21 Stone Garden Farm & Museum Richfield
Spotlight On: O.P.I.N.
Spotlight On: The Haunted Housewife
Spotlight On: The Real Ghost Whisperer
CHAPTER 22 Ghosts of the Ashtabula Train Disaster Ashtabula
SOUTHEAST
CHAPTER 23 The Ridges Athens
CHAPTER 24 Moonville Tunnel Vinton County
Spotlight On: Hope Furnace
CHAPTER 25 Mystery Farmhouse Somewhere in Southeast Ohio
Spotlight On: Haunted Heartland Tours
CHAPTER 26 Briggs-Lawrence County Public Library Ironton
Ohio Haunted Road Trip Travel Guide
Visiting Haunted Sites
Further Reading
About the Author
Introduction
HEY, GHOSTHUNTER, when are you going to tell us about more haunted places in Ohio? If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that question, I would be a rich man today. Almost immediately after Ghosthunting Ohio was published in 2004, people began asking me why I didn’t include this haunted place or that one in the book. It seemed that every time I was a guest on some paranormal radio show, or speaking at a library or university, I would be asked that question. Who knew that there were so many haunted locations in Ohio? I did eventually listen to what my fans and readers were telling me, and this is the result: Ghosthunting Ohio: On the Road Again.
As all the books in the America’s Haunted Road Trip series, this book is a paranormal travel guide, designed to provide not only a great ghost story about each location but also practical information for those of you who would like to do a little ghosthunting of your own. Each place is open to the public, and specific details about location, hours of operation, phone numbers and website addresses, etc., are provided in the Resources section in the back of the book.
Southwest
Cincinnati
Cincinnati Observatory
Loveland
Chateau Laroche
Milford
Promont House Museum
New Richmond
Ross Gowdy House
New Vienna
Snow Hill Country Club
CHAPTER 1
Chateau Laroche
LOVELAND
I COULDN’T BELIEVE MY EYES. There, on a grassy sward beside the river, two knights in armor and colorful livery were engaged in furious combat, slashing away at each other with swords that looked as if they were made of rattan, while a bevy of ladies in long gowns and wimples stood beneath the trees watching them in fear and admiration. To the right, a mighty Norman castle rose up on the hillside overlooking the river, flags flying from its crenellated towers: the redoubtable Chateau Laroche. I felt as though I had wandered into a chapter from Ivanhoe, but in fact I was in Loveland, Ohio, only a few minutes away from downtown Cincinnati.
I lived in Loveland for several years and had the occasion many times to visit Chateau Laroche—nicknamed the Loveland Castle—with my children, friends, and out-of-town visitors. While medieval reenactors were not always on hand, you could depend upon someone from the Knights of the Golden Trail, the present owners and curators of the castle, to show you around and to answer questions about this incredible architectural wonder, the dream-child and life’s work of one man, “Sir” Harry Andrews.
You could also rely on the Knights to tell you about the several ghosts that sought refuge in the castle’s musty stone walls. The ghosts are an integral and romantic part of the history of the castle that all began in 1929 when Sir Harry bought the property on the banks of the Little Miami River and single-handedly began to construct his one-quarter-scale Norman castle.
What would prompt a man to devote himself to such an arduous task?
Harry Andrews was a fascinating man. Born in 1890, he was a graduate of Colgate University, reportedly spoke seven languages, and had an amazing IQ of 189. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I, serving as a medic, even though he was a conscientious objector. He did not object to warfare itself, but to the weapons of modern warfare that could indiscriminately kill large numbers of people from a distance; Harry preferred the old chivalric way of killing a man in eye-to-eye, hand-to-hand combat. During the war, he contracted spinal meningitis and was declared dead. By the time he was declared “undead” six months later, his fiancée back home had married another man.
Rather than return to the United States immediately, Harry roamed throughout Europe studying castles. He also swore off women and over the rest of his life would turn down more than fifty—by his count—marriage proposals from, in his words, “widows and old maids who wanted to live in a castle.”
Harry eventually returned to Ohio, where he worked at a local newspaper and conducted Sunday school for boys. He founded the Knights of the Golden Trail for boys and regularly hosted them on his riverside property where they camped, fished, swam, and boated. Deciding that his boys needed a castle, he began hauling rocks up from the river and Chateau Laroche was begun. At first, he worked on the construction whenever he could find the time, but after retiring from the newspaper at the age of sixty-five, he moved into the castle and dedicated all of his time to its completion.
I was fortunate enough to have visited the castle while Sir Harry was still alive and can remember seeing the wiry, white-haired, bespectacled man high up on the castle roof laying bricks. He was still actively working on the castle in 1981, at the age of ninety-one, when his pants accidentally caught fire from some work he was doing on the roof. He was severely burned and died sixteen days later from gangrene.
With the exception of some menial odd jobs performed by the young Knights, Sir Harry single-handedly built the castle, laying every brick himself. In addition to river rock, he also made cement bricks, using wax milk cartons as forms. He was a meticulous record-keeper; here is his tally of his labors over the fifty-two years he worked on the castle:
2,600 sacks of concrete
32,000 one-quart milk cartons for brick forms
54,000 five-gallon buckets of dirt
56,000 pails-full of stone
The eccentric lord of the castle received much publicity, and well over one million people have toured the castle. Many of them have seen the ghosts.
Sir Harry began seeing ghosts on the property early on. In his writings, he talked about
