In Brief
At the Schenck Mansion in Vevay, Indiana, men sleeping alone kept waking to a soft kiss on the cheek and a Victorian woman in white standing over the bed. The room was always empty by the time they opened their eyes.
The Full Story
At the Schenck Mansion in Vevay, Indiana, the men who slept there alone kept waking up the same way: a soft kiss on the cheek, in the dark, with no one in the room. When they opened their eyes a woman in a white Victorian dress was sometimes there for a moment, standing over the bed, and then the room was empty again.
The innkeeper, Michelle Thompson, didn't hide it. She built it into the pitch. "We do have friendly spirits, four or five," she told a visiting TV crew. "One gets a little frisky with the guys. She likes to kiss them." The Lady in White, the guests called her. She walked the second-floor hallway at night and took no notice of anyone, except the sleeping men. She'd lean down, kiss one on the cheek, and be gone before he was fully awake.
The house she walks is a 35-room Second Empire pile, over 12,000 square feet, built in 1874 for Benjamin Franklin Schenck, son of a steamboat-era hay merchant. He had a four-story tower put up so his wife and daughters could watch his steamboat come and go on the Ohio River. He barely lived under it. His health failed, he went to Florida, and he died there in 1877 at 42, after about two summers in the finished house. His wife Celestine stayed on and off until her own death in 1885. The family handed the place to the Indiana Baptist Convention in 1923, and it passed through other hands before Jerry and Lisa Fisher bought it in 1998 and reopened it as a bed and breakfast.
By then the woman in white was already part of the house. So was the rest of it. Guests and owners reported disembodied voices, footsteps in empty halls, lights that flickered, and sounds that didn't come from anywhere. The owners counted several spirits, never a fixed number, and described all of them the same way. "They're all very kind and very nice," co-owner Lisa Fisher said. "They've never actually intentionally scared, or tried to scare, a guest." Thompson said one had a habit of turning the thermostat down, and that she heard doors open and shut when she was the only person in the house. In 2011, a group of seven paranormal investigators spent time inside and said they came away with at least two female ghosts.
The mansion isn't a bed and breakfast anymore. Kat Von D bought it in December 2020 and turned it back into a private home, so no one books a room now and no one wakes to anything. Whoever was kissing the guests still has the second floor to herself.
