In Brief
The Reitz Home Museum in Evansville, Indiana is one of the town's oldest houses, and the local magazine says plainly that nobody has died here and nobody has reported a ghost. Then every October, the mansion becomes the centerpiece of a ghost walk built around spirits it doesn't actually have.
The Full Story
The Reitz Home Museum in Evansville, Indiana is a haunted house with a problem: there's no record of anything haunting it. The local magazine that covers the place says it straight. There have been no tragic deaths in the residence, and no reports of the home hiding ghostly residents. The most it will offer is that "an occasional bump in the night or shadow in the corner may make you wonder." A maybe is the whole sighting record.
The house itself is real enough. Lumber baron John Augustus Reitz, a Prussian immigrant who ran the local mill and the First National Bank, built the mansion in 1871 at 224 SE First Street, in what's now the Riverside Historic District. He lived there with his wife and eight of his ten children until he died in 1891. His son Francis redid the entire interior in mixed Victorian styles around 1898, which is why it reads so ornate: silk damask on the walls, hand-painted ceilings, parquet floors laid by hand, French gilt chandeliers. The family held the place into the early 1930s. After that it passed to the Daughters of Isabella, became a bishop's residence in 1944, and finally opened to the public as a museum around 1974.
So where do the ghosts come from? October, mostly. The Reitz Home is a central stop on the Haunted Historic Evansville ghost walks, a roughly 75-minute walking show through the district where Evansville Civic Theatre actors play out spirit appearances by real Reitz-era figures. One of them is Edward Reitz, the youngest son, who was 8 when the family moved in. He grew up, settled in the Utah Territory, bought a hardware company, and drowned in the Green River in 1892 while prospecting. He didn't die in the house. He's just played walking through it, alongside writer Annie Fellows Johnston and a Major Albert Rozencranz, all of them performed, none of them seen.
The closest the place ever came to a real investigation was June 29, 2013, when the Interstate Paranormal Investigations Team spent a night inside one of Evansville's oldest houses with cameras, microphones, and a central control station, hunting the former residents. "If there's the past, people that used to live here," investigator Leslie Eyre said, "if they still haunt the place or if they have passed on." Whatever they found was never released to the public.
So the haunting is borrowed. Once a year, a preserved family home gets dressed as a ghost story it never earned, and then the costumes come off and the bumps in the night go back to being a maybe.
