Liberty winery’s past inspires horror novel related to reported hauntings

LIBERTY, Mo. (KCTV) – National television programs like “Ghost Hunters” and “Ghost Adventures” have centered episodes around ghostly apparitions at Liberty’s Belvoir Winery and Inn. Now, a local author has created a fictional horror novel based on people associated with the place, from its 19th-century use as an orphanage to the people who run the place today.

The building that now houses the winery and inn was once an orphanage operated by a benevolent secret society known then as the Independent Order of Odd Fellowship, later shortened to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF).

Neighboring buildings were a school, a hospital and later a nursing home.

A Liberty Tribune newspaper dated 1895 hangs on the walls of the modern-day inn announcing the dedication of the “Odd Fellows Widows’ and Orphans’ Home of Missouri.”

The original orphanage, that was previously a hotel, burned to the ground in 1900. The replacement building now housing the Belvoir Winery and Inn still bears the name of the orphanage: The Odd Fellows Home. The stairs are worn on one side only, where the orphans would climb the steps single file along the handrail to their sleeping quarters.

Jesse Leimkuehler, the managing operator of the Belvoir Winery and Inn, said he didn’t believe in ghosts until he opened the winery, owned by his wife and her sister.

He described doors, secured with retraction arms, opening and closing on their own on the first floor. He said he’s heard the sound of children running and giggling on the second floor. He said he’s heard pianos playing with no one else there. “First you try to write it off. You think okay, well you know, maybe it was just a squeaky floorboard, or you know, the wind or things like that,” Leimkuehler said. “But then there’s stuff that just happens, it’s a little beyond that.”

He’s been collecting artifacts related to the building’s previous incarnations. There are photos, postcards, mesh masks used in Odd Fellows rituals, and a skeleton. It is a real skeleton of a former Odd Fellow who agreed to have his skeleton used upon his death for rituals. He obtained it from an Odd Fellows lodge in St. Louis. All of the skeletons used in rituals at lodges across the nation were named George.

“They would have a blindfolded person come in, they would raise the blindfold and it would be to present them with their own mortality,” Leimkuehler said. “In other words, do what you can while you’re alive, because eventually you’ll be like this.”

The George resting in a small museum at the winery was the inspiration for one of the characters in Skaught Anthony Patterson’s novel, set in the building. The orphans are also characters.

“People were not adopted out of this place,” Leimkuehler explained. “It was a situation where they would be brought here to be cared for for a period of time while their family got back on their feet.”

Patterson describes his book, “The Odd Fellows Home,” as a Gothic horror novel which spans several lifetimes.

“It’s a fictional story,” Patterson said, “but all of their stories come from real experiences.” The modern-day winery owners are also characters but with a twist. “A mysterious old couple who know how to live forever if only you stay in love forever” is how Patterson describes them.

The horror comes as they try to achieve that goal.

“They have to learn, in order to preserve that, to live forever, and it’s about the terrible price they’re willing to pay in order to get that,” Patterson described.

Up a dirt path behind the building is the Odd Fellows Cemetery, home to nearly 600 Odd Fellows lodge members.

Whether you consider ghosts to be fact or fiction, Leimkuehler says the ghost stories still serve as a sort of history lesson for guests. “You’re telling them all these things and what’s happening, what happened in the past. And at the time, they’re just like, ‘Oh, I’m all into the ghost kind of thing,’” he said. “But what what you’re really doing is you’re actually passively teaching them a lot of the things in the past that happened here and other places like this.”

The orphanage closed in the 1950s. Most orphanages came to an end with the advent of the government-funded social welfare system. The IOOC still exists. They now focus on other charitable endeavors. Their website indicates they still use symbols, rituals rites of passage, known as degrees “designed to ‘elevate and improve the character of mankind.’”

Patterson’s book can be found at Prospero’s Books at Belvoir Winery or on Amazon.

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