Milk Carton Bricks and the White Lady: Loveland Castle, Ohio

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 15, 2026 · How we verify

Loveland Castle is a one-man medieval fantasy built out of river stone and milk cartons on the banks of the Little Miami River, north of the town of Loveland in Ohio. Its formal name is Château Laroche, and it exists because a World War I veteran and Boy Scout troop leader named Harry D. Andrews spent more than fifty years of his life hauling rocks up from the water and setting them in mortar. The ghost stories came later, and most of them come from the people who look after the place.

Quick Facts on Château Laroche

• Location: the banks of the Little Miami River, north of Loveland, Ohio
• Construction began: 1927
• Builder: Harry D. Andrews, Boy Scout troop leader, World War I veteran and medievalist
• Land acquired by: promotional plots given for one-year subscriptions to The Cincinnati Enquirer
• Time spent building: over fifty years
• Current owners: the Knights of the Golden Trail, Andrews’ Boy Scout troop, since his death in 1981
• Now: a museum

Harry Andrews and Fifty Years of Hauling Stone

The land came cheap, and strangely. Andrews assembled his site out of promotional plots handed out by The Cincinnati Enquirer to anyone who paid for a one-year subscription. On that patchwork of newspaper giveaways, starting in 1927, he began building a castle in the style of a medieval fortress.

The method was as improvised as the land purchase. Andrews pulled stones directly from the Little Miami River running past the property. When he had exhausted what the river would give him, he switched to making his own material, molding bricks out of cement poured into quart milk cartons. The result is a building whose walls are, quite literally, half riverbed and half dairy packaging.

He kept at it for over fifty years. That detail is worth pausing on, because it reframes the whole site. This is not a folly thrown up in a burst of enthusiasm. It is a single man’s working life, poured into masonry one bucket at a time, from the 1920s into the 1980s.

The French Hospital That Gave the Castle Its Name

The name is not invented whimsy. Andrews named his castle after a military hospital housed in the Château de la Roche, or “Rock Castle,” in southwest France. That building was a 19th-century château constructed by the Russian Count Grigory Kushelev-Bezborodko, and Andrews stayed there while stationed in France during the First World War.

So the Ohio castle is a copy of a memory: a wounded soldier’s recollection of a real French château, rebuilt from scratch thousands of miles away over the following half century. It is one of the more affecting facts about the place, and it is a documented one.

The Knights of the Golden Trail Take Over

Andrews died in 1981 and left the castle to his Boy Scout troop, the Knights of the Golden Trail, known as the KOGT. They have held and worked on it ever since, and the building has been extensively upgraded and renovated in the years since his death. The KOGT have carried the project close to completion, finishing what Andrews did not live to finish.

Their additions are visible throughout. The East tower now houses a short video presentation on Andrews’ quest to complete his dream. The walls of the upstairs chapel are set with stones Andrews brought back from his travels around the world, along with others mailed to him by friends and followers abroad. More recently the volunteers completed an expansion to the outside gardens and added a greenhouse.

What People Report Inside the Castle Walls

Tales of Château Laroche being haunted have been reported over the years, and notably, many of them originate with the castle’s own volunteer knights rather than with visiting ghost hunters. That is unusual enough to note. The people most invested in the building’s upkeep are also among those telling the stories.

The figure most often named is Andrews himself. Visitors and staff describe glimpsing him in the castle’s passages, and local tradition holds that his appearance functions as a warning, a sign that something on the property is amiss. Whether a builder would haunt his own unfinished work is a nice thought rather than a verifiable one, and nothing in the castle’s documented record supports it.

The second story concerns a figure known as the White Lady, said to have died in an explosion near the castle and described as appearing in a flowing white dress in the courtyard or near the riverbank. People who have tried to approach her report that she vanishes. No death record is offered alongside this account. It should be read as local legend, not history.

Beyond those two, reports are of the ordinary haunted-building kind: footsteps, movement caught at the edge of vision, the sense of company in an empty room. A structure of hand-set stone and homemade brick, built piecemeal over five decades and renovated repeatedly since, is not a quiet building. Sound behaves oddly in it, and that accounts for a share of what people describe, though not for all of it.

Visiting Loveland Castle

Château Laroche operates as a museum, and its stewards are volunteers rather than paid staff, so opening arrangements are best confirmed directly before making the drive. Check current hours and admission ahead of your visit.

Once inside, the things worth your attention are the East tower video on Andrews’ half-century project, the chapel upstairs with its walls of stones gathered from around the world, and the gardens and greenhouse the knights have added. Look closely at the masonry while you are there. The transition from river rock to milk-carton brick is the story of the whole place, visible in the walls.

See Loveland Castle for Yourself

Sources

• Loveland Castle
• 120 Waterfall Hikes Around Cincinnati Ohio
• Harry Andrews and the Legend of Chateau La Roche
• Chateau Laroche, Loveland Castle
• Wikipedia: Chateau Laroche

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