DuPont Mansion Bed and Breakfast

Alfred Victor du Pont was shot by his mistress Maggie Payne in 1893. His ghost still smokes cigars in the Louisville B&B his family built in 1879.

Alfred Victor du Pont was shot to death by his mistress Maggie Payne in Louisville on May 16, 1893. The official story blamed apoplexy, and it took a Cincinnati newspaper to out the truth. Guests at the DuPont Mansion Bed and Breakfast keep running into his ghost.

The mansion sits in Old Louisville, a Victorian neighborhood author David Domine has argued is the most haunted in America. It was built around 1879 by Alfred and his brother Biderman du Pont, the Delaware branch of the family sent to run the Louisville end of the powder and gunpowder business. It's a three-story Italianate-Renaissance palace with ornate woodwork and a main staircase wide enough for a hooped dress, and for most of its first decades it belonged to one of the wealthiest industrial dynasties in the country.

Alfred was sixty when Payne shot him. Both he and his nephew Coleman were regulars at her brothel. Louisville's main paper ran a fictitious version of the death along with pages of praise; the Cincinnati Enquirer printed the real one. He was buried, the family closed ranks, and within a few years his brother moved back to Delaware. In the haunted-Louisville literature he goes by "Uncle Fred" or "Uncle Vic" depending on the source.

The cigar smoke is the most common report. "We have had guests who have felt presence," co-owner Gayle Walters Warren told KET's Haunted Louisville series. "They have smelled cigar smoke that would come late at night in their room." The smell shows up in rooms where nobody has been smoking. It drifts down hallways. Visitors walking along Central Park a block away have caught it too, which is a reach as ghost stories go but is in the literature enough to count.

The mansion also has a specific thing with women. Female guests have reported the sensation of hands, or a single hand, touching them on the stairs or in the hallways. One interior decorator working on the restoration was coming down the main staircase when she felt someone next to her and then felt hot breath blown into her ear. She was alone. Other women have described the same hot-breath experience, always in empty rooms, always without anyone nearby.

Objects move. Footsteps travel through empty floors. A well-dressed man in a frock coat has been spotted near the property and occasionally on the staircase, where he vanishes. Most ghost stories about wealthy Victorians converge on one or two of these tropes; Uncle Fred gets all of them.

The Warrens bought the house in 2000, restored it, and won the Louisville Historical League's Historic Preservation Award in 2002 for the work. Activity picked up during the renovation, the Warrens say, which is what always happens during renovations. The B&B now sells a package that bundles a room with an autographed copy of Domine's "Ghosts of Old Louisville" and a ticket to the neighborhood ghost walk.

Most haunted-hotel stories are built around a vague figure and some footsteps. This one has a named victim, a named killer, a date, a cover-up, and a century and a half of guests reporting the same cigar smoke.