Culbertson Mansion

Dr. Webb, Culbertson Mansion's best-known ghost, is fiction, a House of Anguish character that escaped into the lore. The cigar smoke is real.

There's a doctor haunting the Culbertson Mansion named Dr. Webb, and he appears to be fiction. Dr. Webb doesn't show up in the mansion's property records, doesn't appear in any Culbertson family genealogy, and treatments of the building from the 1970s through the early 2000s don't mention him. What he does show up in are the annual House of Anguish haunted attraction scripts, where he reads as the villain character a volunteer team cooked up to give the tour a through-line. Staff and volunteers interviewed in local press discuss him as a character rather than as a historical person. Somewhere along the way he escaped fiction, got picked up by ghost tour sites as real, and now floats through the internet as a verified ghost. That correction matters, because the rest of the Culbertson hauntings actually have a body of evidence behind them and don't need a made-up doctor propping them up.

Step inside the mansion and the reason people report things becomes easier to feel. Twenty-five rooms, twenty thousand square feet, French Second Empire construction completed in November 1869 for William S. Culbertson, who at that point was the richest man in Indiana. Hand-painted ceilings, marble fireplaces, crystal chandeliers, a tin roof imported from Scotland. Architect James T. Banes. The house sits at 914 East Main Street in New Albany and joined Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites in 1976. About 15,000 visitors come through each year, including busloads of Floyd County schoolkids.

Staff started keeping a written log of things they couldn't explain in 1977. Forty-plus years of entries, and the entry that shows up over and over is a sudden smell of cigar smoke in rooms where nobody is smoking and no one has smoked in decades. The smell is typically attributed to one of the Culbertson men, who was a known cigar smoker in life. It shows up in the library. It shows up on the main staircase. Then it's gone.

The story staff tell most often is about a police officer responding to a nighttime security alarm roughly fifteen to twenty years ago. He walked the building with the curator, then asked if they were going to bring "her" out. He'd seen a woman inside. The curator told him they were the only two people in the mansion. The officer left, and the retellings across local news all match up on the same punchline: he never took another call at the address.

The carriage house behind the main mansion is the other hotspot. Ghost tour sites say it burned down in 1888 after a lightning strike killed servants trapped inside, but that specific incident doesn't appear in the mansion's historical record anywhere easy to find, so take it as tour lore rather than confirmed history. What is documented: staff and volunteers regularly report electrical problems in the carriage house, figures moving between rooms, objects vanishing and turning up elsewhere. Several volunteers have refused to work in that building at all.

The annual House of Anguish haunted attraction is now in its fourth decade and has raised over a million dollars for the mansion's restoration. Dr. Webb came from there. The attraction runs every October. The mansion itself is open for tours Wednesday through Sunday the rest of the year.

Jessica Stavros, Southeast Regional Director for the Indiana State Museum, is the person most often asked whether the place is haunted. Her standard response is to ask the visitor whether they believe in ghosts. She doesn't commit either way. It's the right posture for someone running a state historic site that people keep reporting things in.

The ghost stories that hold up here are the cigar smoke and the cop. The ones that don't hold up, you can still get a t-shirt for in October.