The Pfeiffer House

Cigar smoke drifts through a 1905 Fort Wayne mansion where nobody's smoking. Fred Pfeiffer died in 1994 but his salt shakers still take walks.

Cigar smoke keeps showing up where nobody's smoking it. The Valentines noticed it the week they bought 434 West Wayne Street in 1996 and started gutting the place for a restaurant: a faint sweet tobacco smell, drifting through the dining room, then gone before anyone could source it. Fred Pfeiffer was a cigar man. He'd been dead two years.

Fred grew up in the house and lived there most of his life. His parents Charles and Henrietta built it in 1905, the year Charles helped found the German American Bank, which later became Lincoln Bank. Henrietta's people ran Eckart Meat Packing on the other side of downtown. Between the bank money and the meat money, the Pfeiffers were about as prominent as Fort Wayne got. Fred and his sister Marguerite inherited the place and he lived there until 1989, when he moved into assisted living. He died in 1994, and the cigar-smoke reports started almost as soon as the Valentines took the house over.

Clark Valentine bought the house two years after Fred's 1994 death, from the Pfeiffer heirs. By his own account, Clark wasn't the type to buy into ghost stories. Then the salt and pepper shakers started sliding to the center of the dining tables and dropping off the edge, with nobody sitting there. Doors slammed. The piano in the parlor played a single note, one time, with no one near the keys. Footsteps came down the stairs when the stairs were empty. Lights flipped on by themselves.

When Clark finally brought in paranormal investigators, they said they detected at least one spirit, possibly several. They claimed they got a response when they called out the name Fred. Their photographs came back with five distinct orbs in different rooms, which they read as five separate spirits sharing the place. The orb count is the weakest part of the story. Orbs photograph as orbs for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with ghosts. The cigar smoke is harder to explain away, because you can't accidentally catch sweet tobacco on a DSLR lens.

Wanda Lou Willis put the house in her 2002 book Haunted Hoosier Trails after sitting down with Clark in Fort Wayne and hearing the stories straight from him. The book turned the Pfeiffer House from a Valentine family oddity into one of the city's best-known haunts.

The building itself is worth the visit even without the ghost. It's a brick American foursquare on the corner of West Wayne and Fairfield, inside the West Central Historic District on the National Register. Original oak woodwork, original murals, original period lighting. An earlier family, Lindley and Beulah Ninde, supported the Underground Railroad and the women's suffrage movement from this address before the Pfeiffers ever moved in, which means the house has been owned by bankers, meat-packing heirs, and abolitionists inside of one century.

In 2008 the restaurant reopened as the Pfeiffer House and Wayne Street Soda Fountain, built around a restored 1930s Chicago soda fountain. You can sit at the counter, order a float, and watch a salt shaker decide to take a walk.