HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
A turn-of-the-century Virginia Street mansion, now offices of the West Virginia Radio Group and a Charleston ghost-tour stop
1111 Virginia Street East, Charleston, WV 25301
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Private office building; viewable from the public sidewalk. Interior access is not open to the public, but the exterior is a stop on the Charlie West ghost tour.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved downtown sidewalk along Virginia Street East
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1900 · Turn-of-the-Century Charleston Architecture · Frankenberger Family and Merchant History · Adaptive Reuse (WCHS-TV, West Virginia Radio Group)
Philip Frankenberger was born in Wertheim, Germany, in 1843 and immigrated to the United States as a young man, settling in Charleston in 1860. With his brother Moses he opened a downtown men's clothing store that operated for decades. Philip married Jennie Moss, and the 1900 census records the couple living on Virginia Street with their five children. Sources place construction of the Virginia Street mansion between roughly 1893 and 1900.
Jennie Frankenberger died on April 2, 1904. Philip died on November 13, 1908, following complications from surgery. The family's direct association with the house ended in the decades that followed.
In 1954 the renovated mansion became the home of television station WCHS-TV. After the station relocated in the late 1980s, the West Virginia Radio Group took over the building, which it continues to use as offices. The structure stands among the larger surviving turn-of-the-century homes on Charleston's Virginia Street East corridor and is included on the city's downtown ghost tour as a historic landmark with attached local lore.
Sources
The building's best-known ghost story is told as local folklore. In the most widely repeated version, an affair between Philip Frankenberger and a household servant is said to have produced a child who later disappeared. The tale is an urban legend with no documentary support, and it should be read as folklore rather than established fact; it is repeated here because it is the story the ghost tour and local accounts attach to the house.
The more concrete reports come from people who have worked in the building. Noel Richardson, who told local accounts he had worked there for about twenty years, described unexplained noises and lights that turned themselves off and on, including an incident on a rooftop satellite dish around two in the morning. Other reported experiences include the smell of perfume and phantom footsteps.
The Frankenberger Mansion is included as a stop on the Charlie West ghost tour run by US Ghost Adventures, which presents it as both a historic Charleston landmark and a reportedly active site. Because the building is now private offices, the public encounter with it is from the exterior and through the tour's narration rather than interior investigation.
The Frankenberger Mansion is a private office building, now home to the West Virginia Radio Group, and is not open to the public inside. Its exterior is a stop on Charleston's Charlie West ghost tour, which recounts the family's history and the building's ghost lore. The facade can also be viewed any time from the Virginia Street East sidewalk.
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