Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 13, 2026 · How we verify
Reported Phenomena
- Woman in black apparition
- Disembodied voices
- Phantom crying
- Slamming doors
- Cold spots
- Unseen touches
- Objects moving
Reported by visitors & local legend. Stories, not verified claims.
Franklin Castle Cleveland is the address that turns up first whenever anyone starts arguing about the most haunted house in Ohio. The stone pile at 4308 Franklin Boulevard, in the city’s Ohio City neighborhood, has four stories, more than twenty rooms and eighty windows, and it was built for a German immigrant whose family buried five of its members inside a handful of years. Almost everything people believe about the place is a mixture of that documented grief and a century of embroidery on top of it. The two are worth separating before you go looking for the ghosts.
Quick Facts for the Tiedemann House
- Built: 1881 to 1883, for Hannes Tiedemann, a prosperous German immigrant
- Architects: the firm of Cudell & Richardson
- Style: American Queen Anne, in stone, with turrets and gargoyles added later
- Size: four stories, more than twenty rooms, eighty windows
- Listed: added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 15, 1982
- Now: privately owned; the owners announced single-night accommodations for guests on December 24, 2022
- Reported activity: a woman in black, disembodied voices and crying, doors slamming, cold spots, unseen touches
Hannes Tiedemann Built on Cleveland’s Best Street
When the house went up, Franklin Boulevard was one of the most prestigious residential avenues in Cleveland, and Tiedemann hired a firm with a reputation to match. Cudell & Richardson gave him a Queen Anne stone house rather than the Gothic pile the nickname suggests, and the castle look came later, in a second wave of building that added turrets and gargoyles to the facade along with a ballroom running the full length of the fourth floor.
The stated reason for that construction is the reason the house is famous. Tiedemann pushed the work forward to distract his wife, Louise, from a run of deaths in the family.
Five Deaths in the Tiedemann Family
The first is the one the legends always reach for. Tiedemann’s fifteen-year-old daughter Emma died of diabetes on January 15, 1881, the same year work on the house began. Tiedemann’s elderly mother, Wiebeka, died not long afterward. Over the next three years three more Tiedemann children were buried, and the sheer compression of it, five deaths in a single household in a few years, is what set neighbors speculating about the circumstances. Nineteenth-century Cleveland did not need a murderer to explain child mortality on that scale, but the whispering started anyway and never really stopped.
Louise Tiedemann died of a liver disease on March 24, 1895, at the age of fifty-seven. The following year Hannes sold the house to the Mullhauser family. By 1908 he and the entire Tiedemann family were dead, with no one left to inherit his considerable personal wealth. That detail, more than any apparition, is what gives the house its air of a line snuffed out.
The Secret Passages That Are Not There
Every retelling of Franklin Castle promises hidden rooms and concealed passageways, usually tied to bootlegging during Prohibition. It makes a good story and it does not survive contact with the building. No such rooms or passages exist beyond a small stairway that servants used to get from the kitchen to the front door. If you visit expecting a warren of sealed chambers, the house will disappoint you on that point.
The bones are a similar case. Human bones were found in a closet in 1975, a discovery that gets repeated as evidence of something terrible in the Tiedemann years. The prevailing belief is that they were planted by the property’s new owner, who was running ghost tours and wanted the publicity. It is a useful reminder that some of the castle’s most quoted horrors were manufactured by people with tickets to sell.
Clubhouses, Judy Garland’s Widower and a Fire
From 1921 to 1968 the house served as a home for various German and cultural organizations, which is how it survived the decades when large Victorian houses in American cities were routinely lost. Older accounts also attach a family named Romano to the 1960s, and their reported experiences inside the house are a staple of the local legend, though they sit outside the documented record.
The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. In early 1984 it was bought by Michael DeVinko, the fifth and last husband of Judy Garland, who began major renovations almost immediately and spent close to a million dollars over ten years, going so far as to track down some of the original furnishings. He put it up for sale in 1994 regardless, and the castle sat empty for five years.
In 1999 Michelle Heimburger, a native Clevelander and an early Yahoo! employee, bought the castle and carriage house for $350,000 with part of her stock windfall, intending a full restoration. That same year a fire badly damaged the building. Extensive repairs followed, but the restoration was never finished. The exterior stone was cleaned in the mid-2000s and the parapet on the left side of the facade was rebuilt to the nineteenth-century design, around the time of rumors that the house would reopen as the Franklin Castle Club. Fire returned in March 2011, damaging the carriage house. In July 2011 the property was rezoned as a three-family dwelling with a sale pending, and European tapestry artist Chiara Dona Dalle bought it that year for $260,000. A permit for residential exterior alterations followed in February 2012.
What People Report Inside Franklin Castle
None of the following is verified. These are accounts given by visitors, former residents and paranormal investigators, and the house’s reputation as the most haunted in Ohio rests on them rather than on any evidence.
- A woman in black: the most repeated sighting, a figure commonly identified in the local legend as a Tiedemann daughter. The identification is folklore, not record.
- Voices and crying: whispers and a woman’s distressed sobbing heard in the halls and upper floors.
- Doors and objects: doors slamming with no one near them, small items moving.
- Touches: the sensation of being brushed or gripped by an unseen hand.
- Cold spots and dread: localized chill in particular rooms, and a heavy emotional unease reported by some visitors.
Worth keeping in mind: this is a stone house of four stories and eighty windows that has burned twice and been renovated repeatedly. Drafts, settling and sound carrying through a tall, largely empty building account for a fair share of what gets described. The 1975 bones show how readily the record here has been salted for effect. What remains genuinely unsettling is the documented part, a family that lost five members and then vanished entirely within a generation.
Franklin Castle on Television
The house has been a regular stop for paranormal programming. Paranormal Lockdown featured it on March 18, 2016, in the third episode of its first season. Ghost Adventures filmed there for the second episode of Season 23, which aired on the Travel Channel on March 5, 2020, and The Holzer Files devoted its Season 2 episode four to the castle on November 19, 2020, also on the Travel Channel.
Staying the Night at Franklin Castle
Franklin Castle is a private residence and has been for most of its recent history, so there are no open grounds and no drop-in tours. The way in changed on December 24, 2022, when the owners announced that single-night accommodations were available to guests following several years of renovation work. Availability has come and gone over the years, so check before you plan a trip around it.
If you are only passing through, the exterior repays a look from the sidewalk. The cleaned stone, the rebuilt parapet and the turreted facade are the reason a Queen Anne house ended up being called a castle, and Franklin Boulevard still reads as the prestigious avenue Tiedemann chose to build on. Respect the fact that people live here.
Sources
- HouseFront
- Tiedemann, Hannes, House (National Park Service)
- To Cleveland and Away: Of Muellers, Reids, and Others
- Franklin Castle (Atlas Obscura)
- The Ghosts of Ohio – Lore & Legends in Ohio – Franklin Castle
- Wikipedia: Franklin Castle
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Franklin Castle located?
Franklin Castle is located at 4308 Franklin Blvd.
Can you visit Franklin Castle?
Franklin Castle is a place where you can stay overnight. Always follow posted rules and respect private property.
Reader sightings
Nobody has reported anything here yet. If you have been, you would be the first.
Report your own visit to Franklin Castle Cleveland: The Tiedemann House on the Boulevard
How haunted is this place?
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Ghost Tours Nearby
Phantom's Parade on Prospect: Cleveland Ghost Toursfrom $26
Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick- Cleveland – Admissionfrom $10Affiliate links: BeyondHaunted may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.
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