Schenck Mansion

A Victorian ghost used to kiss sleeping male B&B guests. Kat Von D bought the mansion in 2020 and closed it to the public.

Male guests at the Schenck Mansion Bed and Breakfast used to wake up to something soft pressing against their cheek. It happened often enough that innkeeper Michelle Thompson built it into her pitch to visitors. "We do have friendly spirits, four or five," she told one interviewer. "One gets a little frisky with the guys." The frisky one was a Victorian woman in white who floated the second floor at night and occasionally leaned down to kiss a sleeping man on the face. The room was always empty when he opened his eyes.

Benjamin Franklin Schenck was a steamboat captain on the Ohio River, and in 1874 he hired Cincinnati architect George P. Humphries to build him a 12,000-square-foot Second Empire mansion in Vevay, Indiana. It cost $67,000. It has thirty-five rooms, a 74-foot four-story tower with a widow's watch crowned by three round dormers, a mansard roof, four porches, seven balconies, and eight chimneys. Schenck's wife Celestine and their two daughters, Justine and Eugenia, climbed the tower to watch his boat work the river below. Two years after the family moved in, Schenck died of tuberculosis. He barely got to live in the house he built.

Celestine and the daughters couldn't maintain the place on their own and it sat mostly vacant for decades. The mansion passed through a series of owners, got restored in 1998-2000, and reopened as the Benjamin Schenck Mansion Bed and Breakfast. During the B&B's run, staff and guests produced the documented haunting. A team of seven paranormal investigators spent a full day inside in 2011 and confirmed multiple distinct female presences. Owners across the B&B era identified at least four resident spirits: a young woman, a soldier, an elderly woman, and what guests recognized as members of the Schenck family. All of them read as curious rather than threatening.

The kissing ghost was the most specific incident type, but far from the only one. Guests described doors closing on their own, lights switching on in empty rooms, footsteps in halls nobody was walking, voices carrying through unoccupied rooms, music playing without a radio or instrument, and thermostats resetting themselves to temperatures nobody had dialed in. Thompson herself heard doors open and shut when she was the only person in the building.

In 2020, tattoo artist Kat Von D bought the Schenck Mansion for somewhere between $1.55 and $1.87 million and converted it back into a private residence. The B&B is closed. The public can no longer book a night to test the haunting. The Victorian woman who used to kiss sleeping men, the soldier, the elderly woman, and whatever member of the Schenck family has never left are all sealed behind a private front door now. Whether the thermostats have stopped doing whatever they want is somebody else's business to know.