Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  After dinner, more guests arrived and the dancing began. Frank knew the party would last far into the night for Zelia was an untiring hostess. He slipped unnoticed out the back door and for a while walked aimlessly through the gathering twilight. Then he struck out along the brook that skirted the Hanleys’ hill.

  Far ahead he saw a light in their kitchen.

  Before Frank realized how far he had come, he reached the thicket at the base of the hill. He stopped suddenly. A girl in white was dancing on the hillside. With her arms extended, she glided in and out among the trees.

  Frank’s eyes misted and his heart ached with a young man’s desire. Tonight Ethel would not elude him. He sprang forward; the figure floated backward, gesturing for him to follow.

  He fought the tangled branches, his eyes riveted on the apparition that kept receding farther up the hillside. He had almost reached her when she raised her arm and tossed something toward him. Whatever it was fell at his feet. He stooped over to pick it up. When he looked again, she was gone.

  In his hand he held a spray of fresh lilacs.

  H. P. and Son

  Cleveland

  Cleveland businessman H. P. Lillibridge was at work one morning, dictating a letter, when he saw the image of his son hovering a few feet from his desk, his face covered with blood.

  Lillibridge paled and put a hand to his head. It was throbbing. When his secretary asked if he was ill, he said no. But he knew then that his boy, Joe, serving as the captain of a freighter somewhere at sea, had been seriously injured or worse.

  Lillibridge hurriedly finished his dictation and went home to lunch.

  He picked at his meal uncaringly then took a brisk walk to calm himself. He and his son were very close. They shared the same likes and dislikes, habits and opinions, and often, each knew what the other was thinking and feeling. People often remarked that they seemed more like brothers than father and son. Joe captained a freighter as his father had in his own youth; each man started as a common sailor. Lillibridge wrote to his son regularly, and Joe, who had no time for long letters, kept a daily log that he mailed to his father whenever he was in port.

  That afternoon back at his office, H. P. sat at his desk and wrote a detailed account of all he had seen in his vision. Putting the paper in an envelope, he sealed it and addressed it to himself. Then he sent for Willis, the cashier.

  “Willis,” he began, tapping the envelope against his fingers, “please seal this in a large envelope, address it to yourself, and put it in the safe.”

  “Yes, sir, of course.”

  “Right away, please.”

  “I understand, sir,” said Willis, taking the envelope.

  But Willis did not understand. He had never before been asked to carry out such an odd assignment. A double-sealed letter in the safe with the money and important company papers?

  Willis remarked about the peculiar request to the secretary. She too was perplexed. She told Willis that their boss had seemed confused that morning and she wondered if he had suffered a stroke.

  But Willis did as he was told. The envelope was mailed, then received by him and secured in the safe. Days passed and every time Willis opened the safe he saw the large envelope and wondered anew at its contents.

  Seven weeks after Lillibridge wrote the letter, Joe Lillibridge’s latest log arrived from Melbourne, Australia. H. P. called his brother, who was one of his partners, to his office, then summoned the cashier to bring his sealed letter from the safe.

  Willis delivered the envelope, leaving a damp thumbprint in one corner. Standing to one side of the desk, he watched Lillibridge slit the envelope open cleanly with a silver letter opener. Lillibridge shook out the sheets of paper, adjusted his glasses, and began reading in a clear voice to his brother and his cashier.

  Weeks earlier, H. P. Lillibridge wrote that he had seen a vision of an uprising on his son’s ship during which Joe was struck twice in the head by a piece of iron pipe. Joe was badly injured and bleeding profusely.

  Lillibridge put aside the letter, then turned to his son’s log. Lillibridge’s brother and the cashier paled as they listened to Joe’s account of a mutiny aboard his ship; it paralleled the father’s account in nearly every detail except that Joe survived his serious injuries. Allowing for time and date differences, the father had “seen” his son’s apparition at the exact time of the mutiny.

  Four years later, Joe Lillibridge died of sunstroke in the South Seas. But his close association with his father extended beyond the grave. H. P. Lillibridge said he frequently received messages directly from Joe and often saw his ghost. On one occasion the apparition warned his father to avoid an unsafe business deal. He heeded the advice, which had proven to be prescient.

  H. P. and Joe Lillibridge remained “close,” until H. P.’s own death many years later. It made him certain that the bonds between parents and children can remain close even beyond death.

  An Invitation

  Willis

  The hobo was not sure how many miles he had ridden in the boxcar before he decided to go back. He did not know exactly why, but there was something in young Sam’s face that disturbed him, something that communicated an unspoken need. The man recalled that he had been about Sam’s age when his own father had died. So when the engineer slowed the train at a rural crossing, he jumped off and hitchhiked from the middle of nowhere back to Willis, Ohio.

  On the trip back, he wearily reflected on the bizarre events of the day before. It seemed as if it was all part of a dream, yet as he processed the entire evening’s events, he realized that everything had indeed taken place.

  During a driving rainstorm the previous night, the hobo had crawled off a freight train in the now-vanished village of Willis. Shivering in a light jacket and thin pants, he sloshed through the deserted rail yard. Suddenly, someone spoke to him. “It’s sure a bad night.”

  The hobo looked up to see a man wearing a slicker with a rain hat pulled low over his forehead.

  “You got a place to stay?” asked the man. “If you don’t you’d better come home with me for the night.”

  The hobo thanked him and then followed him down the street. Neither of them spoke. After walking two blocks, the man in the slicker turned and walked up to the porch of a house. Stepping aside, he told the stranger to go on in.

  He did as he was directed. A woman and her two children were preparing dinner in the kitchen. Giving the tramp a quick smile, she indicated a chair just inside the back door.

  “My name is Sarah and this is my daughter, Lucy, and my boy, Sam,” she said. “Lucy, set another place at the table for the nice man.”

  When the hobo sat down, he felt the water drain out of his cracked and weathered shoes; he hoped no one would notice the puddles on the floor. He glanced nervously toward the door. Where was the man who had invited him?

  “Sorry for the water, ma’am. I ain’t meanin’ to make work for ya,” said the tramp. “A nice gentleman brought me here. He said to go on in. Looked like he went around the other side of the house.”

  The woman nodded.

  “Yes, I know. We don’t eat fancy, but we can always feed an extra.” She smiled, stirring some extra carrots and onions into the stew simmering on the stovetop. Neither she nor her children seemed scared or disturbed at the sudden appearance of a disheveled hobo turning up on their doorstep.

  The stranger sat quietly and observed the young family finish the dinner preparations. He took in the mouthwatering smells and realized only then just how hungry he was. The only sound to be heard was that of the skillet sizzling in a wreath of smoke.

  “Where you headed?” asked Sarah.

  “Out west. Have to find me a job,” he volunteered.

  “Doing what?”

  The hobo’s cheeks reddened. “Whatever I can git.”

  Lucy clattered the plates and silverware onto the table while her little brother, Sam, carefully set out the bread and butter and pulled up the chairs. The hobo kept his eyes fixed on th
e door. What had happened to the man who had brought him here? He told him he would join him in a few minutes. In the silence, the hobo noticed something else rather odd—there were only four place settings. Was the other fellow not going to join them?

  Sarah noticed the visitor’s agitation. As they ate, she spoke openly to the hobo.

  “It was my husband brought you here. He likes to wander around the rail yard on stormy nights. Most times he brings a tramp or two home with him. But don’t be nervous—it’s fine that you’re here. Tell me if you want more to eat.”

  The stranger stared into his lap, his fingers rolling the paper napkin into a tight, damp ball. He had followed a man down the street and now that man had disappeared. The hobo heard the snap of wood in the kitchen range.

  When he looked up, he saw young Sam’s eyes upon him, eyes that seemed too old for such a small and somber face.

  After the meal was finished, Sarah orchestrated the cleanup, with the hobo chipping in. Once everything was put away, she called to Sam. “Son, show our guest to the spare room.”

  The tramp liked the sound of the term “our guest.” No one had ever called him that before.

  The room he was taken to was spotlessly clean and the bed comfortable. Yet for some reason he could not sleep. As he was just dozing off, he heard footsteps coming down the hall. They stopped at his door. A minute later he heard whoever it was walking back down the hallway. The hobo thought it might be one of the children, and he rolled over in bed.

  But then sometime later came a knock on the door so hard that that he was shaken from his sleep. He got up and cracked open the door but saw no one. The pounding came again. This time he threw open the door. No one was there; the corridor was empty. But just as he was shutting the door, he felt something cold and wet brush past him. He did not sleep the rest of the night.

  In the morning, a warm sun shone. The hobo was boneweary from lack of rest. He got dressed and made his way downstairs. He thanked Sarah and set off for the depot. He reached the tracks as a westbound freight rumbled in. The tramp spotted an empty boxcar with a partially opened door. He was just about to leap aboard when he heard a small voice behind him.

  “Here’s your cap, mister.”

  The hobo turned around. Sam, squinting into the sunlight, held the old, sweat-stained black watch cap.

  “Thanks, kid.”

  The train was picking up speed. Another open boxcar came into view. Sam just stood there, watching.

  “I’ve been meanin’ to ask you something, kid,” the hobo shouted above the din of the moving train. “But if it ain’t none of my business, you tell me.”

  Sam remained motionless.

  “I was wonderin’ why your old man never came back last night. Maybe he come home late and I missed him?”

  Sam’s eyes widened. He spoke steadily and without emotion. “My father’s dead, mister. He was killed in an accident in this here rail yard almost six years ago.”

  The hobo nodded. As the train moved away, he returned Sam’s friendly wave.

  “So long, kid! And tell your old man thanks . . . ,” he bellowed as he leaped aboard the last boxcar.

  Franklin Castle

  Cleveland

  Hannes Tiedemann and his wife, Luise, realized their lifelong dream back in 1881—the construction of their turreted home at 4308 Franklin Boulevard NW in Cleveland. The “castle,” as they called it, had been planned and built exactly to their specifications. The Tiedemanns were overjoyed.

  Some local residents claim that the old couple liked their house so much that they never left, even after their deaths.

  Bizarre stories of psychic disturbances have been told for over a century about this mansion on “Millionaire’s Row.” Scores of newspaper articles and television programs have documented its haunted history.

  What do the stories contend? That doors fly off their hinges without being touched, lights go on and off by themselves, chandeliers slowly swing when the air is still. Mirrors fog for no apparent reason, and voices murmur in empty rooms. From time to time a woman in black is seen peering out a narrow window in the front tower room. A little girl—perhaps the Tiedemanns’ daughter Emma—begs visiting children to come play with her. She died of diabetes at the age of fifteen, a decade after the family moved in.

  The history of the so-called Franklin Castle is a mixture of fact and legend, blurred by incomplete or missing records. It is known, however, that the Hannes Tiedemann family built it and lived there for nearly thirty-three years, that Hannes built his fortune from wholesale grocery and liquor businesses, and that in his later years he became a bank executive.

  It is also a house touched by immense sorrow.

  In addition to his daughter dying there in 1881, Hannes Tiedemann’s eighty-four-year-old mother, Wiebeka, died in the house the same year. She might be the woman in black passersby see on occasion staring out one of the upper-floor windows. Two years later, three more children in the family died. Their father claimed they had been ill, but neighbors suspected there was more to the deaths than that.

  The grief-stricken Luise Tiedemann busied herself with her house, adding secret passageways, hidden rooms, and turrets and gargoyles that made the house appear very much like a gothic haunted castle. Luise even added a huge ballroom on the fourth floor.

  After Luise’s death, Tiedemann sold the place to a family named Mulhauser, remarried, and moved elsewhere. He died in 1908, outliving every member of his immediate family.

  In 1913 the Mulhauser family sold the castle to the German Socialist Party, which used it for meetings and parties. The Socialists owned it for fifty-five years, but for most of that time the house was considered unoccupied.

  A Cleveland nurse recalled caring for an attorney who supposedly lived at 4308 Franklin Boulevard in the early 1930s. She remembered being terrified by the late-night sound of a small child’s crying. The servants refused to talk about it, dismissing the cries as the mews of a desperate cat. But forty years later, the nurse told a reporter that she would “never set foot in that house again.”

  In 1968 Mrs. James C. Romano bought the Tiedemann castle and she, her husband, and their six children moved in. Mrs. Romano always admired the huge stone house and planned to open a restaurant in it. She quickly changed her mind.

  On the day they moved in, their two young sets of twins went upstairs to play. Soon they came down to ask if they could take a cookie up to their friend—a little girl in a long dress. She was crying. This happened a number of times, but every time Mrs. Romano looked for an extra child she found none but her own.

  Mrs. Romano sometimes heard organ music, although there was no organ in the house. In bed late at night, there was the heavy tramping of footsteps as if an army platoon was marching back and forth on the third floor, originally a ballroom, where her two grown sons by a previous marriage slept. Sometimes, when no one was up there, she still heard voices and the clink of glasses. She finally refused to set foot on both the third and fourth floors when she was alone, and she forbade her children from playing up there.

  Mrs. Romano’s fears about the third floor may have been well founded.

  Barbara Dreimiller, a Cleveland writer, had a chilling experience there. During a visit, she and three friends had just reached the third floor when they saw a vaporous object, like a blanket of fog, drifting ahead of them.

  The friends hung back, but Dreimiller bravely walked toward it. Before she could reach it, she seemed to grow faint. Her friends pulled her free of the sickening cloud just before she passed out. They found no source for the vapor.

  One Halloween, the telephone awakened Mrs. Romano at midnight. She picked up the receiver and heard, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  The voice, she recalled, was deep and hollow as though it “came from the grave.” She screamed and dropped the phone. After that incident she vowed never to answer the phone when she was alone in the house.

  “A week later,” said Mrs. Romano, “I woke up from
a deep sleep and found myself in the middle of the floor screaming so loud I lost my voice. And someone was screaming right along with me.”

  James Romano, who was an electrician by trade, rewired the entire house. Yet light bulbs burned out in a week’s time and fixtures burst into flames.

  Mrs. Romano consulted a Catholic priest.

  He told her she was possessed, at times, by the spirit of Luise Tiedemann and that it was the ghost of little Emma Tiedemann who slammed doors and raced up and down the stairs. The priest felt there were many evil entities in the house and advised the family to leave.

  Mrs. Romano’s grown sons needed no urging. They moved out after something pulled the covers off their beds in the third-floor bedroom.

  James Romano remained calm and philosophical about the house.

  “When you buy a castle, you get the ghosts. It’s Halloween at our place 365 days a year.”

  His wife never adopted such a casual attitude. She felt certain the house held dark, brooding secrets. She was too upset to try to learn what they were.

  “It isn’t something to mess with,” she said.

  Eventually she became physically ill and admitted the house was getting the best of her. In September 1974 the Romanos sold the place to Samuel Muscarello.

  The new owner planned to turn it into a Universal Christian Church and, to raise money, opened the house to tours.

  A Cleveland radio disc jockey and a photographer emerged from their tour visibly shaken.

  The radio announcer would not discuss his experience, but he turned down an offer of three hundred dollars to spend the night in the castle.

  For his part, the photographer said he was sitting downstairs with the owner when he heard a woman’s voice call his name.

  He ran up the stairs but found no one. The only other people in the house were two floors higher and their voices could not be heard.