In Brief
At the Conrad-Caldwell House in Louisville, Kentucky, the staff say the original owner never left. Theophilus Conrad died on his own back stairs in 1905, and visitors who wander off the tour report a man in a bowler hat shaking his finger at them.
The Full Story
At the Conrad-Caldwell House in Louisville, Kentucky, the staff say the man who built it still keeps an eye on the tour. Theophilus Conrad died on the back stairs of his own mansion in 1905, and by every account he stayed.
He doesn't say anything. Wander off the tour into a room you're not supposed to be in, and the story goes that a man appears in the doorway, gives you a stern look, and wags his finger, then disappears. Author David Domine, who wrote a book on the ghosts of Old Louisville, describes him plainly. "He sort of appears as a misty apparition and it takes the shape of a man with a goatee and a bowler hat," Domine says. "He just shows up and sternly looks at them and does this, as if to say, you shouldn't be doing this, and then he disappears." Visitors say it feels less frightening than parental, like getting caught by someone's dad.
It is the same man either way. Conrad was a French immigrant from Strasbourg who fled political unrest in 1853, trained in leather tanning, and built a fortune large enough to pay for the Richardsonian mansion of rusticated limestone the neighborhood nicknamed "Conrad's Castle." When he died, William Caldwell of Caldwell Tanks bought the place and lived there for about 35 years.
Conrad isn't the only one. In 1947 a Presbyterian church turned the house into a retirement home for widows, and three women from that era are said to remain in an upstairs sitting room. Move their furniture and they get a little upset, the staff say, opening doors and shifting objects back. There's perfume and the smell of flowers that drift through certain rooms with no source, attributed to Mrs. Caldwell, and cigar smoke in the library, attributed to her husband. A housekeeper alone in the house once heard a voice tell her to hurry and close a window because it was raining. She went upstairs and found the window open, the rain coming in, and no one there. Beth Caldwell, a great-granddaughter, says two balls of light flew past her during a tour.
Domine counts roughly six of them in the house. The staff have stopped pretending otherwise. "All of us have gotten into the habit of saying hello when we come in the morning," one director told a local news crew, "because we know we're not alone."
