Royally Entertaining

They may not be royalty, but Tamara Finocchiaro and her mother, M.J. Page, live in Pythian Castle.

Finocchiaro and Page, former professional kitchen and bathroom designers, left Los Angeles for Springfield after purchasing Pythian Castle in June 2003.

“I’d made a slight joke with my mother that I thought our next project should be a castle. Didn’t really think we’d find one,” Finocchiaro said. She noted that she wasn’t really interested in moving to Europe, so after some searching, her mother found Pythian Castle in the Ozarks.

“So I came out here and wandered through it for about a half hour and decided (it was) perfect,” Finocchiaro said.

Page and Finocchiaro declined to share the purchase price for the castle, which was started in 1908 and dedicated in 1914, but Finocchiaro said she’s heard inaccurate rumors floating around that they purchased it for $4,000, the amount its previous owner paid.

Varied history

Completed in 1914 as an orphanage by the Knights of Pythias and later owned by the U.S. military for more than 50 years, Pythian Castle has more than 40,000 square feet and about 55 rooms.

Renovations are complete in the castle’s most popular rooms – the 2,500-square-foot ballroom and a theater of the same size directly above it.

“It’s the oldest movie theater in Springfield, and it has a stage, too,” Finocchiaro said. “It’s a 15-foot-by-17-foot stage so it’s not as big as a real stage, but it’s good enough for bands or presentations.”

Special events

These days Pythian Castle sets the stage for special events, including dinner theater productions, weddings and tours.

Actor Tonya Cunningham, local representative for St. Louis-based Upstage Productions, has used the ballroom and the theater for the murder mystery dinner theater held every other month. The castle is a perfect setting, she said.

“It has a lot of character,” Cunningham said. “It’s always good to have a place with a little history. An old castle, you can’t beat that.”

The murder mysteries are held as private events or are open to the public, and generally last three hours.

Outside caterers are used for events, as the kitchen has not yet been renovated.

In addition to murder mysteries, Page and Finocchiaro offer tours of the facility, and it’s available for private events.

“We have a lot of weddings here in addition to corporate parties and seminars,” Finocchiaro said, adding that more than 50 couples have been married there since the duo has owned the castle.

Rental prices vary according to the day of the week and time of year. “Right now up until August, the ballroom rents for $950 for seven hours on a Saturday,” Finocchiaro said. She declined to disclose revenues for Pythian Castle.

Finocchiaro and Page have done the majority of renovations on their own.

“We just do one room at a time,” Finocchiaro said, estimating that she and her mother have spent at least $250,000 on improvements.

“Every room had to be patched and painted and carpeted. Some rooms aren’t finished. The major stuff was in good shape – the building itself, the plumbing and electrical. It was a lot of cosmetic work, but it’s big, so it takes a lot of time to do,” she said.

Invisible guests

Participants in murder mysteries, tours and weddings aren’t the only guests at Pythian Castle.

“I’ve heard them. I’ve bumped into them. We’ve got them on film, and they wake me up at night,” Finocchiaro said of the ghosts that allegedly haunt the castle. “Fortunately, they like us. They try to tell me things they think I should know. They tend to be protective of us, probably because they sense that we care about the castle.”

Three ghost hunters have told Finocchiaro there are three ghosts following her around the castle all the time.

“The ghosts sometimes are a bit distracting,” Finocchiaro said. “People get caught up in the ghosts, and I can’t promise the ghosts will come out. They have their moods.”

Future plans

Finocchiaro isn’t sure about long-term plans.

“We have a tendency to create a vision and once it’s done, we get bored,” she said. “I could see myself doing this for years because there’s so much to do here, but I can also see myself finding a new project.”

Finocchiaro is a professional dancer, and she said she’d like to add a circus dinner theater by the end of the year.

“The castle is equipped with circus apparatus. I climb fabric and do circus stunt work. A very adult circus dinner theater, which means no clowns or animals or cotton candy – the acrobatic stuff,” she said.

Renovations may include turning five of the bedrooms into a bed and breakfast, and they’d like to add more events to the calendar. But, overall, the castle is shaping up to Page and Finocchiaro’s vision.

“Sometimes you have to go back to what you are naturally,” Finocchiaro said. “What are your natural skills and abilities? When you’re an adult, sometimes you think you can’t do those things, and you have to get a briefcase and go to the office. But, really, why do you ever have to stop dancing?”