SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Our host; Dr.G had his first paranormal experience at only eight years old. With over five decades of storytelling, magic and paranormal story collection he is an award winning story teller on a mission to revive firelight and the telling of stories!
SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
A Banker’s Mansion Becomes America’s Most Haunted House
A grand Cleveland mansion with turrets, a fourth-floor ballroom, and a tangle of secret passages sounds like a fairy tale—until the deaths begin, rumors spread, and the walls start talking. We head out on the road for Doctober and open the door to Franklin Castle, widely called the most haunted house in Ohio, to unpack how grief, architecture, and folklore fused into a legend that refuses to fade.
We trace the Tiedemann family’s rapid losses and the questions that followed, then explore why hidden corridors and a castle-like facade invite darker readings of a place already heavy with sorrow. From alleged affairs and violence to political intrigue and the sensational discovery of bones, the castle absorbed the fears of each generation and reflected them back. Decades later, the Romano family’s attempt to restore the home collided with classic paranormal markers—organ music with no organ, small footsteps, and children who asked for cookies for a crying girl—culminating in a priest’s stark advice to leave. Along the way, we consider the woman in black seen in the tower, a niece said to have been hanged behind the ballroom, and the chilling claims of infant remains linked to a rogue doctor.
Media attention kept the furnace hot: TV investigators, urban explorers, and would-be restorers all added fresh layers—fires, stalled renovations, and rumors that pushed the house deeper into infamy. We also share a new field lead: a floor-to-ceiling cabinet that swings open into a tunnel, a sudden ten-foot drop, and a witness who swears a man in a bowler hat shoved him over the edge. Whether you lean skeptical or sensitive, Franklin Castle is a case study in how place, story, and human need create hauntings that feel alive. Listen for the history, stay for the patterns, and decide where you draw the line between legend and record.
If this kind of deep dive into paranormal history and field leads is your thing, tap follow, share the show with a friend who loves haunted places, and leave a review with your take on Franklin Castle’s most credible claim.
Hey everybody, it's Dr. G, Spirit Tales and Magic. Hope today finds you well. It's been quite a busy day for Cassandra and I, and we are still not home. So definitely not in control of the space that I am in. We will do our best to get through this and broadcast it out hopefully without a lot of interruption. Just to check in on what we lovingly refer to as Doctober, and some people call it Doctoberfest. It averages out to be an episode a day for the month of October. That doesn't mean there isn't actually an episode every day. It just means that there are between 30 and 31 episodes in the month of October. Having said that, there may not be an episode tomorrow. It's a travel day. Or something like that. So just to keep you in the know. Because like I always say, we appreciate you guys very much, and I don't want you to think, where'd he go? or something like that. So Cassandra and I are talking during our 17 minutes of lunch today. What exactly would be the top 10 paranormal events? Now, if you look at 50 different lists of the top 10 paranormal events, you'll get 40 some different lists most of the time. So we tried to, not very scientifically, but just eyeing them up and counting and tried to throw together the top ten paranormal list from many different sources, kind of shakes out like this. Number ten, the Franklin Castle. Number nine, the Enfield poltergeist. Number eight is Havana Syndrome. Seven, the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Number six, where are the Sauter Children? Number five is our friend the Mothman. Number four, Dog Calling Bridge. Number three, hey, it's our friend Bigfoot. Number two is the Flannon Isles Lighthouse. And number one, they say, is the Bell Witch. So we thought it would be fun to touch on some of those. I probably won't do the top ten in order. We've already talked a lot about our buddy the Sasquatch, and the Mothman has his own episode coming up. So we will go through some of them though. I have not been inside the Franklin Castle. I have been by it many times, and both times when I tried to get in there, there was always some reason. Oh, you can't, it's under construction, the owner's not here, we don't know you, you know, that sort of bunk. In Cleveland, in the American state of Ohio, they say, you can find the Heinous Teterbin Mansion. Now, this imposing mansion is better known as the Franklin Castle because it's located on Franklin Boulevard. But it's also known as the most haunted house in Ohio. Why? Because things have happened there that should have never come to light. That's from a German newspaper. So let's talk about the history of Franklin Castle. The German immigrant, Hannes Tiederman, he was a banker. He built a mansion for his family between, I want to say, 1881 and 1883. The first three years, the first few years, his wife Luis and their children, and I believe that's August and Emma, had a pretty good time in their twenty-room house. His mother, Vebecca, also lived with them. Unfortunately, the happiness ended when fifteen-year-old daughter Emma died of consequences of diabetes January fifteenth, eighteen ninety one. Just a few weeks later, Vebecca also passed away. Immediately after this, people started speculating. Was the family cursed? In the three years that followed, three more children were buried, of which the youngest was just an infant. The speculations really came loose at that point. Did Hannes have something to do with it himself? Was there something he was trying to hide? Hannes wanted to cheer up his wife. She wanted a ballroom. This ballroom was as large as the entire house, built on the fourth floor. He also decorated the house with towers and gargoyles. Started to look more and more like a castle. In this period he also started building secret halls and tunnels in the house. Everyone wondered why did he do this? Questions were asked, the answers were unclear. But according to legend, Louisa used these tunnels to escape her husband's bad temper, and when she died in 1895, she was only fifty-seven years old. More strange things kept coming to the surface. People claimed that Hannes had several love affairs, sometimes even in the house itself. He allegedly forced women to have sex with him and didn't even shy away from murdering them if they refused. He must have had enough of the history of the castle. He sold the house shortly after his wife's death to the Mulheiser family. He remarried to Henrietta, a waitress, but the marriage already ended in a divorce a year later. Haines himself died in 1908 because of a massive stroke while taking a walk in the park. He did in fact outlive his entire family, even his grandchildren. There was nobody to left nobody left to claim his inheritance. The German Maulheiser family sold the house to the German Socialist Party in 1913. Now at that point, the castle was supposed to be a place for meetings and parties. Instead, it's rumored that the house was used to house Nazis. Legend says twenty people were killed in the house with machine guns because of political disagreements. Later, the residents claimed they could hear the fight over and over again inside the house. After that, the house remained vacant for a while until it was sold and purchased again in 1968 by James Romano and his family. His wife had always been fascinated by the large mansion. Goodness gracious, by the large mansion, and wanted to turn it into a restaurant. Well, the ghost kind of made sure that that didn't happen. The Romano family was very busy restoring the capsule. Mrs. Romano sent her children upstairs to play. A while later the four children came downstairs to ask for cookies. They said, Can we take some extra cookies to give to the sad girl who was crying? When misses Romano went up with them, she saw nobody, but the children insisted. They played with other children up there all the time. Not just with the crying girl. Were these children? The deceased Teterman children? Not just the idea of ghost children scared Mrs. Romano. There was organ music that filled the house on a regular occasion, even though the Romanos didn't own an organ. There were also footsteps. Sounds of clinking glasses and turning ceiling lamps made the family get help from paranormal investigators. During one investigation, one of them even ran out of the house screaming. And that's when a priest was asked to perform an exorcism on the house. The priest told them he believed there were evil spirits in the house, and that they should leave, because the spirits, in his opinion, were too powerful to remove. So in 1974, they did just that. The house was sold again to Sam Muscatella, who wanted to turn the place into a church. All ghost stories didn't do much good for his church, so he did determine that he would turn Franklin Castle into a tourist attraction. He opened the house to the public and gave people tours. Fearless people could also spend the night for a fee. He wanted to make a profit out of all of the ghost stories. He was so intrigued by all the secret passageways and tunnels, and he decided to explore the house very slowly, top to bottom, side to side, missing nothing. In one of these hidden rooms he made a very gruesome discovery. He found human bones. Now he took the story to the media. Some people claim he placed the bones there himself to seek more attention. But if that's so it backfired because the tourists stayed away. However, the strange stories continued. More and more scandals, and just when he thought he could recover in the press, there'd be another. So Muscatello sold the house again. But strange occurrences that all of his guests had written in the guest book in the guest book remained very interesting. Further research brought more wrongdoings of the Teterman to light. A woman in black was seen in the tower. She was seen in the room from time to time, and after much research she is claimed to be the ghost of Rachel, a maid who didn't want anything to do with uh, shall we say, Teterman's sweet talks. She was probably strangled by him because she refused. They say that people feel like they are choking if they're anywhere near that area. People who had spent the night there claimed to have heard a woman suffocating, but when they went up there, no one was there. The spirit of a thirteen year old niece of Teterman is also said to haunt the house. Karen was hanged in one of the tunnels behind the ballroom. They say because she was insane. Teterman claims that he wanted to put her out of her misery. But they say in truth he caught her in bed with one of his grandsons. Someone was killed in one of the rooms with an ax, and no less than twelve baby corpses were found in a secret room. Rumors say a doctor briefly lived there, and he experimented on babies and children. The sounds of babies crying are frequently heard in the castle as well. Franklin Castle today. It starred in several movies and TV shows. Paranormal Lockdown, I believe 2016. And I know Ghost Adventures was there in 2020. Now, since you can pretty much watch Netflix anywhere, and they don't advertise on the channel, but that's the network that they're on, so I don't want to hear about it. But you should make sure to check it out if you have any interest in that. There was another lady that bought it, Michelle Heimberger. She had great plans for the mansion. She wanted to restore it the way it was. Unfortunately, in 1999, there was a huge fire. That fire happened just a few months after she bought it. That pretty much ended that dream. It was partially destroyed. She didn't have the money or the time to fix it. Later, a group of people bought it to turn it into a club. The house remained untouched until 2006. People began to grow suspicious. Apparently the house was used for shooting pornographic movies. Franklin Castle remained unoccupied after that. The boarded up windows and the big fence with the no entry signs gave the house a even more creepy and depressive look. Now they say that in 2011, there was a European tapestry artist, Chera Donna Dow, bought the house. In 2012, a permit was issued to convert the house into three family homes. They say they hope the new families can live in perfect harmony with the many resident ghosts. Now I kind of lose track of it after that. So if anybody listening, and I know I have a lot of listeners in Cleveland, so if you know anything about the castle today, email that to me. We'll do a follow-up. I'm just going to touch on a tiny part of a story that Cassandra and I heard today. There's uh an underground room, and I I don't have permission to tell the story yet. And I don't know if the owners are going to give it to me. They're very hot and cold, which is why we didn't go home already. There's a spot in the room where there is a cabinet. It's a floor-to-ceiling cabinet, has a bunch of mason jars in it with things that look like they were canned many, many years ago. And if you push on that, it opens into a tunnel. And if you walk four or five feet, there's a a drop down. You if you ran over the edge of that thing, you would fall about 10 feet into another passageway. The reason that we were there in the first place was because one of the previous owners claims that he was pushed off of that. He called it balcony, but it's it's not a balcony. Says he was pushed off of that structure by a man in a long coat and a bowler hat. That changed the entire plan of why we were out and about in the first place. Soon as I heard that, I'm like, can you say that again? And they did. So we have to go there. Oh, I can arrange that for you. Oh, great, here we are. Um pretty sure the people that I'm in negotiations with do not listen to the podcast. Um, and if you do, uh stop acting like turds and play nice. What's your story about big houses and hauntings? We'd love to hear it. We get reminded when we're out doing stuff like this that there is indeed a world unseen. It is a world that exists all around us all the time. Every now and then we catch a glimpse of it, and the dead get in. If we don't talk tomorrow, we will definitely talk on Monday. Well, we may talk tomorrow. Until then, tell a paranormal story. It's good for you. Good night, my friends from the road.
unknown:Dr.
SPEAKER_00:G and Cassandra.
