From writer Charles Cassady

Although it is not a Cleveland subject matter, I have written another book containing many a creepy thing, PARANORMAL MISSISSIPPI RIVER. My longest work yet, more than 300 pages. So if one is buying ghost stories by weight, this makes the best deal yet.

You might want to at least feature the book trailer online because I feel it's quite amusing. And made entirely in a camera tower at Northfield Park harness track in between laps!

The most wonderful time of the year

Yes, Cleveland - it's that time of year again! The weather's getting chilly, the Halloween displays are in full bloom at Marc's and Walmart and the Browns are making me cry. I wanted to take the time to put up a post encouraging everyone to follow Creepy Cleveland on Facebook and Twitter. I use the Facebook account to post links and tidbits and other things that might not be strictly Cleveland related - but interesting nonetheless. I'd also love to get some fan submissions. Got a cool Halloween costume planned? Do you decorate your yard? Which haunted houses are you going to? Let me know!

The Twitter account is less interactive, but it does send out a tweet for every post I make here or on the Facebook page. So if you just want a short reminder when it's time to check out new stuff - follow CreepyCleveland.

I'm also collecting old (and new) newspaper articles (as seen in the sidebar) that have to do with Cleveland haunts and legends. I hope I'm not stepping on any toes - I ALWAYS give credit to the original author and link back to the source, if available, but if I posted something of yours and you hate that - let me know - I'll pull it down. On the other hand - if you have any articles you'd like to share - forward them along with the authors name and contact info. Cool?

Happy Haunting Season, Cleveland. I hope to hear from you soon.

Franklin Castle Interviews

Charles Milsaps, owner of the Franklin Castle, founder of the Ohio City Preservation and Restoration Society, and proprietor of The Franklin Castle Club is now available for radio interviews. Contact Charles directly at the email below to get the latest news about the Franklin Castle restoration, the Network TV show about the Castle, and how the paranormal community will soon have the opportunity to do the first ever investigations of the Franklin Castle.

Press release to paranormal radio shows
The Castle has been off limits to most people for over 30 years. Find out the real story and the future of one of America’s Most Haunted Homes, first hand, as Charles Milsaps answers all your questions about the infamous Franklin Castle.
Charles will be available for phone interviews as well as on site, live remote interviews over the next 2 weeks. His time is limited and the interviews will be scheduled first call, first schedule. Contact Charles today. He will return calls in the order the are received.
Charles@FranklinCastleClub.com
Charles Milsaps
The Franklin Castle Club
Ohio City Preservation and Restoration Society
4308 Franklin Blvd.
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
216/631.2582

Introducing the Shadow Seekers

Hi my name is Tammie Mccourt and i am the founder of The Shadow Seekers, we are a small paranormal group based in Brunswick Ohio. We are just wanting to let people know that we exist. We are a small group of friends and family who have at one time in our lives had a paranormal experience that has peeked our curiosity. Me and my sister Me-Lang Clark used to live in a haunted house in Cleveland. It was located on west 58th and Wakefield right behind the Fir Avenue cemetery. I have posted a story on Creepy Cleveland before, and the story behind Fir Avenue cemetery is mine as well. We have experienced some very scary stuff growing up that we did not understand. Today we do local investigations around Ohio, so we can try to find some understanding and some answers.On August 7th we did an investigations at the infamous Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville Ky, yes i know it isnt in Cleveland but let me be the first to tell you this place was well worth the trip. I do have pics of places we investigated on some of our pages, we are relatively a new group so we do not yet have a website but our pics can be viewed on our personal pages.We just wanted to introduce ourselves, and we will be sending in stories of future investigations and submitting some pics. Thank You very much.

Tammie Mccourt - Founder
Me-lang Clark - Co-Founder
www.myspace.com/shadowseekers
www.myspace.com/angelvoice6006
Facebook Group...shadowseekers.
Seeking the secrets in the shadows.

From the Archives!

I'm finally going through all the stories I received and posted on the Old Creepy Cleveland site.

I'm going to start re-posting them here in the new format and tag them with the tag: archives. If the archived story had comments, I'll just include them in the post itself. I'm removing email addresses though. If your story gets reposted from the archive and you want your contact information posted or updated - just let me know.

Hopefully this will make it easier to find some of the classic Creepy Cleveland stories and eventually save me some disk space by removing them from the old site.

Creepy Cleveland on Twitter

Do you use twitter? I just started and thought it would be a cool place to push all my feeds. Wanna know when there´s a new post? New comment? New bookmark or video? Follow me on twitter!

http://twitter.com/creepycleveland

That's Life with Robin Swoboda

Did you miss the show? Robin Swoboda's "That's Life" Cleveland morning talk show on Halloween 2008 featured a number of haunted locations and creepy legends around Cleveland.


See all the segments here

Also see:
Creepy Tales on the Tube

Creepy Reading

You must get this book!
You may remember me mentioning being interviewed late last year for an article in West Life. Well, the author, Charles Cassady, had mentioned at the time that he was in the process of collecting stories for a book he was writing.
I expressed how cool I thought that was and asked him to let me know when the book would be in stores. Well, back in June, he sent me an email letting me know that "Cleveland Ghosts" would be in stores by Halloween 2008. Sweet.
Well tonight I dragged the wife and daughter out for a nice family movie (Saw V) and stopped in a Border's beforehand.
Right when you walk in they have a Halloween/haunted-themed table. Among them was Charles' new book! I grabbed it and started thumbing through it. It looked awesome! He's got dozens of Cleveland pictures and all the ghost stories we've come to know and love. Franklin Castle, Squire's Castle and Melonheads (oh my!) Plus TONS of smaller and lesser known stories.
OK, I may be a bit biased because I got a mention in the book (YAY!), but I can't put it down. It's like he took all the stories I've heard over the past twenty years and put 'em all in one book. (In actuality, he did research web sites like Creepy Cleveland and Dead Ohio along with interviewing anyone who's anyone in the field of local ghost-stories)
I'm kinda hoping to get a real, more thorough, review posted in the future once I get a chance to read the whole book. But if what I've read in only a few hours is any indication... well, buy the book. You won't be sorry.

Officially CreepyCleveland.net

It's official. I own creepycleveland.net

I want to thank Billy again for registering the domain and pointing it at my site for the past two years. Thanks, Billy!

Everybody else shouldn't notice any difference - creepycelveland.net always brought you here. But now I don't have to pipe it through that go.to/creepycleveland redirect...

Anyway. It's October people... let's get those stories in here.

IPRN Award Winner!

I am proud to announce Creepy Cleveland has received the International Paranormal Research Network Award of Excellence!


Well... I'd never heard of the IPRN before today, but will admit to being flattered to receive an unsolicited web award from an organized paranormal group. After receiving the award I visited the IPRN site and was pleased to find what appears to be a well-organized, professional-looking page run by a group of people who are genuinely interested in investigation and education of the paranormal.

Many members, including the director, David L. Frost, appear to hail from Ohio. That alone qualifies the IPRN for a plug from Creepy Cleveland! Check them out. Join the organization or just contribute to the forums. Or both!

Thank you for the recognition, IPRN. I wish you luck in the future!

Just How Weird Is Ohio?

So tonight I dragged my wife and daughter up to Fairview Park library to see James A Willis' presentation: Just How Weird Is Ohio?
If he's in your neck of the woods I highly recommend making time to check it out. James spent about 90 minutes giving a really entertaining presentation on some of Ohio's weirdest attractions, urban legends, ghosts stories and miscellaneous folklore.
At one point afterwards he opened the floor to questions and I was excited to hear questions about Gravity Hill, the Melon Heads, and Gore Orphanage. At one point someone asked where exactly Gore Orphanage is located. After a few minutes of people trying to clarify exactly where the 'allegedly haunted' part of Gore Orphanage was, I piped up and suggested that I have an online map of a bunch of haunted locations in northern Ohio and Gore Orphanage was one of them!
I certainly didn't want to take anything away from James' presentation or his excellent Ghosts of Ohio website, but I'll admit that I enjoyed pimping Creepy Cleveland a little bit and hopefully generated some new traffic for myself as well.
All in all it was a really great way to kick off October. I'm glad I stuck around afterwards to meet James and chat a little about some of our common interests. (I wish I would have brought my 'Weird US' book for him to autograph...damn.) He's an excellent presenter and a genuinely nice guy and I highly recommend attending one of his presentations (check his website for the calendar of events).
Thanks James.

P.S. I know I told a few of you to go to creepycleveland.net and you wound up here. Next week I will officially own the creepycleveland.net domain and I'll do away with the nasty redirection link. Read the whole sordid story, if you want, here.

Halloween Haunted Houses

I almost forgot.

A couple weeks ago (while pondering the Bloodview Midsummer Nightmare), I worked up a quick Google Map of area haunted houses for this upcoming Halloween season.

Every year, we pick two haunted houses (they're getting expensive!) to go to and I was trying to get a feel for where they are. Anybody interested in helping out? I think I got all the popular houses (at least the houses that were in operation last year). Do you know of any new ones? Any that I missed?

Any you really, really like?

Let me know. I wanna get scared this year.

Creepy Cleveland Area Haunted Houses

West Life Article on Creepy Cleveland!

I nearly missed it! The article by Charles Cassady for which I was interviewed appeared in the West Life News on July 27, 2007. I finally got my hands a copy.

Wanna read it?

Click here - Creepy Cleveland Article.

You need a PDF reader to view it. Don't have one? Get one here.

P.S. OK, OK... if you don't have a PDF reader and don't want to install one - you can also see the original .jpg scan (1.4M) by clicking here.

Hell has frozen over

Creepy Cleveland has a MySpace Page.

I half-heartedly put up a page on MySpace a couple months back so I could see what the fuss was all about and almost immediately regretted my decision.

After a few months of spam invites and hassles I finally got a message from a person who really was interested in Creepy Cleveland. So I got off my ass and did some digging and searching in an attempt to make the place presentable.

After some tweaks and sweat and cursing, I think I've got something. Well, at least I'm not embarrassed by it anymore.

Here's to increased traffic!

P.S. Who the hell is this Tom guy?!

A Story about Creepy Cleveland?

Yep. It's true. I got an email from a reporter from West Life News wanting to know if I would mind answering some questions for an upcoming book (or article, I'm not sure yet - I was too excited to care).

I just sent off my answers and am now anxiously awaiting whatever comes next.

Stay Tuned!

Send Me Links

I saw this idea on another site and thought it might be cool to try out here:

Do you use del.icio.us to save your bookmarks? If so, add creepycleveland to your network and send links to Creepy Cleveland by using the for: feature.

Found a creepy site, picture or story online? Bookmark it in del.icio.us and add a tag for:creepycleveland and we'll all be able to enjoy it!!

On the flip side - if you add creepycleveland to your del.icio.us network you also get first dibs at new links I post.

See? We all win.

Creepy Cleveland Maps

Have you seen the new Google 'My Maps' yet? It's pretty cool. I'm using it to track the locations of many Creepy Cleveland locations. I made the Creepy Cleveland Map public in order to try to attract some fresh visitors, but I want to know what everybody else thinks too. The link is over on the right under 'Important Links'. Click on the push-pin icons to get links to stories and posts about the more popular locations. Click the map-marker icon to read a story or post about a location you may not have heard of.

If, while checking it out, you notice something wrong - let me know and I'll fix it. A lot of the locations are fairly easy to spot using Google Maps hybrid feature, but some are so out-of-the-way or vague that I may have gotten it wrong.

Whenever I have a decent picture of the location I'll include it on the map pop-up. If you've got a picture of a place (or a better pic that I've got) and want to share - send it in!

Check it out.

What's with all the Creepy Clevelands?

I've been busy the last couple days trying to get Creepy Cleveland re-established and back online. I'm editing posts, reformatting stories and hacking away at the old website so I can integrate it with the new site. During this time I've googled (yes, I'm allowed to use google as a verb - I used the Google Search Engine!) Creepy Cleveland a few times to see what's already out there. Wow. There are quite a few Creepy Clevelands out there. In case you're confused about your search results, let me try to clear things up a little:

http://erielink.com/~reddeath/CreepyCle.html - this is where Creepy Cleveland was born. (See archive.org's cache of the Original Creepy Cleveland) Erielink was a gracious host, but after my 56k modem ate itself, I moved to DSL and Creepy Cleveland had to go with me. This address might still pop up on the internet once in a while. (Mostly because of this.)

http://otherworlds.homeip.net/creepy/ - Short lived, but a great experience. A site visitor, Mark Budnick offered to give me hosting space on his server! While never charging me, he put up with some heavy duty traffic during Halloween season of 2002. Mark rules.

http://creepycleveland.neopages.net - This was kind of a long story. In mid October, 2002, while trying to get off of Mark's server, I started looking for a new host, I found Neopages. They were unique in the fact that they offered free hosting, with a catch. You must have an established page already and be willing to put your page up for a vote by the current members. They stress originality and style. Well...I figured I'd give it a shot and entered an application. After getting beat up by some of the critiques, I figured I didn't have a chance. Then - lo and behold - I got accepted!! See archive.org's screenshot. Unfortunately, the community within Neopages bred some contempt from hackers. The entire host got hacked. Many pages were lost and had to be restored from backup. A couple months later, the server the site was hosted on got hosed. Bad luck? Indeed. Creepy Cleveland was in limbo.

http://creepycleveland.net - Until now, this is the most recent version of Creepy Cleveland. After the neopages fiasco, I did have the site back on neopages for a short time, but I knew I needed to look into something more permanent. About this time I started having a hard time keeping Creepy Cleveland updated and interesting. After thinking it over for a long time I made the decision to shut it down. I was afraid the final move lost too many visitors and traffic to the site ground to a halt. I posted a message to the few people that managed to keep track of the site address, zipped up the files and closed the door.
A few months later I got an email from a fan asking if I'd like for him to host the site. Halloween 2005 was coming up and I had received a few emails from people asking if I was ever going to come back. Hmmm.... somebody else host Creepy Cleveland? Again? After thinking it over, I thought the site would do more good online than rotting on my backup hard drive. Billy Meade took over hosting and has kept the page available until now. Billy rules too.

http://creepycleveland.blogspot.com - The latest and (hopefully) greatest incarnation of Creepy Cleveland. Born on Halloween 2006, I've turned the stories (which were by far the most popular part of the site) over to a blog format. I'm hoping it will make questions and comments on the stories easier to make, answer and follow. The backed up version of the old site is getting a slow makeover in the hopes of becoming and back-end host to all the old content, new investigations, and file storage. If you care to rummage through the mess, check out the Creepy Cleveland Archive.

So there you have it. Practically every version of Creepy Cleveland that's out there, in one form or another. I've already sent an email to Billy asking him to post a redirection link on creepycleveland.net and I'm hoping to talk him into letting me grab the domain once it expires.

A final piece of advice, if I may offer it, is to bookmark http://go.to/creepycleveland. Unless that redirection service goes down, that address will always point to the correct address.

UPDATE 2009: I'm dropping the Blogger address (http://creepycleveland.blogspot.com). I've secured creepycleveland.net and am redirecting all traffic to that address.

MUTANT MELON HEADS TERRORIZE KIRTLAND

Hey, Cleveland. I'm back.

While thumbing through a copy of the Free Times today at work I came across this article. Near the bottom of the article Creepy Cleveland was mentioned. I got sad.

I really, really loved running Creepy Cleveland a few years back and have decided to take the reins again.

Just in time for Halloween.

Besides a place for the page to live, the biggest problem I had back when Creepy Cleveland was in it's heyday was keeping it updated. I've got some ideas to remedy that problem.

In only the few years since I was actively running Creepy Cleveland the web has exploded with new services. I'm going to take advantage of some free advances in web technology to make it easier for everyone to find information they want and contribute (because - let's face it, the stories were probably the best part of old Creepy Cleveland).

There's gonna be a bunch of changes. I have a ton of back email to wade through. I've got a hundred links to validate and repost. There are many people I have to get back in touch with.

This might take a while.

But, God, it's gonna be fun.