Hartford Castle
38°48′02″N 90°05′05″W / 38.800600°N 90.084600°W
Hartford Castle is the ruins of a 19th-century residence located near Hartford, Illinois. It is located at 38°48′2″N 90°5′4″W / 38.80056°N 90.08444°W (38.800600, -90.084600) approximately 15 miles (24 km) north of downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The official name of the home was Lakeview.
The Castle was birthed from the unbridled imagination and seemingly limitless means of John J. Biszantz. His story begins not in France or England but in the faraway land of Marietta, Ohio. John Biszantz’s grandparents immigrated from Germany in the 1830s and settled in southeastern Ohio when John’s father was a baby. John Biszantz was born on April 11, 1861, the day before the first shots were fired in the Civil War.
A formative moment in little John’s life took place in Marietta when he was eight years old. In July of 1869 John’s older sister Elizabeth, who was 12, and her friend Anna Roeser, 13, were in a small boat in a canal with 16-year-old Lavina Buck. Lavina started rocking the boat back and forth to scare the girls when it flipped, tossing everyone into the water. John’s father heard their cries for help and jumped into the canal. He managed to pull a young girl from the water, a girl he thought was his daughter because of the dress she was wearing. In a tragic twist, it was learned that Elizabeth and Anna had switched dresses earlier that evening. John’s father had not saved his daughter, but her friend Anna instead. Elizabeth and Lavina Buck were swept away and drowned. That accident would stay with John the rest of his life and influence the design of the single most defining feature of The Castle.
John and his family were in Marietta for the 1870 census, but by 1880 had moved down the Ohio River to Evansville, Indiana where John was now 19 years old and a carpenter by trade. By the time he was 21 he had saved up about $100 and left Indiana for St. Louis to find his fortune. Work for a young carpenter was abundant. When John wasn’t sawing and nailing boards, he was swooning and spending time with a young woman named Lillie Black. Lillie was not from England, but Brooklyn, Brooklyn Street, on the near north side of St. Louis. Lillie was the same age as John and the daughter of a steamboat carpenter. The pair had been an item for a while by time the Society section of the April 12, 1883 Alton Telegraph reported how they had spent the day together visiting friends in Edwardsville.
By the end of May they were married and John would set about building their first home. Rather than settling in, they leaned into the red-hot real estate market and sold the house for an inspiring profit. The experience set the couple on a prosperous path of flipping houses and property long before it was trending on cable television.
The first formal newspaper mention of a John Biszantz real estate transaction would come in the St. Louis Globe Democrat in July of 1887 when he was listed as the buyer of a 143x148 lot on Magazine Street east of Bacon Street for $2,700. That sale would be the equivalent of more than $89,000 today. Over the course of the next few months and years newspapers would be filled with public notices of property sales involving John and in some instances, though never mentioned by name, Lillie as well.
At some point the couple paused to add an adopted daughter Edna to their “portfolio.” The Biszants were becoming very rich, very fast and enjoyed the Gilded Age in the most gilded ways possible by collecting souvenirs from travels far and wide. The family was living in a home at 3338 Washington Avenue, not far from where the Fox Theater stands today. At that time their home, which no longer stands, would have been on the western edge of town in the newly developed section of the city. For all their success, John and Lillie never made the society pages of the St. Louis newspapers. Maybe they were just too young to be noticed by the old money in town, or maybe it just was not their scene. All of the glitz, all of the money, none of it mattered when Lille fell ill in the fall of 1889.
The nature of Lillie’s condition is not known, but it appears it was an extended illness as John Biszantz’s relatives from Evansville, Indiana traveled to St. Louis to help care for her. John’s aunt, Emily Lehnhard, arrived in October with her four year old daughter, Carrie. While they were in St. Louis, caring for Lillie, Carrie got sick and died rather suddenly. A note on Carrie’s “Find A Grave” page suggests the little girl died of dysentery. The loss must have been devastating for a family already dealing with so much.
We cannot be sure if the affliction that Lillie was dealing with in October of 1889 was the same issues she was dealing with months later, but on August 6, 1890 29-year-old Lillie passed away, leaving behind her husband and 6-year-old daughter. Lillie’s cause of death is unknown.
Stricken with grief, John Biszantz trudged along for a few years. He had enough money and over time enough of the real estate business and in 1896, at the age of just 35, he shut it down and retired. Satisfied to simply cash checks from his holdings, the single father of a now 12-year-old daughter was left to contemplate his next move. Biszantz found comfort and companionship in close friends real estate agent Rudolph Klaus and his wife Carrie. In July 1896 John, daughter Edna and the Klaus’s traveled to Asbury Park, New Jersey where they stayed at the swanky Ocean Hotel. It might have been the grand nature of the company they kept and the places they stayed that had John thinking about his next move.
About two months after that trip, John Biszantz made up his mind that his next project would be his biggest, boldest and unlike anything he had ever done before. While many of the wealthy in St. Louis were building their personal palaces to the south or amid the rolling hills to the west of the city, Biszantz set his eye across the river in Illinois. At the time the flat river bottoms from East St. Louis to the bluffs of Edwardsville and then over to Alton was just a scattering of farms filling the space between all those trees. This was the very definition of “fly-over” land only in the 19th century no one was flying, railroads were chugging through this mostly empty expanse with no one giving notice to all the nothing there was to not notice. He settled on a 40-acre tract of land smack in the middle of this nowhere as the perfect place to build. Though it was far from neighboring farms, the property was bordered on its west flank by the railway that connected Alton with East St. Louis. As secluded and remote as this land was, each and every hour the silence would be broken by steam engines huffing by.
The area where the land was located was known locally, but not officially, as Comstock. The 40-acres Biszantz desired was owned by Caroline G. Rose and C. W. Leverett. The Edwardsville Intelligencer notes on September 22, 1896 Leverett sold his share directly to Biszantz for $750 ($25,116 in 2024) while that same day Rose sold her share to Justice of the Peace Daniel W. Collett for $250 ($8,372 in 2024). Collet flipped the title to Biszantz for a cool $2,000 ($67,000 in 2024) and pocketed a significant profit.
Where most saw just another field to be cleared and farmed, Biszantz saw something more. More than a mansion, he envisioned a full-fledged estate with grounds and gardens, pools and porticos, the sort of thing you would expect to see at a resort rather than a residence. There is no way to know exactly what inspired this grand vision, if it was a tribute to the memory of his late wife Lillie, a palace for his princess Edna or if it was simply a guy with a lot of money, a big piece of land and no one to tell him “No.”
Almost immediately Biszantz went to work. The first task was building out the single element that would come to define this project for the next one hundred years. His home would be encircled by water. Biszantz called it a lake, everyone else called it a moat. Before he could build his house on the hill, Biszantz needed a hill and the man-made moat would provide the raw materials. Sixty teams of local workers and local horses were brought in and over the next six months, through the winter, crews dug a trench that was fifty-feet wide and more than a mile in circumference.
The depth of the channel was intentionally limited to four feet. As Biszantz would later explain, deep enough to float a boat, but shallow enough to prevent a child from drowning. The death of his sister years earlier had clearly stuck with Biszantz. The moat would take the shape of a large letter “D” with round corners, and the flat side nudged up against the railroad tracks.
The November 17, 1896 edition of the Alton Evening Telegraph on page 4 report whiffed on John’s name, but gives an insight to the scope of the project.
" J. J. Varant, a St. Louis real estate dealer, has purchased a 40-acre tract near Comstock, which he proposed to make one of the most beautiful spots in Madison County. A large force of men and teams are at work grading and excavating lakes, which will be dotted with little islands, planted with flowers."
Take away all the bells and whistles and the house Biszantz was building was simply an impressive Queen Anne, asymmetrical style structure that was all the rage at the time. It was big, but there were certainly larger and more elegant homes in nearby Edwardsville. The Biszantz home stood apart with its sizzle and style. The three-story, sixteen-room mansion was white and made of wood, but designed to look like stone. It was reported that the project was one of the first in Madison County to use concrete. It was capped with a bright red roof and its lower level wrapped by a covered porch. The most commanding feature was the outsized, four-story tower positioned on the southwest corner of the home facing the tracks.
Guests entering through the front door would find themselves in a large reception hall with parlors on either side and the large round room of the tower to their right. Most homes of the time were sectioned off with pocket doors or curtains to help contain the heat. Biszantz went with an open floor plan, separating the rooms with columns rather than walls and giving the first floor of the home an open, more expansive feel. Large mirrors were strategically positioned to create the illusion that wherever you looked the space appeared to go on and on. The unique use of “looking glass” inspired exaggerated tales of the house having a hall, or even a maze, of mirrors. More practical than a maze, before electricity, mirrors and crystals would be used to reflect light through large and otherwise dark rooms. The kitchen, dining room and living quarters for the home’s caretakers filled the back half of the first floor. Just off the back porch was an oversized cellar door, large enough to roll barrels of wine and cider beneath the house. Despite rumors stoked up years later, there were no underground passages or secret tunnels, those would have been flooded by the shallow water table of the river bottoms. The extent of the subterranean features were limited to a small cellar to keep casks cool.
The home reportedly had an impressive library that was no doubt filled with leather-bound books and smelled of rich mahogany. The library, like most of the house, was said to be adorned with rare paintings, tapestries and artwork. No expense was spared as hardwood floors were covered with the finest carpets available. Moldings around windows and doorways were adorned with cords that dangled wood accents and hollow glass “acorns” designed to dangle and sparkle in the light and rattle in the breeze.
The second floor was bedrooms and in the tower was John Biszantz’s man cave. The centerpiece, and subject of much gossip in the community, was a billiards table. The third floor of the tower was set aside as the sitting room and decked out in Oriental decor with Japanese fans and artwork from the Far East. The top of the tower rose above the third floor and roof of the home with an open ring of stone arches, offering unobstructed views of the grounds and all that nothingness beyond the moat.
The grounds were a maze of pathways and babbling brooks, accentuated with fountains, fish ponds and stone gazebos. An orchard of 300 flowering fruit trees was planted in one section of the grounds. A three-story water tower just to the south of the house leaned into the castle theme and was designed to look like an old-world turret complete with crenellations. A windmill on the tower was used to draw water up into a tank, providing pressure for the home’s indoor plumbing.
The water for the mansion was pulled from a deep well and collected in a covered reservoir and used to supply the house as well as keep the moat full and the koi content. Streams flowing off the main moat encircled a chain of small islands connected by stone paths and arched footbridges. A statue of a reclining dog at the edge of one island stood watch over one of two drawbridges. One bridge on the south end led to a long driveway, the west bridge leading to the railroad tracks and a train depot built just for the estate. Biszantz would later explain the bridges with their large chains were not designed to rise and keep people out, but for the practical purpose of allowing his row boats and his new, modern gasoline powered skiff to pass.
As a carpenter and real estate developer, Biszantz claimed he did a lot of work on the home. There is no way to know if the design was all his idea, a mashup of things he had seen in other places or if an architect was involved. Years later a newspaper report would say the project was built at a price of more than $100,000 or more than $3.7 million in 2024 dollars. Biszantz would call his new home Lakeview, the lake being the moat. To stunned farmers who lived nearby and anyone passing on trains during it was simply known as The Castle.
Nearly a year into the build, in July 1897, Biszantz made the Big Four Railroad Company a deal they couldn’t refuse. He sold the railway the land it would need to build a depot, just across the tracks from the entrance, for $1. The depot would be known as the Lake View Station. A year later a post office was established at the depot and designated as the Comstock office.
Biszantz and his daughter lived in the castle year round with his close friends Rudolph Klaus and his wife Carrie. In some instances they were referred to as caretakers, but that does not appear to be the case, especially after what happened next.
Scandal erupted in November of 1900 after the St. Louis Globe Democrat reported Rudolph Kraus was facing charges of defrauding an elderly St. Louis couple of their life savings, some $13,816 equivalent to just more than a half-million in 2024 dollars. The alleged theft happened about the same time Kraus was let go as a bookkeeper at a failing St. Louis real estate agency. The owner of the agency claimed Kraus had stolen a list of clients with the intention of starting his own business. Even worse, the agency owner claimed customers were being swindled by Klaus. When the warrants for his arrest were issued, Rudolph Klaus was nowhere to be found. Klaus had not been seen in two months, the last anyone knew, he had been living in “Comstock, Illinois” with his wife and child at the Biszantz mansion. There were rumors he had moved, some said fled, to Mexico on account of his wife’s health.
Three days after that article was published, John Biszantz sold a row of flats on Whittier at Page streets in St. Louis for $20,000. It was the first real estate transaction to make the paper with Biszantz’s name in years. Of course there is nothing linking the sale to his friend’s legal issues. However, exactly how the Kraus case shook out is a mystery. There are no subsequent articles about the case or court hearings. The case just seemed to go away. The next mention of the Kraus family came three years later in the society notes of the August 20, 1903 St. Louis Republic where it notes Mrs. Rudolph Kraus was entertaining friends at her country home; Lake View.
A huge development for Lakeview came in the summer of 1904 when a new electric powered interurban rail service was established between Granite City and Alton. John Biszantz would make arrangements with the Traction Company to tap into the system and use the rail line’s electric service to power his home.
In August 1905 John Biszantz sold a row of 16 flats on North Spring Avenue for $12,000, about $430,000 in 2024 dollars. He may have been cashing in assets because the price was right, or it might have been to underwrite a winter getaway in Los Angeles. About this time the Biszantz and Kraus families started escaping the harsh Midwest winters for the mild weather in Southern California. While Biszantz certainly had more than enough money to buy his own place, according to the census, he lived with his friends Rudolph and Carrie Kraus and their butler Gussie. It was in Los Angeles that John’s 22-year-old Edna Biszantz would meet and marry Walter Sloat.
In April of 1910 the Rudoph and Carrie hosted a surprise birthday party for John Biszantz at their home at 2140 Estrella Avenue. The event was such that it was mentioned in the society pages of the Los Angeles Times. John’s daughter Edna and son in law were among a long list of friends that attended the party.
For everything Biszantz had achieved, the wealth, the mansion, the friends there was always something, rather someone, missing. The memories of his wife Lillie and the loss he felt after she died hung on him like a heavy, wet wool coat. That grief would lead him to take extraordinary steps to try and ease that pain, and it came at the hands of a particular woman who, at this very moment, was living back in St. Louis, but not for long.
One week after that surprise birthday party, a man stepped up to and knocked on the door of a rental property at 3003 Dickson Street in St. Louis. The man was an enumerator for the census, and the resident he was questioning was a woman by the name of Carrie M. Sawyer, a 54-year-old widow living with her 37-year-old daughter Adele Carnahan. The census lists Carrie’s occupation as “minister,” but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of who this woman was or would become in the life of John J. Biszantz.
Sawyer was born in 1855 in Wisconsin and realized her calling at an early age. At just 15 she was living in Chicago and placing ads in the newspaper as a spiritualist and medium with the power to commune and materialize the spirits of the dead. When she was 16 her estranged husband interrupted her seance sparking an argument that escalated to a shooting leaving her and her live-in boyfriend injured. The story was so sensational it was picked up and reported in newspapers across the country. All that attention put her in the spotlight and under scrutiny. She would be found to be a fraud in Chicago in 1871 and exposed again in San Francisco in 1879. She landed in St. Louis where the St. Louis Globe Democrat couldn’t write enough glowing articles about her, but a trip to Little Rock in 1883 went south and she was rung up again. Newspapers in Washington, D.C. in 1884 said she was real, but a return to Chicago in 1885 had reporters once again calling her bluff.
Times were tough for the larger than life medium and the arrests and negative press had Sawyer sideways with the “true” spiritualists of the time. Tired of all the exposure, yet undeterred, she reinvented herself as a truth teller, launching a series of public appearances where she promised to reveal all of her secrets. When that flopped she went back to conjuring spirits and, for some reason, back to Chicago in 1890 where she was jailed on fraud charges. The next twenty years would be spent criss-crossing the country trying to stay one step of the law.
By the time the census taker arrived at her door in St. Louis that April afternoon in 1910, Carrie Sawyer had lived a lot of life, speaking to the living and allegedly dead all over the country. She would not be in St. Louis for long. By the end of the year she and her daughter would head out to Los Angeles putting her on a collision course with a very wealthy and very vulnerable John Biszantz.
Los Angeles in 1910 had tripled in size since the turn of the century and was attracting a wide range of people with a wide range of ideas. The spiritualist movement really took hold here, so much so that the city went so far as to regulate and license real spiritualists. Biszantz decided to check out a medium as a way to connect with the spirit of his late wife Lillie, gone now for 20 years. That medium was Carrie Sawyer.
Biszantz claimed he was skeptical at first, but over a period of two years he would pay to attend seances and materialization meetings led by Sawyer. At these meetings Sawyer would take her audience into a large parlor, sit them in a semi-circle facing a cabinet. The cabinet had doors on the front and back with a wire screen in the middle. Sawyer would sit in the back half of the cabinet and go into a trance. Her daughter, acting as her assistant, would turn down the gas lamps in the room until it was nearly impossible to see anything. After some chanting and shimmying, sometimes, not every time, a spirit covered in a white veil with barely discernible features would step into the room from the front door of the cabinet. The spirit might be a pharaoh from ancient Egypt or a playful little girl named Maude who would float around the room interacting with the guests. Every so often Sawyer would hit a home run and bring forth a long-lost loved one of someone in attendance. It was that chance of seeing Lillie that kept Biszantz coming back.
It is possible Sawyer knew of Biszantz from St. Louis, regardless it did not take long for her to mark him as someone worth investing in. Once she realized he was wealthy and had him on the hook, Sawyer went so far as to suggest that Biszantz marry a young lady on her team as the ultimate sign of commitment to preserving his wife’s memory. Even John Biszantz failed to see the logic in that idea and declined, but he kept showing up for seances, even underwriting some of Sawyer’s work.
In April of 1912 good friend Carrie Kraus tagged along with John Biszantz to a seance that got very bizarre very quickly. Carrie Sawyer went into her box and out walked the manifestation of Lillie Biszantz, veiled in white and speaking directly to John. He became so worked up that he stood from his chair and leaned forward to kiss the apparition. Carrie Kraus had seen enough and later, along with her husband Rudolph and John’s daughter Edna, decided it was time for an apparition intervention.
They brought in a young academic named Frank Leeds who was traveling the circuit holding public lectures on the “Shams of Spiritualism.” Biszantz wasn’t buying what Leeds was selling, but he did agree to let him tag along to a seance. Also attending would be a newspaper man and a detective provided by the Justice League. Sadly, this is not the Batman and Wonder Woman Justice League, that would be a GREAT story. Rather, this J-League was a group of about 100 community and business leaders committed to ridding Los Angeles of riff raff like fake spiritualists, people just like Carrie Sawyer and her daughter Adele Carnahan.
John Biszantz, a medium’s mark, was now the bait being used by the Justice League to land a big fish and a source for a newspaper man to reel off some sensational stories of a supernatural sting.
“We went five nights,” Biszantz is quoted in one of those articles. “For four nights we got only trance and trumpet messages, but on the fifth it was announced that a materialization would take place.”
“Mrs. Sawyer went into a little cabinet used from trumpet messages and materializations and the room was darkened so that objects were barely discernible. Then a white figure appeared from the cabinet, said it was the spirit of Mrs. Biszantz and began calling for me.”
“Leeds, who was sitting in the front row, immediately leaped upon the stage and seized the figure. Mrs. Carnahan screamed and tried to fight him off, but he clung to the figure and when the lights were turned on and the veil removed we beheld Mrs. Sawyer. That was enough for me. The detective arrested both women and all the spectators were summoned as witnesses. Mrs. Carnahan clawed Leeds’ face terribly.”
The Justice League detective took Sawyer and Carnahan into custody, handed them over to police and they were booked on charges of criminal conspiracy for defrauding Biszantz.
Biszantz tried to save face and told the League that he had only ever paid Sawyer and Carnahan $45 for them to bring forth the spirit of his dead wife. The money he paid them was of no concern a “mere trifle,” and he told reporters that he had no regrets for the amount spent. A believer up until the moment Sawyer was unmasked, Biszantz was now determined in his position that fake mediums should be “rigidly” prosecuted. As it turns out, Biszantz’s spirited stand was full of huff.
The medium roundup was huge news in California, and Biszantz was being sought out for interviews by newspapers and police. The story would dominate the headlines for the better part of a week, and then an even bigger story broke. Just ten days after the Biszantz story dropped, a ship named Titanic struck an iceberg and sank.
Shortly after the sting operation Biszantz bolted, leaving LA and returning to Lakeview. In a May 5th, 1912 front page on the article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Biszantz tried to set the record straight about those two lost years. He claimed he had not given the mediums more than $300, and “declared that he had been so completely duped that on several occasions he believed a veiled medium who stood before him was the materialized spirit of his wife.” Biszantz insisted to reporters that he had not fled California, but left because he worried that the spiritualists would try to kill him. Which, honestly, sounds like a textbook case of fleeing. A condensed version of the Post Dispatch story appeared on page 5 of the Los Angeles Times the next day. In that article Biszantz details his rise to fame and fortune.
The district attorney in Los Angeles was building a strong case and public opinion was definitely turning against the spiritualists. Authorities in California started hearing from authorities across the country that had crossed paths with Sawyer and her daughter. Prosecutors had Sawyer dead to rights, and then the case fell apart. John Biszantz, the victim of the sham, refused to return to LA to testify against Sawyer, and the case was dropped. Sawyer and her daughter were released from jail. Maybe Biszantz was scared of being targeted, maybe he was embarrassed by the entire situation or, maybe, he wasn’t as certain as he said and deep down he really wanted to believe that he had communed with Lillie’s spirit.
Carrie Sawyer dodged a bullet and went back to work. Her career of reaching out to the dead came to a sudden end in September 1914 during a seance at Goldfield, Nevada. Sawyer stepped into her cabinet, fell into a trance, started having seizures and died on the spot of complications due to kidney failure.
John Biszantz’s role in the Sawyer scandal was big news in St. Louis and brought a new round of attention to the man and his castle. He was front page news in the Post Dispatch with a long, sympathetic interview about the events in California and a detailed description of his home. The St. Louis Star and Times tabloid followed up with an article describing Biszantz as a “rich spiritualist.” The entire episode only served to ramp up rumors the Biszantz mansion was haunted. By 1912 The Castle was about 15 years old and Biszantz was spending less time at The Castle, leaving it vacant most of the year. Local farmers reported hearing strange sounds or seeing strange lights moving around the property. The Edwardsville Intelligencer wrote of all kinds of crazy happening at the mansion, all of it hearsay.
As the stories go, the place became notorious for its fast life. Huge sums of money are said to have passed across the gambling tables and other stories tell of the presence of beautiful women, beautiful of form and features, yet, withal, possessed of the cold expressionless eye and voice acquired by a life of dissipation. As the years rolled by, gay life ceased. Some say farmers in the vicinity waged war upon the inmates and compelled them to leave.
- Edwardsville Intelligencer, Feb 12, 1915 p.8
With Biszantz gone, sightseers would often step off the train and cross the bridge to have a look around. The only person at The Castle during the winter was caretaker Henry Meyer (spelled Meijer in one source) who was happy to show the curious around as long as they were courteous.
There was one thing Henry Meyer would not do, and that was spend the night at the mansion. Every evening at the end of the day he would lock up and head home leaving the big, dark house to the night; quiet and empty. That was until the night of Thursday, March 13, 1913. Mark Podner, a 23 year old from Mt. Olive broke into The Castle by breaking out a window and spent the night in the house. According to the St. Louis Globe Democrat, Henry Meyer arrived at work the next morning and found Podner in a bedroom trying on Biszantz's clothes. Podner was handed over to the police and jailed in Edwardsville. It was during his time in the slammer that Podner really leaned into the whole haunted house angle.
He told any newspaper reporter who would listen how he was not a burglar but a victim, just a curious ghost hunter. He claimed he went to the house to meet a woman, who told him she worked at the house. She let him in then disappeared, leaving him alone in the dark. Clearly she was a ghostly gal. He spoke of how he was overcome with fear as he tried to find his way out. Everywhere he turned he saw ghosts in the mirrors, heard voices from behind the walls and chains clanking in the next room. Podner said he eventually collapsed from exhaustion and was found the next morning bordering on insanity, trying to pull himself together.
The newspapers, especially the St. Louis Star and Times tabloid did a full page spread with photos on the “haunted mansion,” despite numerous quotes from Henry Meyer explaining away the nonsense.
In September of 1913, Biszantz returned to Lakeview to clear his name, clear the air of all this ghost talk and most importantly clear the title on the estate. In a visit to the courthouse in Edwardsville, Biszantz said saloon owners in East St. Louis put Mark Podner up to the stunt. Biszantz claimed those saloon owners wanted to buy the property but first wanted to drive down the price. So they hired Podner to go in, get caught and weave his wild tales hoping no one would want to buy a haunted mansion. While he was in town Biszantz told reporters that he had made a thorough inspection of the property and no ghosts or goblins were to be found. Then he made the surprise announcement that he was selling the property, to the man accompanying him to the courthouse.
Selling such a unique property would require a special kind of investor. A rural forty-acre estate, with a moat, rowdy reputation and a big price tag was not for everyone, but it only takes one buyer and that person was quite the character.
You may have read how The Castle was built by a Frenchman but, c’est faux. Rather, it was this recent arrival from Paris, France named Eugene Rinaldo who purchased the estate to become Lakeview’s second owner. Rinaldo was an accomplished musician and spent his early days in St. Louis leading orchestras and giving music lessons. His flair for the dramatic was on full display during a 1908 version of a “battle of the bands” event when the rival orchestra sent a 9-year-old boy to the podium to conduct, as a joke. The audience loved the stunt, however Rinaldo lost his mind, made a scene, took off his uniform and threatened to take his orchestra and go home. Two years later Rinaldo was all over the papers again caught up in a widely covered saucy scandal after he was sued for $50,000 for allegedly stealing another man’s wife.
On September 11, 1913 the ambitious 28-year-old Rinaldo bought the Lakeview estate for $50,000. Rinaldo and his wife Ethyl formed a company with E. C. Smith of Chicago and Percy P. Lusk to make the purchase. Lusk was an interesting guy, a respected insurance man out of Edwardsville who had a penchant for purchasing properties at tax auctions. At one point he was the winning bid for the Illinois half of the Merchant’s Bridge in downtown St. Louis. For his part, Rinaldo took out three notes of $5,000 each and other smaller notes to be paid over the course of several years. On top of all of that a second mortgage was taken on the property to cover a $4,000 loan in Smith’s name. The purchase of the property made news as far away as Chicago with each story pegging The Castle as the celebrated “house of mystery” flush with rumors it was haunted.
Rinaldo's plan was to convert the home and grounds into a school, the Lakeview Military Academy. Advertisements for the school proclaimed Lakeview as the place for boys who had fallen behind in school to become “manly men,” studying subjects like typewriting, shorthand and bookkeeping. On the day he purchased the estate, Rinaldo had already taken photos of stand-in students boating on the moat and guarding the entrance, armed with rifles. Pamphlets promoting the center were already being distributed across the country.
For students, each day would begin with Reveille in the morning and end with Taps. The drawbridge would be raised at 9:30 p.m. to keep students from sneaking out. To give the place that military feel, school gardener WIlliam Roe was tasked with forming fake cannons out of concrete that were positioned at the main entrance. The grounds were manicured and the moat was given a good cleaning. It was reported that there were 2,800 goldfish (koi) enjoying Lakeview’s water features. On September 29th more than 200 guests from St. Louis and the immediate area attended a dedication ceremony and the school was off and running. Plans were unveiled to build large barracks on the property to house all the cadets that were sure to enroll. The extra beds would not be needed. Despite all the hoopla, only seventeen students signed up for the inaugural class, a good start on such short notice, but hardly enough to pay the bills.
Just a few weeks into the school year, things literally went off the rails. On the evening of October 20, 1913 just after 7 p.m. the Chicago and Alton’s Midnight Special was chugging along at 50-miles per hour when it hit a bad section of track and crashed just outside of Lakeview. Fifteen of the 103 passengers on board were injured when everything but the engine jumped the tracks. As bad as it was, it could have been much worse had telegraph poles not prevented the passenger cars from toppling over and rolling down the embankment.
Rinaldo spent the next year placing academy ads in newspapers across the Midwest. Enrollment for the first year had been a disappointment and as the next summer wore on, concern was growing for year two. In a last-minute push in late August of 1914 Rinaldo announced the school would be using the latest motion picture technology to help teach “dry and sluggish” topics like geography and history. Despite all the promotion and promise, the pitch fell flat and the school failed to open for that second year.
Rinaldo apparently started feeling the pinch and may have stopped paying the staff. In September 1914 William Roe, the Lakeview groundskeeper and lead concrete cannon creator, nicked $300 worth of surgical instruments from Rinaldo and a rifle and suit of clothes from one of the school instructors. Roe told Rinaldo he would give the items back when he got paid. Rinaldo promised to settle up and arranged to meet Roe in St. Louis. When Roe arrived he was met by Rinaldo and police and placed under arrest.
Payroll problems were just the start. Rinaldo failed to pay his taxes and he stopped making mortgage payments. Back in Los Angeles John Biszantz had seen enough and sued them all, Eugene Rinaldo, his wife Ethyl, Smith and Lusk. In response, and here is where things start getting confusing, Rinaldo claimed he had sold off his stake in the property to John Williams and his wife Birdie. The couple planned to turn Lakeview into a “pleasure resort,” but that plan fell apart when Birdie’s health took a turn for the worse. While lawyers and the courts tried to sort out who owned what and who owed what to whom, the once grand estate of Lakeview sat dark and empty tended to by a lone caretaker.
In September 1916, 19-months after his first lawsuit, Biszantz sued again, this time targeting Eugene and Ethyl Rinaldo and John and Birdie Williams. As the case was playing out, a new investor stepped forward with an offer they could not refuse.
James Marquis was a well known and well connected developer out of Alton. Along with a small group of investors, they planned to convert Lakeview into the hot new trend, a roadhouse designed to cater to all those new automobile owners zipping about. Marquis had big plans, but Marquis had a big problem. His cash flow was much healthier than his physical being and he was spending more and more time away from home trying to recover by soaking in the medicinal springs at spas in Indiana. Marquis and his partners poured a lot of time and money into Lakeview through the winter, and into the spring. However, on May 29, 1917, just days before the new Lakeview Roadhouse was set to open, Marquis passed away. When the other investors tried to move forward with the project, they learned the liquor license for Lakeview was issued in Marquis’ name alone and was non-transferable. Getting a new license would be necessary and delay the opening. Then an even bigger issue dropped. Those investors did not have a formal agreement, contract or partnership for the project. Everything was in Marquis’ name and nothing on paper offered any proof his partners had any stake in Lakeview, leaving them on the wrong side of the moat.
In August of 1917 John Biszantz sued the Marquis estate to retake Lakeview and recover the money owed to him. Following another drawn out, long-distance, legal battle, Biszantz once again regained control of the property, once again he put it on the market and once again he sold it to … well, you’ll never believe who bought it, again.
In the two years since the Lakeview Military Academy debacle, Eugene Rinaldo made a major career change. While still operating a music conservatory in St. Louis, he remarkably managed to find the time to obtain a medical license, move to Los Angeles and set up a private practice. If that seems like a lot in a short amount of time, state regulators in California were right there with you. More on that in a moment. In May 1919 Dr. Eugene Rinaldo, M.D. teamed up with Dr. T. S. Manning of St. Louis and pulled together $12,000 to purchase Lakeview. This time the plan was to turn the estate into a sanitarium and this time build wards, rather than barracks, to accommodate 200 patients. By this time Lakeview had sat vacant and unused for the better part of two years. It would stay that way a little longer. Before a single patient could be admitted, Dr. Rinaldo got sideways with Dr. Manning and sued his partner. The courts ruled against Rinaldo, keeping his streak of Lakeview legal losses intact. The sanitarium project was conceived and collapsed in a matter of just three months.
Here is one last paragraph to put a bow on the Eugene Rinaldo tangent. Rinaldo returned to his medical practice in Los Angeles and in October 1932 the California State Medical Board moved to revoke his license. The state alleged Rinaldo had skipped medical school and purchased his degree from a diploma mill in St. Louis for $800. Rinaldo ignored the action and continued to see patients sparking a six-year court battle. When Rinaldo was given the option to leave California or face imprisonment, he chose Joplin over jail and returned to Missouri and life as a band leader. Rinaldo never gave up the fight to be a doctor and in 1946 he actually won the right to practice medicine. Rinaldo would eventually return to California, lead more bands and passed away in 1978 at the age of 93.
Back to The Castle.
By August 1919 Lakeview’s status devolved into a confusing, often conflicting series of public notices and court filings. John Biszantz, Eugene Rinaldo and the heirs of James Marquis were all in the mix in a drawn out push and pull before everything was finally settled in partition proceedings in Circuit Court. The dust did not settle on ownership of the estate until at least November of 1920. Eugene Rinaldo and the Mannings would continue to work out their differences in court for another four years.
In June of 1920 Prohibition became the law of the land. That meant the next chapter for Lakeview would not involve liquor. Well, not exactly. If you were going to stand up a speakeasy, Lakeview checked all the boxes. It was set back off the road, hidden in the trees, outside of any city limits and surrounded by a moat. But, Lakeview was not as hidden as it had been in the past. In the early 1920s a brick road from Alton to St. Louis was completed, and passed just to the west of the grounds. In 1921 a road from Edwardsville to Granite City was built, passing through Mitchell, Illinois, just south of the castle. The roads were popular and packed. A reporter for the Intelligencer drove the route from Edwardsville to Granite City and claimed to have passed 581 cars. With the new roads, on a good day, motorists could now drive from Edwardsville to Granite City in about 35-minutes, and make it to the heart of downtown St. Louis in about an hour.
Lakeview was eventually purchased out of foreclosure proceedings by a man named Mato (Matt) Vidakovich, an immigrant from Croatia who ran a grocery store in nearby Wood River. Since anyone who buys The Castle must have a back story, Vidakovich is no exception. In February 1917 he was fined for beating up a competitor he thought was stealing his customers. In the 1920 census Matt Vidakovich and his family were living on Ferguson Avenue in Wood River. By 1924 Vidakovich had the keys to The Castle, but rather than move his family into the estate, Vidakovich saw Lakeview as an investment opportunity. He leased the house to a restaurateur of questionable repute with a name to match, Myrtle Devine.
Miss Devine opened The Castle as the new Lakeview Resort in the fall of 1924. Nothing about Devine’s business resembled a resort, while most everything rolling inside, figuratively and literally, was rumored to be outside the law. Unlike traditional resorts, guests arriving at Lakeview would be met at the drawbridge by Arnold Smith. In addition to his role as bartender, Smith was the gatekeeper giving each car and its occupants a good look over with his flashlight before allowing anyone to cross the moat. On the night of November 15, 1924, some forty, invitation-only guests made their way to Lakeview for a party they would never forget, and strangely a party no one would remember.
Just after 9 p.m. Devine and her early arrivals were in the grand hall preparing to get the party started when “Dressed-Up Jimmy” Overstreet and seven members of his gang stormed The Castle with guns drawn. Arnold Smith, who was behind the bar, was relieved of his revolver and everyone was herded into a back room. If guests were scared, they should have been. Overstreet was a dangerous man who, at just 20 years of age, had managed to build a long rap sheet of murder and mayhem that included stealing cars in Oklahoma, dynamiting homes during the railroad strike of 1922, breaking out of jail and robbing banks in the Metro East. In Oklahoma he was known as the “Jelly Bean Bandit” because of his age and youthful appearance. By the time he arrived in Madison County he had the new nickname earned for his penchant for using stolen loot for swanky suits. A signature move of the Overstreet gang was to never use their real names, during a job they would call each other “Oscar.”
On this night, two of the gang members went to the bridge to greet guests, just as Arnold Smith would normally do. Two other gangsters directed guests where to park and, with the help of the persuasive persuasion provided by sawed off shotguns, relieved the men and women of their wallets, valuables and coats. Guests were ushered inside and moved to the backroom where they were held at gunpoint facing the wall with their arms above their heads. Two men did resist, and two men were beaten into submission. Once all the guests were detained, Overstreet’s gang hit the bar… hard. The more the Oscars drank, the more they loosened up and before long they were pouring shots for hostages and firing shots into the floor. The bad guys were dancing with the women, and the women who refused to dance were sent to the kitchen to cook for everyone. Women who played nice were rewarded with the return of their valuables. Around 4 a.m. one of the Oscars went outside and cut the ignition wires on all of the cars except one. The gang left their beat up ride and stole a much nicer car belonging to Edward Thomas of Granite City. The Overstreet gang made their getaway leaving behind a house full of inebriated and exhausted men and women. If the victims had the clarity to call for help, they couldn’t, Lakeview did not have a phone. If they wanted to drive away they would have to repair their cars. If they wanted to walk back to town, they would have to make the long trek without coats.
The police never went to Lakeview Saturday night or early Sunday morning. In fact, police did not have a clue the brazen holdup had happened at all. With reputations on the line, the entire wild weekend was on track to be written off by everyone involved as an unfortunate, costly hangover. It is very likely the entire incident would have been swept under the rug if not for a very sleepy man named Richard Barrett.
Barrett was a 29-year-old photographer living in Maplewood, Missouri who had seen some stuff. A veteran of the Great War, he and his fellow soldiers had been gassed while serving on the front lines in France. On this evening Barrett was getting blitzed at a back-room bar in East St. Louis when he struck up a conversation with a friendly fellow named Oscar. Barrett was asked if he would like to take a drive and make some quick money. Barrett said sure, and soon found himself in a car with other guys named Oscar. During their drive out to the country weapons were distributed and a plan was hatched. Once they arrived at Lakeview Barrett was told to guard a side door. When it was time to leave, Barrett said he was so drunk he could hardly walk. The last thing he remembered was Oscar saying they were stopping for gas. The next thing he remembered was police officers shaking him awake. About an hour after the heist had ended the gang left Barrett asleep in Ed Thomas’s car on the side of Natural Bridge Road at Spring Avenue in St. Louis. Police found a couple of stolen watches, a woman’s fur in the car and $50 cash in Barrett’s pockets. Other contraband was found scattered on the ground nearby. A foggy Barrett told police everything he could remember and they called Sheriff Edward Deimling in Edwardsville.
Sheriff Deimling had no idea the brazen holdup and robbery had happened under his watch and he did not hear about it until 5 p.m. Sunday. By the time he and his deputies arrived at Lakeview it was dark and most everyone, including Myrtle Devine, was gone. The few stragglers that were still around were either unwilling or unable to give many details. The best authorities could figure, Overstreet and his gang made off with $8,000 to $10,000 worth of cash, jewelry and other items.
While authorities were busy trying get to the bottom of what happened at Lakeview, Overstreet was causing more trouble just outside of a Granite City. Around 11:30 Sunday, the very next night after Lakeview, his gang raided a roadhouse in Eagle Park that ended in a shootout. An employee at the bar and one of the Oscars were killed, two others injured. Two incidents in two days was too much for editors at the Granite City Press Record. On November 19th they unleashed a blistering editorial demanding Sheriff Deimling do his job and shut down all the speakeasies around Madison County posing as roadhouses and resorts.
The Overstreet gang would continue a reign of terror that included robbing eleven Illinois banks in 1924 alone. Eventually every member of his gang was either killed or captured. Police in Michigan got a tip out of Joplin that led to the arrest of Overstreet and his wife Margaret, the so-called “Flapper Bandit.” In a jailhouse interview Overstreet revealed one of Sheriff Deimling’s deputies was on the take and tipping the gang off during their time wreaking havoc in the Metro East. Overstreet called the Lakeview heist his finest moment.
Following the heist the Vidakovich family may have moved into The Castle. In the 1925 Huber Wood River City Directory (p.77) they are listed as operating their grocery store on Ferguson Avenue, and their residence is “Lake View.”
It is the same story in the 1926 directory (p.185).
In the 1928 directory (p. 186) the family has the grocery store on Ferguson Avenue, but is now listed as also living at that address.
Then in 1929 (p.206) their residence was back at Lake View.
While the city directories may have the family living at the estate, subsequent events at Lakeview, and there were many, make no mention of the family during this time. There are numerous newspaper ads and articles of civic groups, unions, churches, school and bridal parties holding their picnics at Lakeview Inn, but no mention of the Vidakovichs. The property was operating as a resort rather than a residence. Fun and frolic ruled the day while gangsters and greed ruled the night at the moated estate.
In late February 1926 authorities were tipped off about a moonshine operation near the grounds. Deputies found large concrete vats for making huge batches of moonshine. Authorities hauled off three suspects along with their stills, then used dynamite to blow the vats to vits.
In August 1928 a drunken fight broke out between three men attending a boilermaker’s picnic at the estate. One of the men grabbed an 8-inch bread knife from a table, and when he turned to rejoin the fray accidentally stabbed an innocent bystander. William Lentz, 33, the father of two little boys, died as a result of his injuries.
By 1928 Tom Ebling and his wife Marie, longtime Mitchell residents, were the proprietors of the Lakeview Inn. One afternoon in October five men in two autos crossed the moat. With a man stationed at the bridge, another at the front door, the remaining gangsters went inside and robbed Ebling and a half dozen guests of $3,500 in cash, diamonds and jewelry. Authorities found out about the robbery secondhand because Ebling never called the sheriff. The investigation went nowhere as Ebling and the other victims declined to give statements to detectives.
On Christmas Eve 1929, the Inn played a key role in a grizzly gangland style murder. It started when Bryce Bolin and William O’Leary, two men with extensive criminal records, just happened to be touring in the area and stopped at the Inn. They borrowed a shotgun from Thomas Ebling and wandered off to do a little hunting. When they returned, Ebling told the pair that while they were away three men had been at the Inn looking for them. A little later, after dark, the three men returned and “convinced” Bolin and O’Leary to go with them for a little drive. They ended up at the Shady Rest Resort, an abandoned speakeasy at Horseshoe Lake. Inside the dark clubhouse one of the men rolled up a piece of newspaper and set it on fire so they could see. He laid the torch on the bar, pulled out a revolver and started shooting. Bryce Bolin was gravely wounded while O’Leary was hit in the shoulder and played dead. The gunmen fled leaving the two victims alone as the fire spread. Bryce Bolin begged O’Leary to pull him from the building. O’Leary would later testify he was too weak to move Bolin, and left him lying on the floor while he went for help. By the time O’Leary returned the building was destroyed and Bolin was dead, burned beyond recognition.
During the 1930s Matt Vidakovich may have taken on his wife’s cousin as a business partner. Paul Billion, a refinery worker from Wood River, starts showing up in public notices about Lakeview, usually involving back taxes. But press coverage of Lakeview was not reserved for the legal notice section of the paper. 1930 would pick up where 1929 left off with The Castle making headlines for all the wrong reasons. A raid by Sheriff Hermann and his deputies at the resort in April 1930 found “home brew and hard liquor.” Thomas Ebling was fined $300 and court costs. Then in July, another round with officers once again finding beer and liquor on the premises. Ebling was taken into custody with bond set at $1,000.
Despite all the incidents, Lakeview continued to be a popular destination for Metro East residents. A June 1931 article in the St. Louis Argus mentioned Lakeview was an ideal destination for black residents in St. Louis looking for a place to picnic and play. The Argus article compared Lakeview to the Highlands amusement park in Forest Park.
In March 1937 an accident at Lakeview’s rail crossing claimed the lives of farmer Michael Tomlovich and farmhand J. E. Hibbs. Tomlovich owned a farm next to Lakeview, and the two men were in a truck loaded with crates of chickens when they pulled onto the tracks and into the path of a speeding train. The impact sent the truck flying 80 feet into a nearby ditch. Tomlovich was killed instantly. Hibbs was still alive when he was loaded onto the train and engineers sped off to Alton where he was transferred to the hospital, but later passed away.
Marie Ebling would die in 1941. Thomas Ebling would continue to operate the Lakeview Inn until his death. His obituary in the July 8, 1950 Alton Telegraph noted “Lakeview Inn had attained a reputation for fine foods and its keeper as a man of jovial disposition.”
June 8, 1954 John J. Biszantz passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 93. The man whose life went from simple to sensational, outlived his daughter and her husband and died alone in a nursing home. The funeral notice in the Times noted the services were “strictly private.” No other funeral announcement that day or even that week included such a notation. Biszantz was cremated, his ashes returned to St. Louis and buried next to his wife, daughter and son in law beneath a large marker in the Bellefontaine Cemetery.
Reportedly, Matt and Barbara Vidakovich made Lakeview their primary residence in the early 1960s. Matt would pass away in December of 1964. The big old estate was too much for Barbara to handle by herself, so she moved off the property and put the mansion up for rent.
By 1968 William Dewain Burroughs and his family were living at Lakeview. A mention in the society notes in the Granite City Press Record notes the family held a reunion at the property.
Another article in the March 1970 Press Record mentions Billy and Rickey Burroughs returning home to Lakeview Castle after a trip to Mattoon, Illinois. So the Burroughs family were there for at least two years.
At the end of 1971 the Creek family was living at The Castle. Sadly, a front page article in the Granite City Press Record on Thursday, February 24, 1972 reports on the overdose death of 19-year-old Danny Creek, even showing a photo of his dead body above the fold. Later in the story it mentions the Creek family had “moved to the “old castle” in the Mitchell area a few months ago.” Whether it was Danny’s death or some other reason, the Creeks left the property a short time later, and Lakeview, once again, sat empty.
The empty Castle would be stormed by waves of teenagers and college students looking for a place to party. Set back in the trees, out in the middle of nowhere, it was the perfect place to raise a ruckus. Vandals prowled the estate and stole anything they could carry and busted anything they couldn’t. In late 1972 someone stripped the mansion of its fireplaces, light fixtures and what was left of the ornate woodwork. Reportedly Vidakovich called the county building inspectors and Lakeview was condemned. A notice stapled to the door did little to stop the parties and one afternoon in mid-March of 1973 someone set fire to the house, burning it to the ground. The Mitchell Volunteer Fire Department responded to the scene, but the mansion was already gone by the time they arrived. The only thing left standing of the once proud structure was a tall brick chimney. Stone columns and arches that once ringed the observation deck at the top of the home’s tower fell fifty feet, landing with a thump in the ground where they were snatched up and carted away as souvenirs.
Just as it had when it stood tall, even in ruins, the Castle has provided local residents with irresistible fodder for ghost stories too good to be true and true stories often too wild to be believed. Today, more than 125 years later, the site is still private property and, according to Madison County tax records, still owned by the Vidakovich family. YouTubers have documented visits to the site where all that remains of the once grand estate are a pair of stone gazebos, nondescript concrete foundations, a couple of unremarkable wells and an empty fish pond. Through the years some of Madison County’s “finest” have paid their respects by tagging everything with graffiti and nonsense. The old drawbridges are gone and a felled tree is the only way to traverse the moat outside of slugging through hip-deep, stagnant water. The statue of the dog, for generations a novel focal point of the grounds, has been nicked and now sits purposeless in the front yard of a house a few miles away on Meadowlane Drive. It is impossible to see what was once Lakeview without trespassing which was and is still illegal. If you do go (please don’t) expect to be greeted by an unnatural number of mosquitoes, ticks and the most frustrating, painful, thorny shrubbery that nature could dream up, deftly weaved across any path you choose to explore.
In the end, Lakeview may not have been any bigger or more elegant than some of the grand old homes along St. Louis Street in Edwardsville. But location is everything in the real estate game, and Biszantz built his mansion in a place where it could not be ignored, with a tower to be seen and most importantly, that single feature elevating any residence to mythic status, the moat. A moat that, remarkably, is still visible on Google Maps, shaped like a giant triangle, nestled up against the railroad tracks on the north side of New Poag Road midway between Illinois Route 3 and Illinois Route 111. That moat, a lingering reminder of one man’s dream and a lasting link to the local legend.
Sources
Taylor, Troy (2005). Weird Illinois. Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. pp. 232–233. ISBN 0-7607-5943-X.
Taylor, Troy. "Hartford Castle". Retrieved 2007-01-26.
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