In Brief
At the DuPont Mansion Bed and Breakfast in Old Louisville, guests keep smelling cigar smoke in a house where no one smokes. They say it's Alfred du Pont, a gunpowder heir shot through the chest in 1893 by the brothel madam carrying his child.
The Full Story
At the DuPont Mansion Bed and Breakfast in Old Louisville, Kentucky, guests keep waking to the smell of cigar smoke in a house where no one is allowed to light one. The owners run a nonsmoking inn. The smoke comes anyway, late at night, in occupied rooms.
It started before they opened. During a 1998 restoration, a workman looked up and saw a man standing at the bottom of the main staircase, dressed in old-fashioned formal attire. He was fully formed, solid as anyone. There was a bloodstain on his chest, and under it, a bullet hole.
The story goes that he is Alfred Victor du Pont, of the Delaware gunpowder dynasty. His brother and he came to Louisville from Delaware to run the family's paper and gunpowder business, and their country estate became the city's Central Park, a block away from the house. The three-story Italianate mansion went up in the late 1870s, all hand-carved marble fireplaces and ten-foot doors. Alfred died on May 16, 1893, around 60 years old. The family said it was apoplexy. The Louisville paper printed that, plus pages of praise.
The Cincinnati Enquirer printed the truth. Alfred had been shot in the chest by Maggie Payne, a madam who ran the most expensive brothel in town and was pregnant with his child. They had quarreled over it. The official version moved the shooting to the porch of the hotel where he lived; the real one happened at her house. A sixty-year-old gunpowder heir, killed by the woman carrying his child, and the family had the influence to bury all of it under a heart attack.
The man on the stairs is the wound that killed him, walking. He turns up in old-fashioned formal dress, descends the main staircase, and disappears at the bottom step, the way the workman saw him. An interior decorator working the restoration felt hot breath blown into her ear on that same staircase, then watched a tall man in formal dress walk down the steps ahead of her and vanish. An unseen hand grabbed her. The breath and the touch get reported almost entirely by women.
"We have had guests who have felt presence," co-owner Gayle Walters Warren told Kentucky public television. "They have smelled cigar smoke that would come late at night in their room. And no one smokes. The story goes that it is indeed Mr. DuPont."
Over in Central Park, on the grass that used to be his front lawn, people report a well-dressed man sitting under the trees in the evening, enjoying a cigar.
