The Mystery of the House With the Missing Turret
An abandoned ranch, a million-dollar property transfer, a handmade house hidden in the woods, and the historical rabbit hole that started Corporate House Takeover.
I did not intend to spend an entire night hunting for the house of a woman who had died nearly twenty years earlier.
I feel like I should establish that right away.
I had plans. Presumably. I don't remember what they were anymore, because sometime that evening I fell directly into a historical rabbit hole involving Rumpke, an abandoned Cincinnati-area ranch, property deeds from the 1920s, a mysterious woman named Anna Ritter, and a house with a three-story tower that apparently NO ONE THOUGHT TO PHOTOGRAPH.
By the time I looked at the clock, it was almost 3:00 in the morning.
I had questions.
And most of them were for Anna.
This Started With a Landfill
For reasons that made perfect sense several hours earlier, I started looking into the history of Rumpke's landfill in Colerain Township.
I've known Mount Rumpke my entire life. If you grew up around Cincinnati, it's just... there. You drive past it. You smell it. You make jokes about it.
You probably don't spend much time wondering what was there before the mountain of garbage.
Unfortunately, I am exactly the kind of person who starts wondering what was there before the mountain of garbage.
This was my first mistake.
One question became another, which became an old map, which became a road that doesn't really exist anymore, which became old properties swallowed up by decades of landfill expansion.
And then I remembered Handle Bar Ranch.
More specifically, I remembered a house on the hill that my dad used to tell me about whenever we drove down Hughes Road and stopped at Bank Road.
That was my second mistake.
Enter Anna Ritter
Handle Bar Ranch was a wonderfully unusual place near Hughes and Bank Roads in Colerain Township.
There were horses. Hayrides. Creeks. Rustic buildings. And, at one point, apparently 48 vintage Schwinn bicycles that visitors could rent and ride around.
The woman associated with the ranch was Anna Gay Ritter.
Anna and her husband, Percy, lived in the area for decades. They had no children, and Percy was apparently quite the craftsman.
Their property eventually found itself surrounded by the expanding Rumpke operation.
While researching the ranch, I came across a 2002 CityBeat article about Anna.
And that's when everything went completely off the rails.
Because the article didn't just describe the ranch.
It described her HOUSE.
According to the account, Anna's home stood across Hughes Road, tucked into a wooded hillside. The reporter described walking up a crumbling concrete driveway toward a handmade structure that seemed to grow larger as it emerged through the trees.
And in the center of this unusual house stood a three-story tower.
Another historical description referred to a square turret with a balcony.
Excuse me?
You cannot tell me there was a handmade, castle-like house hidden in the woods across from a place called Handle Bar Ranch and expect me to simply continue with my evening.
I needed to see this house.
Immediately.
The Great Search for the Missing Turret
Naturally, I started with Google.
Nothing.
Old newspaper archives?
Ranch pictures.
Historical websites?
More ranch pictures.
Old postcards?
Bicycles. Horses. Ranch.
Facebook?
You guessed it.
More ranch.
Apparently, every human being who visited this property for decades collectively agreed on one thing:
Whatever you do, don't photograph the giant, unusual house with the tower.
Wonderful.
So I turned to historical aerial photographs.
And eventually, we found a house.
It was in roughly the right location, surrounded by woods, across from part of the ranch. It looked substantial enough to be a possibility.
For a moment, I thought we'd found it.
Then I zoomed in.
And stared.
And zoomed in some more.
And finally asked the question that would haunt the rest of this investigation:
WHERE IS THE TURRET?!
There was no obvious tower.
No unmistakable architectural feature rising above the roofline.
Nothing that resembled the extraordinary structure described in those old articles.
And if there was one thing I knew, it was that a three-story tower shouldn't be particularly difficult to identify.
So we set that theory aside.
If the photographs weren't going to cooperate, I was going to find Anna through the property records.
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Historical Deeds
This is where my evening became a full-scale investigation.
I started digging through Hamilton County Recorder records.
Not modern, neatly formatted deeds with convenient parcel numbers.
Oh, no.
I'm talking about old handwritten and typewritten legal descriptions involving stones, quarter sections, estate lots, bearings, and roads that have moved or disappeared entirely.
The kind of documents that make you wonder whether surveyors in 1928 were paid by the word.
But slowly, names began to emerge.
Anna Gay Ritter.
Before her marriage, Anna Gay.
Percy Ritter.
The Lucy Ann Pottenger estate lots.
Property along Hughes Road.
Deeds from 1949.
And eventually, records reaching back into 1928.
At one point, a deed directed us to another book and page that was supposed to contain a reference to Percy Ritter.
It didn't.
I checked the surrounding pages.
Still no Percy.
More pages.
Nothing.
Eventually, I had to accept that either the reference was incorrect, the indexing had gone wrong, or Percy Ritter had somehow reached through time to tell me to go to bed.
I chose not to listen.
Then We Found the Property
After hours of comparing historical descriptions, deeds, and maps, I landed on a modern Hamilton County parcel.
Parcel number: 510-0130-0020-00
And suddenly, the pieces began falling into place.
The property record identified Rumpke Sanitary Landfill as the owner.
The previous owner?
Anna Gay Ritter.
The recorded transfer date?
November 14, 2007.
The reported sale price?
$1,000,000.
There she was.
Anna.
Rumpke.
November 2007.
One million dollars.
And the information aligned with a historical news account reporting that Rumpke had acquired approximately 30 acres associated with Anna's property.
WE FOUND HER.
There was just one small problem.
The Hamilton County Auditor listed the property address as 11320 Bank Road.
Except the parcel I was looking at didn't even touch Bank Road.
I had spent hours trying to reconcile historical references to Hughes Road, Bank Road, Handle Bar Ranch, and Anna's mysterious house, only to discover that the county's address information was adding another layer of confusion.
Of course it was.
At this point, I was beginning to suspect that Anna had arranged this entire thing specifically to test my patience.
The Auditor Gives Me a Present
Once I had the parcel identified, I began exploring its historical photographs.
One image dated 2003 showed Handle Bar Ranch.
And sitting prominently in front of the property was the red Handle Bar Ranch hayride truck.
Not just any red truck.
The distinctive ranch truck that also appeared in an old visitor photograph I'd discovered.
For the first time, I had a recognizable object connecting different photographs of the property.
It was exciting.
But there was one problem.
It still wasn't Anna's house.
Then I opened another Auditor photograph.
This one was dated January 2, 2009.
Trees.
Stone retaining walls.
A gate.
And climbing steeply into the wooded hillside...
A crumbling concrete driveway.
I nearly fell out of my chair.
Because years earlier, the CityBeat reporter had described approaching Anna's house by walking up a crumbling concrete driveway.
And now I was staring at what appeared to be that very driveway.
On the property connected to Anna.
Less than two years after the recorded transfer to Rumpke.
ANNA.
WHERE IS YOUR HOUSE?
By this point, I had practically everything.
I had the deeds, the parcel, the purchase price, the ranch, the truck, the driveway, the stonework, the woods, the aerial photographs, and contemporary descriptions of the house.
I even had multiple references to the turret.
But I did not have...
THE TURRET.
And I was beginning to take this personally.
Naturally, We Tracked Down the Photographer
Because apparently I have no concept of quitting, I returned to the original 2002 CityBeat story.
There was a photography credit.
Jon Hughes.
And a website: PhotoPresse.com.
That meant a photographer had been involved in documenting the property for the article.
Could photographs from that assignment still exist somewhere?
Suddenly, I had a new mission.
I found references connecting Jon and Sean Hughes with PhotoPresse, then discovered archived versions of the website through the Wayback Machine.
And there I was, in the middle of the night, navigating a partially broken website preserved from 2002.
Clicking links that didn't work.
Opening images that no longer loaded.
Searching through fragments of a digital archive that had apparently decided to retire years earlier.
At approximately this point, any reasonable person would have gone to bed.
Instead, I emailed the photographer.
Maybe somewhere there was an old contact sheet, a folder of negatives, a CD, or a forgotten hard drive containing unpublished photographs from that assignment.
And maybe one of those photographs showed Anna's house.
The actual house.
The tower.
The elusive turret.
And Somehow, We Ended Up on MySpace
This really should have been the end of the evening.
It was not.
Because while rummaging through the Wayback Machine, I remembered something else connected to another part of my research around Buell Road.
Two of my friends, Lauren and Miranda, had died there when I was a teenager, on my graduation day.
I wanted to confirm something from that period.
And somehow, this led me to my old MySpace profile.
Yes.
MySpace.
And ladies and gentlemen, apparently I have always been exactly like this.
Just louder.
There was 19-year-old me, complete with Fall Out Boy lyrics, dramatic opinions, emo quizzes, and commentary about my 2008 Ford Focus, which I apparently already recognized as a questionable financial decision.
There was also a very public declaration that my fiancé, Christopher John, was my entire world.
Christopher John is now my husband.
So apparently that one worked out.
My Top Friends included a profile called Rangers all the Way.
That was Chris.
Because nothing says everlasting romance quite like putting your future husband in your MySpace Top 8.
Meanwhile, my sister had left a comment asking what was going on with me and this whole wedding thing.
Well, apparently quite a lot.
I married him.
But I digress.
How did a search for a missing turret turn into a tour of my teenage internet presence?
I genuinely couldn't tell you.
Anna, You Win Tonight
What began as a simple question about the history of Rumpke's landfill had somehow turned into a full-scale investigation involving nearly a century of deeds, a vanished ranch, a mysterious handmade house, an old photography agency, and my MySpace account.
I had spent hours searching for one very specific thing.
A photograph of Anna Ritter's house.
And I still hadn't found it.
The house was no longer standing. Our research indicated it had disappeared sometime after 2021.
But surely photographs existed.
Someone had to have taken one.
Maybe the photographer had one.
Maybe an old ranch visitor had one.
Maybe a former neighbor had a photograph sitting in an album that hadn't been opened in forty years.
I refused to believe that a woman could live for decades in a handmade house with a three-story tower and nobody, anywhere, had a clear photograph of it.
So, Anna...
You win tonight.
But I found your driveway.
And I wasn't finished.
Nine Days Later...
Nine days after I ended my completely unreasonable historical investigation with the words “Damn it, Anna Ritter,” something wonderful happened.
I FOUND THE TURRET.
And naturally, after spending hours digging through government records, historical archives, and websites held together by technology from 2002...
Facebook had it.
After sharing my search in several Facebook groups, a gentleman named Steven came to my rescue.
Photographs surfaced.
Actual photographs.
Not fuzzy aerial imagery.
Not suspicious shadows.
Not a roofline hidden beneath a canopy of trees.
Real, ground-level photographs of the property.
And there it was.
THE TURRET!
At the bottom of the hill sat the familiar red Handle Bar Ranch trucks.
Behind them, the hillside rose steeply through the trees.
Stone walls zigzagged across the property.
Buildings were scattered along the slope.
And towering over this wonderfully unusual little compound was an extraordinary handmade house.
Rising directly from its center was the feature I'd spent nine days searching for.
A tall, square tower.
Windowed on multiple sides.
Capped with its own roof.
The turret.
The actual turret.
I cannot adequately describe the satisfaction.
Anna, You Magnificent Weirdo
The historical descriptions had not prepared me for this house.
At all.
This wasn't an ordinary old farmhouse with a decorative tower attached to one corner.
This place looked like several architectural styles had gotten together and decided that following the rules was entirely optional.
There was stone.
Stucco.
Wood.
Balconies.
Terraces.
Retaining walls.
Little outbuildings tucked into the hillside.
Roofs going in every direction.
And then, apparently, Percy looked at everything he'd built and decided:
You know what this needs?
A tower.
And up it went.
The close photographs made the tower impossible to miss.
The writers hadn't exaggerated.
We hadn't misunderstood the descriptions.
Anna Ritter really had lived in an extraordinary handmade house overlooking Handle Bar Ranch.
And suddenly, everything we'd spent hours investigating made sense.
The Driveway!
Remember that 2009 Auditor photograph?
The one showing a steep concrete driveway disappearing into the woods, bordered by stone retaining walls?
At the time, I could only say that it looked like the approach described in the 2002 article.
Now I could compare it with actual photographs of the property.
There was the steep approach.
There were the stone walls.
There was the wooded hillside.
And at the top...
Anna's house.
One photograph, taken in the snow, was particularly remarkable.
It showed the property from below, with the road climbing through the hillside and the unusual house looming above it.
The turret rose over everything.
For the first time, I understood what the reporter meant when describing the house appearing larger as he approached.
You wouldn't necessarily see the entire building from the road.
You'd begin climbing.
The trees would open.
And suddenly, this extraordinary structure would appear above you.
After spending so much time trying to understand the property through flat maps and aerial photographs, seeing it from ground level was almost surreal.
The Trucks Were Another Piece of the Puzzle
One of the most satisfying details was seeing the red Handle Bar Ranch trucks in the photographs.
Those trucks had appeared repeatedly throughout the investigation.
I'd identified one in a 2003 Auditor photograph.
I'd seen another in an old visitor photograph.
They became recognizable landmarks that helped connect different views of the property.
And now, in the newly discovered photographs, the trucks sat at the bottom of the hill with Anna's house visible above them.
For the first time, I could understand the relationship between the ranch, the hillside, the driveway, and the house.
This wasn't simply a collection of disconnected historical clues.
It was a real place.
A strange, sprawling, handmade little world built into the hills of Colerain Township.
And now I could finally see it.
And Then I Found Anna Herself
As I continued exploring the photographs associated with the ranch, another image surfaced.
This one was shared on Facebook by Steven Karwisch on February 28, 2024.
The caption read:
“More live action with owner Anna Ritter.”
And there she was—or, more precisely, there was a woman identified by the person who posted the photograph as Anna Ritter.
Standing along the roadside near Handle Bar Ranch, wearing a white shirt and cap, with the ranch's sign and rustic buildings visible behind her.
The photograph itself was clearly older than the 2024 Facebook posting, although its original date remains unknown.
For someone who had spent so much time chasing Anna through property records, newspaper accounts, and aerial photographs, this was another wonderful piece of the puzzle.
I'd spent hours trying to reconstruct the world she lived in.
Now I had an image associated with the woman at the center of it.
And that made the history feel a little more personal.
The Bittersweet Part of Finding It
As exciting as these discoveries were, there was something bittersweet about finally seeing the photographs.
Because the world they captured was gone.
The trucks.
The ranch buildings.
The handmade house.
The unusual tower.
The landscape had changed dramatically as the surrounding landfill operation expanded.
And if you drove through the area today without knowing its history, you might never imagine that such a place had once existed in those woods.
People lived there.
They rode horses.
They went on hayrides.
They rented bicycles.
They built stone walls.
They planted flowers.
They parked those distinctive red trucks at the bottom of the hill.
Someone woke up on snowy mornings and walked that steep driveway.
For decades, this was somebody's ordinary view of the world.
And then, eventually, it wasn't there anymore.
That's what stayed with me.
Not simply the missing turret.
But the realization that entire places can disappear, taking generations of stories with them.
Sometimes History Survives in the Strangest Places
This investigation taught me something about how local history survives.
Not neatly.
Not in one convenient archive.
And certainly not in a folder labeled Everything Ashley Will Want to Find in 2026.
It survives in pieces.
A newspaper article.
A deed.
An Auditor photograph.
A parcel number.
A postcard.
An abandoned website.
The Wayback Machine.
Someone's old photo album.
A Facebook post.
A memory.
One person remembers the trucks.
Someone else remembers the horses.
Someone remembers Anna.
And somebody has a photograph without realizing that a complete stranger has spent nine days searching for the architectural feature visible in the background.
Sometimes all it takes is someone curious enough to begin connecting those pieces.
The Investigation That Started Something Bigger
When I first began looking into the land surrounding Rumpke, I had no intention of starting a historical investigation series.
I was simply curious about what used to be there.
But somewhere between the deeds, the maps, the photographs, and the missing turret, I realized something.
There are countless places like this.
Homes that once stood along roads we still travel.
Family farms replaced by subdivisions.
Businesses that generations of people remember but that no longer exist.
Properties with remarkable histories hidden beneath ordinary modern landscapes.
And sometimes, the only thing keeping those stories alive is a photograph, a newspaper clipping, or somebody who remembers.
As a REALTOR® with a passion for historic properties and local history, I spend a great deal of time thinking about houses.
What they're worth.
Who owns them.
What condition they're in.
But I also think about something that doesn't always appear in a property listing.
Who lived there before?
What did they build?
What did they love?
And what happens to their stories when the house is gone?
Anna Ritter's house was one of the most unusual homes I've ever researched.
I can't help thinking that someday, perhaps, someone might be investigating one of my own strange old-house projects, wondering who lived there and why on earth they built things the way they did.
And I hope someone will have kept the photographs.
Because the places we call home deserve to be remembered, even after they're gone.
So, Anna...
Nine days ago, I told you that you'd won.
You sent me through decades of property records.
You gave me an address that didn't seem to match the parcel.
You hid your house beneath enough trees to make aerial photography almost useless.
You left behind descriptions of a three-story tower without making a single photograph easy to find.
You somehow sent me through the Wayback Machine and all the way back to my own MySpace page.
But Anna...
I found your house.
And I have to admit...
It was worth every minute.
Because that thing was glorious.
And that's how a missing house, a mysterious turret, and one very determined late-night search helped inspire Corporate House Takeover.
A series dedicated to uncovering the stories of homes, businesses, neighborhoods, and forgotten places that have disappeared from our communities.
So now I want to know:
What homes or places from your childhood have disappeared?
Is there a house you remember that no longer stands? A family property that became part of a development? A business you wish you could see one more time?
Tell me about it.
You never know which forgotten place might become the next investigation.
Until the next historical rabbit hole...
Damn it, Anna Ritter.
Written and researched by Ashley Yoder | Homes With History — Corporate House Takeover