The Pabst Mansion

Captain Frederick Pabst built this Flemish Renaissance Revival mansion in 1892 and died in its music room in 1904. Since a nonprofit began restoring the house in 1978, staff and visitors have reported candelabras acting up on Pabst's birthday, a bearded figure matching his portraits watching renovation work, and the faint smell of cigars from his hidden humidor.

Staff were setting up candelabras for an event at the Pabst Mansion when the candles started popping out on their own. They'd place one, it would fly out and hit the floor. Replace it, same thing. According to Allison Jornlin, founder of Milwaukee Ghosts, the staff eventually noticed the date: it was Captain Frederick Pabst's birthday.

Pabst built this place in 1892, hiring architect George Bowman Ferry to design a Flemish Renaissance Revival mansion at 2000 West Wisconsin Avenue. The construction took two years. The interior split along gender lines typical of the era: a mahogany-paneled men's parlor, a white enamel ladies' parlor, and a music room where the Captain's funeral would be held twelve years later. He died in 1904. Maria Pabst followed in 1906.

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee bought the mansion in 1908 and housed five consecutive archbishops there for 67 years. When a nonprofit, Wisconsin Heritages Inc., acquired it in 1978 and began restoration, the reports started almost immediately. Doors would open and close on their own. A chandelier shook without wind or vibration, hard enough that a staff member walked over to check the mounting. Objects dropped off shelves in rooms where nobody had been for hours.

In the summer of 2010, volunteer Brenda Nemetz spent two months conducting a survey of staff, volunteers, and visitors. She collected accounts of every odd thing people had experienced in the house. The pattern was striking: people described the same phenomena in the same rooms, independently. One laborer working on renovations looked up from his project and saw a bearded man watching him work. The figure matched the portraits of Captain Pabst hanging throughout the mansion. A woman visiting the house felt a cold breeze wrap around her legs so intensely she couldn't move them.

The mansion's director of operations, Jocelyn Slocum, has a diplomatic take. "The staff of the Pabst Mansion don't think it's haunted," she told Spectrum News. "We like to say that it's always been a spirited house and it still is." The mansion runs "Illuminating the Dark" after-hours tours that explore unseen areas and the darker chapters of the Pabst family's history, though they stop short of calling it a ghost hunt.

Captain Pabst's study contains a cigar humidor hidden behind a secret latch. The room smells faintly of tobacco sometimes, though no one smokes in the building. It's a small detail, but it tracks with a man who built a beer empire, earned his pilot's license at 21, and married into the Best brewery family in 1862. He wasn't the type to leave quietly.

Ghost Hunters filmed at the mansion, drawn by the volume of reports. The NRHP listing came in 1975, three years before the nonprofit took over. The building is beautiful, a Gilded Age showpiece with original woodwork, ironwork, and stained glass. The ghost stories are secondary to the architecture for most visitors, which might be exactly how Captain Pabst would want it. He built the house to impress the living, not to haunt it.