John B. Kachuba - Ghosthunting Ohio: On the Road Again

I COULDNT 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 Larochenicknamed the Loveland Castlewith 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 lifes 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 castles 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 fiance 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 fiftyby his countmarriage 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.