Bell Mansion

The Bell Mansion on Wayne Street was a funeral home for nearly a century. Now it books weddings in the same rooms where Fort Wayne mourned its dead.

You can get married at the Bell Mansion in the same room where Fort Wayne mourned its dead for nearly a century.

Robert Clark Bell was Civil War cavalry in the Eighth Indiana Regiment, a Michigan Law grad, a state senator from 1874 to 1886, and law partner to William H. Miller, who became U.S. Attorney General under Benjamin Harrison. His wife Clara Wolfe Bell helped found the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. In 1884 he hired the architecture firm Wing and Mahurin to build the family a mansion at 420 West Wayne Street, in heavy Richardsonian limestone with woodwork from Jacob Klett and Sons. Bell died in the house in 1901.

The second act is what made the place weird. Widow Bell sold in 1904 to William K. Nobel. In 1926, Nobel sold to William R. Klaehn, who converted the mansion into the Klaehn Funeral Home. The building operated as a funeral home under various family operators for roughly 92 years, closing in the late 2010s. A purpose-built ballroom addition went up on the west end in 1935 specifically to handle larger viewings. That's a lot of bodies to pass through a building. Belle Castle Enterprise bought it in 2020 and reopened it as an event venue in January 2022.

Nick Carboni runs the venue and also investigates paranormal. He doesn't hedge. He says he knows the building is haunted and has evidence to back it up. His co-manager Angie Sturm started out skeptical, then changed her mind after sitting through investigations and hearing voices call names in the dark. The Olde World Paranormal Society of Fort Wayne has run investigations inside the mansion and pulled spirit box responses, REM pod hits on the electromagnetic field, and visual anomalies on the cameras.

Guests report footsteps in the limestone hallways when the mansion is otherwise empty. Figures seen briefly in the former viewing rooms, especially near the west ballroom. The feeling of being watched in the upstairs hallways that got named, years ago, for the original Bell family.

The Bell Mansion books weddings, corporate events, yoga classes, and ghost hunts, often in the same week. It's the only venue in Fort Wayne where the bride and groom might be standing in the exact spot where a casket rested ninety years ago. Carboni promotes the haunting alongside the weddings. The yoga students don't usually ask.

If there are spirits here, they probably aren't Robert or Clara Bell. They're more likely the mourners nobody names, and the dead who passed through those doors on the way somewhere else.