The Casket Room Ghost of Cleveland’s House of Wills

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

The House of Wills sits in Cleveland, Ohio, as one of the city’s most photographed empty buildings: a gothic pile that has been a Hebrew school, a Prohibition speakeasy and, for most of the twentieth century, a Black-owned funeral home of real standing. It closed in 2005. What has grown up in the years since is a body of reported sightings, told mostly by urban explorers and paranormal investigators, of a white figure at an upper window, shadows crossing doorways and a man in a suit in the room where caskets were once displayed. None of that is verified. The history underneath it is.

• Founded: 1904, by John Walter Wills
• Original name: Gee & Wills, later Wills and Sons
• Closed: 2005
• Where: Cleveland, Ohio

John Walter Wills and the Business He Built

Wills established the funeral business in 1904 under the name Gee & Wills, and it later operated as Wills and Sons. It became one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in Cleveland, which in an era of intense segregation meant something beyond commercial success. A funeral home serving a community shut out of most other institutions inevitably becomes more than a funeral home. The House of Wills functioned as a community hub, and it hosted civil rights meetings at a time when few other rooms in the city were open for them.

That is the part of the story worth carrying into the building with you. Whatever else the place has become in the imagination of ghost hunters, its documented significance is as a monument to African American entrepreneurship and cultural identity in a neighborhood that had previously been dominated by German and Jewish residents.

Hebrew School, Speakeasy, Funeral Parlor

The structure itself has changed hands and purposes more than once. Before the funeral business took it over, it served as a Hebrew school, and during Prohibition it operated as a speakeasy. The grand gothic exterior gives way inside to a set of thematically decorated rooms and a large auditorium, features that read strangely in an abandoned building and go a long way toward explaining why photographers keep coming back to it.

Those overlapping uses are also why the place resists a single tidy ghost story. There is no one tragedy that anchors the legend. Instead there are layers: a school, a bar operating outside the law, decades of funerals, then two decades of vacancy.

What Visitors Say They See Inside the House of Wills

Since the closure in 2005 the building has drawn paranormal enthusiasts and thrill seekers, and the accounts that circulate fall into a few consistent shapes. Read them as reported experiences rather than established fact.

• The figure at the window. A white figure is described staring out solemnly from a second-story window, usually seen from the street rather than from inside.
• Shadows in motion. Dark shapes are reported flitting from room to room, glimpsed at the edge of vision in corridors and doorways.
• The man in the casket room. The room where caskets were once shown is the most frequently named spot in the building. Witnesses describe the apparition of a man in a suit there.
• Voices in empty rooms. Speech and murmuring are reported echoing through spaces with no one in them.

Worth noting for the sceptically minded: a large, half-empty gothic building with an auditorium and long hallways is an acoustic instrument. Sound carries oddly, light through dirty upper windows behaves unpredictably, and expectation does the rest. That does not make the accounts dishonest. It does mean the casket room ghost is a story people tell, not a fact anyone has demonstrated.

Seeing the House of Wills Today

This is not a museum. The funeral business ceased operating in 2005 and the building has been closed since, so there is no ticket counter and no posted opening hours in anything documented here. Treat it as private property: look at the facade from the public street, photograph the exterior, and do not attempt to get inside. Abandoned buildings of this age carry genuine hazards that have nothing to do with the supernatural, and access is at the owner’s discretion, not a visitor’s.

If you go, go for the right reason. The House of Wills is interesting because of what it was, a place where a Black-owned business in segregated Cleveland became a civic institution, and because of the peculiar afterlife the building has had as a ruin. The ghost stories are the surface. The history is the reason the surface holds anyone’s attention.

See House of Wills for Yourself

Sources

• Sir Joshua Reynolds Lady Talbot exhibited 1782
• Making sure you're not a bot!
• Loc (official)
• Yale (official site)
• VIAF
• Wikipedia: Wills Hill, 1st Marquess of Downshire

Address: 2491 East 55th Street

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