42-room c. 1900 hall in Cleveland's Central neighborhood that served as a German singing hall, hospital, and J. Walter Wills's Black-owned funeral home before closing in 2005.
2491 E 55th Street, Cleveland, OH 44104
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Tour pricing varies by event. Current owner Eric Freeman hosts seasonal Halloween tours and private bookings.
Access
Limited Access
Historic 42-room building with multiple levels, narrow corridors, and unfinished restoration; significant climbing and uneven surfaces
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1900 · African American Funeral-Industry Heritage · Cleveland Central Neighborhood · J. Walter Wills Sr. Legacy · Adaptive Reuse / Preservation
The building at 2491 East 55th Street was constructed circa 1899-1900 as the headquarters of a German singing society. Over the next four decades it served a succession of community functions: a Hungarian immigrants' hospital, the Cleveland Hebrew Institute (a Jewish day school), and a Masonic lodge. The 42-room structure includes auditorium-scale gathering spaces, classrooms, dormitory bedrooms, and former chapel spaces.
In 1941 J. Walter Wills Sr., a Cleveland businessman who had operated funeral parlors in the Central neighborhood since 1904, purchased and converted the property into the J. Walter Wills Funeral Home. The business grew to become one of the largest African American-owned funeral homes in Ohio, serving Cleveland's Central and Glenville communities. Wills was a founder of the Cleveland chapter of the NAACP and a leading civic figure; in his later years he and his family lived in the building's upper floors.
J. Walter Wills Sr. died on April 23, 1971 in an upstairs bedroom of the funeral home. The business continued under family operation until its final closure in 2005, with the building falling into significant disrepair afterward.
In 2010 Cleveland resident Eric Freeman purchased the property for approximately $20,000 and began an ongoing preservation and adaptive-reuse effort. Freeman has opened the building for seasonal Halloween tours, paranormal investigations, film shoots, and special events, while raising funds for structural restoration. The property is described as one of Cleveland's most architecturally significant African American-heritage sites.
Sources
According to Cleveland Vintage and Signal Cleveland's coverage of Eric Freeman's tours, the most frequently described phenomenon at the House of Wills is a whitish, semi-transparent apparition seen looking down from an upstairs window — visible both from the street and from inside the building. Visitors to the funeral home have reported phantom footsteps in the corridors, a disembodied voice that calls them by name, shadow figures along the staircases, and inexplicable mists in the auditorium and rear chapel.
Local paranormal groups, including Fringe Paranormal, have investigated the property and reported voice anomalies on audio recordings (EVPs) and brief glimpses of figures on the upper floors. Tour guides discuss the building's layered history of community use — a hospital, a school, a funeral home — and frame the activity in terms of generations of community grief and life-transition events that took place in the building. Eric Freeman has described his ownership philosophy in terms of preserving the building's spiritual as well as physical history.
J. Walter Wills Sr. is treated reverently in tour narrative as the building's most well-documented previous occupant. We have not located primary documentation that explicitly attributes specific apparitional sightings to Wills himself; tour and media language consistently describes him as a presence honored in the building rather than as a malevolent revenant. The upstairs bedroom where he died on April 23, 1971 is described as the most paranormally active room in the building.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Owner Eric Freeman leads seasonal guided tours through the 42-room building, walking guests through its layered history as a singing hall, hospital, school, and one of Ohio's largest African American-owned funeral homes. Tours have been documented by Signal Cleveland and Atlas Obscura.
The current ownership rents the building to paranormal-investigation teams by appointment. The third-floor bedroom where J. Walter Wills died on April 23, 1971 is a focal point of the building's paranormal lore.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Cleveland, OH
Grays Armory is a Romanesque Revival sandstone fortress completed in 1893 to house the Cleveland Grays, a private volunteer militia founded August 28, 1837 as the Cleveland City Guards. Designed by Fenimore C. Bate, the building has hosted civic milestones from Metropolitan Opera performances to the Cleveland Orchestra's 1917 debut. Today it operates as a museum of military and Cleveland history.
San Diego, CA
Villa Montezuma is the 1887 Queen Anne residence built in San Diego's Sherman Heights for pianist, author, and Spiritualist Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard, later known by the pen name Francis Grierson. The home is owned by the City of San Diego, operated as a museum by the Friends of the Villa Montezuma, and was saved from demolition in the 1960s by Save Our Heritage Organisation.
Hollywood, MD
Historic Sotterley is the only tidewater plantation in Maryland open to the public, with a 1703 Manor House and an 1830s slave cabin standing on 94 acres above the Patuxent River. It is a National Historic Landmark and a UNESCO Site of Memory tied to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.