Springfield’s Pythian Castle has history, mystery, and ghost stories to spare

Rising up in a modest residential neighborhood on the north side of Springfield, Missouri, the hulking gray limestone castle is about as unexpected a feature as you could imagine. Set back from a vast lawn, and surrounded these days by a chain-link fence and some forbidding gates and signage, the Pythian Castle looms as large in local lore as it does in physical presence.

In its first life, the Pythian Home of Missouri was intended as the charity home for any children left behind by the death of local members of the Order of the Knights of Pythias. The fraternal organization, the first such group to be chartered by the U.S.Congress, was wooed to build in Springfield among a hotly contested group of possible cities, and spent an eventual $100,000 on the castle’s construction, completed in 1913. The home served its function as an orphanage until World War II, when the military demands on the homefront pressed it into service as a hospital unit and social club for wounded veterans convalescing after foreign tours. While soldiers and office personnel occupied the main areas, a barred “dungeon” and other facilities on the campus housed captured German and Italian prisoners of war. Some artwork and Japanese writing remain visible on the walls today.

Next up was use by the Army Reserves, a lease arrangement with the Ozarks Area Community Action Corporation (a social services agency), and finally sale as surplus military property in 1993. Sealed bids were relatively few, and the castle sold to an area farmer and his family, who lived there for a time but ultimately decamped and sold the property to its current owners. Tamara Finocchiaro and her mother M.J. Page moved here from the Los Angeles area, looking for a project to combine the daughter’s interest in swing dance and aerial acrobatics (a castle seemed like a cool place to host competitions) and the mother’s interest in historical renovation (hello, castle updates!) Today, visitors can experience the Pythian Castle in several ways, including paranormal tours, themed escape room puzzles, and interactive dinner theater mysteries.