Haunted Cleveland

On July 22, 1796, a surveying party from the Connecticut Land Company reached the mouth of the Cuyahoga River on the shore of Lake Erie. It was led by Moses Cleaveland, one of the company's directors, sent to map its holdings in the Western Reserve, and his surveyors named the new town after him. Cleaveland and most of his party left that October, and he never returned. Lorenzo Carter, who built a log cabin on the banks of the Cuyahoga, became the settlement's first permanent resident. Cleveland was incorporated as a village in 1814 and as a city in 1836.

The Ohio and Erie Canal, completed in 1832, and then the railroads turned the frontier town into an industrial powerhouse. In 1870 John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, Henry Flagler and Samuel Andrews formed the partnership that became Standard Oil. Irish and German immigrants came first, followed by waves from Southern and Eastern Europe. Cleveland had 43,417 residents in 1860 and 261,353 by 1890; by 1920 it had 796,841, nearly a third of them foreign-born, and was the fifth-largest city in the country. On Memorial Day 1890, the Arcade opened downtown under a glass roof of 1,800 panes, paid for by Rockefeller, Stephen Harkness, Marcus Hanna, Charles Brush and other wealthy Clevelanders.

Growth brought disease and danger with it. On June 10, 1832, the steamboat Henry Clay, which had carried soldiers to the Black Hawk War and been turned away at Detroit, arrived with cholera aboard. Village trustees created a Board of Health with the power to inspect arriving vessels and isolate the sick, but the epidemic lasted a month and claimed 50 lives. That October an unexplained recurrence killed 14 more people, all of them within three days.

Many of the early dead were laid to rest in Erie Street Cemetery, which village trustees established in 1826 on land bought from Leonard Case Sr. for one dollar. It holds almost 8,000 burials, not all of them marked, including Lorenzo Carter's. Among them is Joc-O-Sot, or Walking Bear, a Meskwaki chief wounded in the Black Hawk War who came to Cleveland in the early 1830s as a hunting and fishing guide. He toured England with a theatrical troupe in 1844 and was received by Queen Victoria, but fell ill, likely with tuberculosis, and made his way back to Cleveland, where he died on September 3, 1844. His epitaph gives the wrong month, and the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History notes that his remains were probably taken for medical experimentation, a common practice at the time. When the city considered moving his grave in the early 1900s, Chief Thunderwater warned that "a terrible disaster would befall Cleveland" if it were disturbed; it was restored instead. Some believe Joc-O-Sot still walks the cemetery, and historian William Krejci has found accounts of an "Erie Street Ghost," a towering phantom reported between 1861 and 1863.

The twentieth century brought disasters on a larger scale. Shortly after 9 a.m. on March 4, 1908, an overheated steam pipe set fire to the wooden joists beneath the front stairs of Lakeview Elementary School in Collinwood. Of 366 pupils, 194 escaped; 172 children and two teachers died, many of them trapped behind narrow inner vestibule doors at the rear exit. The disaster prompted school inspections across the country and stricter laws. Nineteen children who could never be identified were buried together in Lake View Cemetery, and the school site became a memorial park.

On July 24, 1916, workers digging a new waterworks tunnel struck a pocket of natural gas. Eleven workmen and ten men who tried to rescue them died. At the request of the police, inventor Garrett Morgan, his brother Frank and two others went into the gas-filled tunnel wearing Morgan's breathing apparatus, brought out two survivors and recovered four bodies. Six waterworks tunnel disasters between 1898 and 1916 took the lives of 58 men. Then, at 2:40 p.m. on October 20, 1944, a liquefied natural gas tank at the East Ohio Gas Co. plant at the north end of East 61st Street exploded, and a second tank followed about twenty minutes later. The fire spread across more than a square mile of the east side. It killed 130 people, destroyed 79 homes and left about 680 people homeless. In the 1930s, while Eliot Ness was the city's safety director, a series of killings around Kingsbury Run, with an official count of twelve victims, most of them poor and living on the margins, went unsolved. We mention them as history, and with respect for the people who died, not as entertainment.

Lake View Cemetery, organized in 1869 with Jeptha Wade as president, spreads across nearly 200 acres and holds many of the best-known names in the city's history. The Garfield Monument opened there on Memorial Day 1890, Rockefeller is honored with a distinctive monument, and the Wade Memorial Chapel, built in 1901, has an interior designed by Tiffany. Near the Euclid Avenue entrance stands the monument to the children and teachers lost at Collinwood.

Playhouse Square is the place most often named in Cleveland's ghost stories. Its theaters opened in 1921 and 1922; by 1969 all but the Hanna had closed, and a preservation campaign that Ray Shepardson began in 1970 eventually saved them. Author Charles Cassady told Cleveland Magazine that mediums and tourists consider it the most haunted place in town, and described a photographer who reported a figure descending a staircase with no head or legs. Paranormal investigators who have worked with Playhouse Square describe a woman in the balcony of the Hanna Theatre, a spirit in the State Theatre said to be a woman who always wanted to be an actress, and a kindly gentleman in the Connor Palace who may have been an usher in the 1930s.

Then there is Franklin Castle, the turreted stone house at 4308 Franklin Boulevard in Ohio City, built between 1881 and 1883 for German immigrant Hannes Tiedemann. It is often called the most haunted house in Ohio, and visitors describe a woman seen in the windows, children in the halls and footsteps with no one there. But the murder stories told about it don't hold up. Historian William G. Krejci found no evidence in census records or among Tiedemann's descendants that the niece and servant girl he supposedly killed ever existed, and traced the tale to a medium living in the house who told the Cleveland Press in 1980 that Tiedemann's ghost had confessed to her. Cleveland Magazine's verdict: busted. Franklin Castle is privately owned, so please admire it from the sidewalk.

That is why Cleveland is considered haunted: a city that grew from a frontier camp into an industrial giant and paid for it in epidemics, fires and explosions, and whose cemeteries, theaters and old houses have collected stories that outlived the people who first told them. On The Ghosts of Cleveland Tour, our family-friendly walk, and The Dead Know These Streets, our adults-only tour through the city's darker history, our Ambassadors share the documented history and the local legends side by side, and always tell you which is which.