Pythian Castle

The castle ran as an orphanage and old-age home for three decades — residents remembered five-cent movies and a roller-skating ramp in a bright basement gymnasium — former resident Mildred Halt Cherry, an orphan there in the late 1920s, still recalled the songs decades later — and it doubled as one of the first movie venues in town — until 1942, when the U.S. Army took the property by Order of Immediate Possession. It became the service club for O'Reilly General Hospital: dances in the cafeteria, movies repriced from a nickel to a quarter, big bands in the ballroom for wounded veterans convalescing on the post. Downstairs, the Army walled off the bright gymnasium with cinderblock and built cells. German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners of war were held in the basement — how many and how long is exactly what the surviving paperwork does not say, though the artwork and Japanese writing the prisoners left on the walls are still legible.

The castle passed through the Army Reserve, a social-services lease, and a surplus sale in 1993 before landing with Tamara Finocchiaro and her mother, who moved from Los Angeles looking for a property that could combine swing dancing and historical renovation. It opened to the public in 2009, a hundred-year-old limestone landmark on the National Register doing third and fourth duty as events space and investigation site.

Finocchiaro has described discovering the haunting the hard way: alone in the lobby, she heard a voice say hello, clear as day, with nobody present. Ghost tours went on the schedule shortly afterward — the castle now runs history tours, paranormal investigations, and murder-mystery dinners, a program mix the archive finds wholly appropriate for a building that has been an orphanage, a ballroom, and a POW block in the same century.

Filed reports run to voices, footsteps, and figures, with the basement cells collecting the heaviest traffic. The prisoners left their names on the walls; the orphans left roller skates; the dancers left the ballroom floor. Whatever else it is, the castle is one of the few files in this archive where every single layer of the haunting claim corresponds to a layer you can still walk through.