigated, she found the third floor empty.

There is, in fact, some truth to this story.

Jimmy Romano, a son of Dolores and James, clearly remembered the incident. He also remembered that this didn’t occur on the third floor, but rather on the fourth, very close to where the dumbwaiter service let off. Furthermore, it happened on more than one occasion. His twin sister, Dee Dee, also remembered these incidents quite well. The little girl, as she recalled, appeared to be about their age. One time, Dee Dee even managed to talk to the girl. When she offered to go and call the little girl’s mother for her, the girl simply told Dee Dee that she couldn’t. When asked why, all that the little girl would say was that her mother wouldn’t come to get her.

Jimmy recalled that the girl was a lot like having an imaginary friend, only she wasn’t imagined. As the Romano children grew older, they realized that seeing the little girl wasn’t a normal thing. Gradually they became more and more afraid when they’d see her. Eventually, the girl stopped appearing to them altogether.

When the Romanos moved into the house, it was in something of a state of disrepair. For starters, there was only one room in the house that had working electricity, that being the first-floor servants’ bedroom. Wires ran to other parts of the house but weren’t connected. Mr. Romano, an electrician with the Ford Motor Company, took it upon himself to rewire the entire house. A problem that would be reported in the years that followed would be that many light bulbs would burn out after only a few weeks’ time. Jimmy Romano remembered that the dumbwaiter was wired up for electricity but only connected to the main circuits when his father rewired the house. Mr. Romano also replaced its motor. The dumbwaiter obviously wasn’t intended to carry passengers, though Jimmy remembered that he’d ridden in it once or twice.

The Romano children in front of the Franklin Castle. Courtesy of the Romano and Ocheltree families.

The walls were in pretty bad shape as well, being something of a sootybrown color. Immediately, the family decided to hang wallpaper. The lowest floor was finished in silver and white damask patterns, and the upper floors were done with similar prints, with the back bedrooms in silver and the large room in the front in red. Mrs. Romano wanted the house to emulate the era in which it’d been built and did her best to make it so. Fixing up the house also meant removing the white paint from the windows. While doing this, the name of one of the Mühlhaüser children was discovered etched into the glass. In the fourth-floor ballroom, the crest for the Bildungsverein Eintracht had been painted on the wall. This, the Romanos painted over. The cage door was also removed from the landing between the second and third floors. Another problem was that the floorboards on the first level were almost completely rotted away. A replacement floor was needed. Fortunately, Interstate 90 was being built at that time, and many houses were being torn down to make way for the new freeway. One person who’d salvaged much of the scrap from these houses was a man named Gus, who owned Gus’ Wrecking Company in the Flats. Mr. Romano was a friend of Gus, and on occasion, his son Jimmy would pull nails for him. A new floor for the first level was purchased from Gus, as were two wooden fireplaces for that level.

Tearing out the old floor was quite a project. That job fell to Bill and Ken Ocheltree, Mrs. Romano’s sons from her first marriage, who were then living in the house. As the two removed the old boards, they found a sandy dirt base underneath. Just as they were completing the job, Bill removed a floorboard that was up against the wall beside the servants’ stairwell in the front of the house. The next thing he knew, one of the vertical baton board wainscot panels came crashing down on his head, leaving a bump of considerable size. After Ken checked to see if Bill was okay, the two brothers realized there was an open space behind that panel. Peering inside, they discovered another room, which had once been the Tiedemanns’ dry storage room. Carefully tucked away in the back was the forgotten Prohibition-era liquor still that had been left behind by the Eintracht. Along with this were quite a few antique liquor bottles. The house was full of hidden treasures.

There were many pieces of furniture left in the house by the Eintracht Club. Some of these pieces were rumored to have been left by the Tiedemanns. Most of this was auctioned off shortly after the Romanos moved in. One item in particular was an old rocking chair, believed to have belonged to Louise Tiedemann herself. The person who purchased this shortly returned it, claiming it would rock on its own accord. They claimed it was haunted.

One of the most important discoveries in the house was a library, comprising more than six hundred volumes of German and American literature, as well as several books of Socialist propaganda, dating from 1845 to 1925. These were also found in the hidden room on the first floor. Included in this collection were several bound volumes of the Echo, a periodical published by the renowned German socialist Dr. W.L. Rosenberg, as well as quite a few volumes of the Solidarität and the English language periodical the Pioneer. Also found was a large oil portrait of Karl Marx.

Quite interestingly, many personal documents about Socialist meetings and memberships were discovered. These, along with the bulk of the Socialist library, were sold in 1971 to a German foreign diplomat working in Cleveland named Peter Schoenwaldt. He’d learned of the library a year earlier from a friend who worked as a book dealer in Cleveland who had asked him if he’d be interested in purchasing “some German junk.” At first he’d passed on the offer but later had an idea to write an article about the discovery of these books. Writing this article never came to fruition, as the life of a diplomat rarely allowed for such leisure activities. It was Mr. Schoenwaldt who, while reading over minutes from a socialist meeting, discovered an entry making reference to a radio tower atop the turret, thus beginning the stories of Nazi spying. The minutes from the meetings, along with the rest of the club documents, were presented by Mr. Schoenwaldt to the Case Western Reserve University in hopes they could be of use to the descendants of early members of the club. The propaganda library remained in Mr. Schoenwaldt’s possession for at least the next thirty years, though word has it that it was later taken over by a secondhand bookshop in Vienna.

Dolores and James Romano with a portrait of Karl Marx found in the Franklin Castle in 1968. Photo by Glenn Zahn; Cleveland State University Library.

Soon after moving into the home, the Romanos’ plans for opening a restaurant in the house were put to rest. The original plan was that the house could be used for banquets and small parties. This plan was abandoned when a local councilwoman stepped in. She wouldn’t allow anything of the sort on the premises without a rezoning change. That could only happen if the Romanos tore down the carriage house in the back to allow room for more parking, something they refused to do.

Another story told from this period is about how Mrs. Romano’s two sons from her previous marriage were chased from the home after their blankets were torn from their beds one night. Jimmy Romano not only remembered this but also recalled that it happened on more than one occasion. The room that the two were occupying was formerly Louise Tiedemann’s bedroom on the third floor, the one beneath it being occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Romano and the other on the second floor being occupied by the rest of the children who slept on bunk beds. When asked about the blanket incident, Ken Ocheltree preferred not to discuss the matter. Whatever the case may have been, both Ken and Bill Ocheltree resided at the house for a very brief time before moving to Lakewood.

Word was spreading about the house’s haunted reputation, and by mid-September 1968, a newspaper article, the first to report on the strange occurrences, appeared in the Cleveland Press. The article’s author, Mary

Swindell, reported that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Romano believed in ghosts. On the other hand, there were some strange incidents, a few of which couldn’t be explained.

Mrs. Romano claimed that while doing some cleaning on the third floor, she heard what sounded like a chain being dragged across the floor above. The house always seemed to be full of unusual sounds. Most of these, however, were attributed to wind. Bearing that in mind, Mrs. Romano recalled an evening she had heard what sounded like organ music. She found no source for this and simply allowed it to lull her to sleep. Ken Ocheltree recalled one night when he traced the music to the first level. He noticed that the sound was actually coming from the floor itself. Soon after, he walked outside and realized that it was originating from one of the neighboring homes and the noise was likely traveling through the sandy ground beneath the houses.

According to Mary Swindell’s article, the Romanos were pulling buckshot out of much of the woodwork on the third floor near the bar, though none of Mr. and Mrs. Romano’s children recalled this. The article also stated that shortly after the Romanos moved in, neighbors beat a path to the door to tell stories of a thirteen-year-old insane girl that was hanged by her father in a room on the fourth floor.

In researching the facts for this story, Mrs. Swindell managed to locate a grandson of Hannes Tiedemann’s, Edward Ralph Wiebenson, Dora and Edward’s eldest son. This would be the only time that Dora or her family would ever be mentioned in any history of the house. Any article that followed simply said that Hannes Tiedemann outlived every member of his family, and furthermore, none of these would ever mention him having a daughter named Dora. To make matters worse, Mrs. Swindell’s article named Edward Wiebenson as Edward “Weideman.” This confusion stems from when Mrs. Swindell researched Hannes Tiedemann’s back story and came across John Christian Weideman as a business associate.

Edward Wiebenson recalled that he used to go to the house when he was a kid and that it was quite big but didn’t really know why his grandfather had built it. After hearing tales of the thirteen-year-old hanged girl, Mr. Wiebenson laughed the story off but added that it might have happened. At this, he stated that his family moved away in 1910, following the death of his father, and he didn’t know what happened to the house after that. Shortly after the article was printed, Mary Swindell realized her error in misnaming Hannes Tiedemann’s grandson and sent an apology letter to him.

After the idea for the new restaurant was put down, another idea soon came to mind. With the stories of the haunting beginning to spread, Mr. and Mrs. Romano realized they could open the house for tours. It was then that the name Franklin Castle was first introduced. The idea of calling it this was Mr. Romano’s, as he thought the house very much resembled an old castle. The name has stuck with the house ever since.

Vincent Romano, Mr. Romano’s son from his first marriage, recalled that these tours were given around midday on Sundays and usually consisted of groups of five to ten people. Although he didn’t live there, the house being too unusual for him to reside in, Vincent assisted with the tours. Vincent’s brother, Jimmy, remembered that these tours were mostly given around Halloween. At first, the Romanos charged a dollar for the tours, but each year, the price went up. Eventually, they were charging five dollars per person.

To add to the mysterious appearance of the house, Mr. Romano purchased many statues from a friend named Al, who was an auctioneer. These were placed throughout the home. Two of these statues, a matching pair of stone lions, were placed outside of the home flanking both sides of the front entrance. One time, a couple of men attempted to steal them but were unsuccessful. When the Romanos moved some years later, they took these lions with them.

Unfortunately, it was during a tour that one of the treasures found in the house went missing. Shortly after moving into the home, Mrs. Romano discovered a letter that had been sent to one of the members of the Eintracht Club. The letter had been dictated by Helen Keller and was kept in Mrs. Romano’s jewelry box. Its disappearance was quite upsetting.

Just after the family moved in, one of the house’s long-kept secrets was hidden. Jimmy Romano recalled the tunnel located in the carriage house in the center of the main floor with a hatch about the size of a large manhole covering the entrance. Beneath this were steps that led down, and from there, the short tunnel ran north. The hiding of this took place when Ken and Bill Ocheltree covered the tunnel entrance with cement. This was done to keep the younger children from playing in it. Though when asked about this, Ken Ocheltree didn’t have any recollection of it.

During these early years, a couple of strange incidents occurred involving the stairway, the first of which was when Mr. and Mrs. Romano’s youngest child, Debbie, fell down the stairs while in her baby walker. Miraculously, she escaped the incident completely unscathed. The same could not be said for their babysitter, who lived with them for a time. Karen Dillon Brown was a family friend, and on one occasion, she and Ken Ocheltree were arranging some books on an upper floor when an incident occurred. While moving these books, Karen was pushed by some unseen force down the stairs. She was fairly banged up from the fall and shortly afterward moved out, though her moving had nothing to do with this incident. Karen had recently graduated and wished to start her life. Still, word quickly spread about what had happened, and soon, stories were circulating about a “servant girl” named Karen who had been killed in the house many years earlier. It’s amazing how some legends have their origins.

As time wore on, a few further renovations were made to the house. The beautiful glassed-in office on the second level was converted into Mrs. Romano’s sewing room, and the former servants’ bedroom on the lowest floor was converted into a kitchen. It was also at that time that Mr. Romano decided to remove the long bar the Eintracht Club installed on the third floor. This was done mainly because it wasn’t original to the house and did not match the rest of the interior. The plan was to replace it with a smaller bar, which he did after removing the wall that separated Dora Tiedemann’s former bedroom from what had once been the ladies’ guest bedroom.

To start with, the third floor always seemed a bit on the cold side. When Mr. Romano removed the long bar, he discovered why. Where the bar made an L-turn and met the wall, he found a window behind it that had been sealed up, and worse yet, the window had been left open about six inches to a foot. Also found next to the open window was a note left by one of the bar’s original builders that said “Hot as Hell, Ha Ha!”

As the years passed, the unusual disturbances began to occur with greater frequency. Mr. and Mrs. Romano’s daughter Dee Dee remembered that the bedroom door would open and close of its own accord. Furthermore, there was an incident when she was sitting in the bedroom reading a book. When she’d finish reading a page, she’d say, “turn the page,” and the page would turn. She did this a few times and thought it amusing. After telling her mother about this, she was told never to do it again.

Dee Dee’s twin brother, Jimmy, remembered that certain items would go missing around the house and turn up some time later in a completely different place, sometimes even on a different floor. One of the most common disturbances was the sound of footsteps moving across the upper floors when nobody was up there.

For a time, the future of the Franklin Castle looked uncertain. A group that was interested in purchasing the house and moving it to New York City approached the Romanos about doing this. The plan was that blueprints for the house would be drawn up, each block would be numbered as it was removed and the house would be reassembled just as it had stood in Cleveland. A surveyor came in, measured the position of the house in relation to the property pins and learned that it hadn’t shifted more than one quarter of an inch in the ninety years it had stood. Eventually, Mrs. Romano decided that she didn’t want to sell the house to this group and firmly believed it should remain in Cleveland. Though the move never happened, she ended up with a copy of the blueprints.

As the disturbances continued, the children were eventually forbidden to play on the third and fourth floors, which were primarily used for storage. The first floor served as the children’s play room, though playing outside seemed a far better alternative. Jimmy Romano recalled playing in the backyard, where he’d often dig holes in the sandy ground. Some of these holes were so deep that he’d be able to hide in them completely. One time, he found a very old ice skate buried in the dirt, which makes one wonder what else might be buried on the property. Jimmy also recalled that he got in trouble on more than one occasion for digging these holes.

Playing outside was fine for a while, though soon curiosity seekers started coming up to the house to take pictures. Some people even started photographing the Romano children. One year it got so bad that Mr. Romano had the children’s bikes and swing set moved into the main room on the second floor. Eventually, people got so bold as to even come onto the property to take pictures. Little did they know the Romanos owned a dog named Tootsie, which Jimmy had named after the Tootsie Roll. Tootsie was notorious for biting people who would come into the yard to get a closer look. This was accomplished by hiding around a corner and waiting for the unsuspecting trespassers. One time, Tootsie even ripped the seat off of someone’s pants.

Soon, the house was being visited by some of the most unusual guests. People claiming to be white witches, black witches, psychics and mediums all wanted to see it. One time, a man in a cape showed up at the front door wanting to come in. These total strangers couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t be admitted. On one occasion, a woman sent over a box of items hoping that Mrs. Romano would be able to help find her missing child.

It seemed that the only people who wouldn’t want to come into the house were Mr. Romano’s parents. When they would come over for a visit, they remained in their car in the driveway. If Mr. Romano ever tried to invite them in, his mother would refuse, telling him that she wouldn’t go into the house because it was evil.

Mrs. Romano would occasionally have over a newspaper reporter or legitimate paranormal investigator. It was on occasions like these that she would send her children next door to their babysitter’s. One of these legitimate investigations was conducted by a group of seven students from John Caroll University. This was to be done on a long-term basis, as the students would live with the Romanos for an extended period of time. These students resided on the third floor and in the bedroom on the fourth. Until now, that bedroom had been used as Mr. Romano’s clock room. After being there a few days, they came back to find their rooms ransacked and immediately suspected that the Romano children had gone through their possessions, which, of course, they hadn’t.

While searching the fourth floor, these students stumbled across one of the passages that paralleled the ballroom, where they made an incredible discovery—yet another of the house’s many treasures. Within this passage, they found an old photograph as well as an oil painting of a young girl holding a basket of eggs. Upon showing this painting to the Romanos, the children grew ecstatic. There was no mistake about it. The girl in the portrait was the same girl they’d seen on the fourth floor near the dumbwaiter service when they’d first moved in. As for the photograph, it was of Hannes, Louise and August Tiedemann, most likely August Tiedemann’s graduation portrait.

The painting of the girl, which had eyes that seemed to follow you across the room, remained with the Romano family until early December 2006, when it was donated to the Goodwill in Elyria, certainly a wonderful find for some lucky soul.

Unfortunately, the college students made a habit of staying up late and making too much noise, which Mr. and Mrs. Romano couldn’t tolerate, as they had young children in the house. Also, they had brought in a Tarot deck and Ouija board that Mrs. Romano had asked them not to. The students were asked to leave after only a month.

For a brief time following the students’ stay at the castle, a man named Lance Toko occupied one of the upper floors. On one occasion, a statue that he’d owned, a bust of Mae West, was found destroyed in his bedroom, the head being completely separated from the shoulders. Toko immediately blamed the Romano children, though to this day they deny that any of them had broken it.

Aside from the problem of new light bulbs constantly burning out, the house also proved rather expensive to keep heated during the winter months, as it was heated by a steam radiator system with a large boiler in the first-floor coal room. Heating bills reached as high as $300 a month, almost completely unheard of at that time.

Many different stories have been told in regards to the Romanos’ departure from the Franklin Castle. One of the most common of these tells that the spirits that inhabited the house finally drove Mrs. Romano to the brink of madness. This is, of course, completely preposterous. In fact, it should be pointed out that many of the newspaper articles written at that time took much of what she’d said out of context. Jimmy Romano firmly explained that many of those articles made his mother out to be something of a flake, which she definitely wasn’t.

Another story claims that Mrs. Romano received a warning from a medium telling her that if she didn’t move out of the house, one of her children would die. Never was there such a prediction made. This story stems from someone doing research on the Romano family and learning that one of their children had tragically died shortly after the family left the house.

On the evening of Saturday, September 4, 1976, Mr. and Mrs. Romano’s eleven-year-old son John had been playing near the road in front of the new family home on U.S. Route 42 in West Salem, Ohio, with some friends. At one point, he ran out onto the road and into the path of a northbound vehicle. According to the Medina County Sheriff’s Office, the driver braked and swerved but couldn’t avoid hitting the child. John Romano was taken to Lodi Community Hospital, where he died from his injuries. The fact that anyone would twist this tragedy to make the story of the Franklin Castle sound more interesting is quite disturbing.

The truth behind the Romano family’s moving is actually very simple. In the early part of the 1970s, the City of Cleveland began to make changes in its school system. These changes included bussing children from their own neighborhoods to different parts of town. Mr. and Mrs. Romano didn’t like the idea of the city deciding which schools their children would attend. It was at this that they decided to put their home up for sale.

In the late summer of 1974, a new owner was found, and the Romanos relocated to West Salem. The children felt somewhat out of place in their new community, having lived in the city their entire lives. Mr. Romano, in particular, didn’t really care for living that far out. One would think this would be the end of the Romanos’ part in the story of the Franklin Castle, when, in fact, they would still have much more involvement with the house in the years to come.