Château Laroche (Loveland Castle)

The story

Harry Andrews was officially declared dead of spinal meningitis in a military hospital during World War I. He wasn't. After recovering and learning that his fiancé had married someone else during his reported death, Andrews abandoned standard civilian life. He bought riverfront land in Loveland using subscription promotions from The Cincinnati Enquirer and spent the next half-century laying stone on the banks of the Little Miami River.

He called it Château Laroche, but locals knew it simply as a one-man war against modern decline. To construct a full-scale medieval fortress, Andrews lugged over 55,000 buckets of river rocks out of the Little Miami bed. When river stone ran short, he poured cement into paper quart milk cartons to mass-produce tens of thousands of custom concrete bricks. He lived on site with no indoor plumbing, founded a code-of-chivalry youth order called the Knights of the Golden Trail, and logged nearly 99 percent of the construction labor himself until he died at age 91 from accidental burn injuries in 1981.

Today, the Knights still guard and operate the keep Andrews willed to them. Squeeze past the narrow turrets and you will find stones embedded in the chapel walls from his global travels, a dry moat, a dungeon, and weapon displays that feel far more like an eccentric prepper's redoubt than a sanitized historic museum.