Tippecanoe Place

A Woman in White descends the staircase fading below the knees. Clement Studebaker's office smells of cigar smoke. Maid Beatrice walks the halls.

A hostess at Tippecanoe Place was at the top of the grand staircase one night in the early 1990s when she watched a woman in a long white dress descend past her. The figure was solid from the waist up. Below the knees she simply wasn't there. She faded into nothing against the limestone steps. Another employee, one of the original restaurant managers, later said the same woman walked straight through him and kept going into what staff call the George and Ada suite, leaving the air behind her noticeably colder.

She's the Woman in White of Tippecanoe Place, the mansion's most-documented ghost, and nobody has been able to match her to a name. Historian Michael Kleen, who has written the most careful investigation of the haunting, points out that a lot of the folklore about the Studebaker family is wrong. The two children people say died in the mansion were from Clement's first marriage and died before the house was even built. Clement himself did not die by suicide. He died of natural causes in 1901 at the age of seventy. Whoever the Woman in White is, she isn't a Studebaker.

Clement Studebaker built the mansion between 1886 and 1889 on land he'd owned since 1868, hiring Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb to design a forty-room, four-story Richardsonian Romanesque pile of glacial boulders set in concrete with Indiana limestone trim. He named it Tippecanoe Place after William Henry Harrison's 1811 battle. A conical tower rises from the northeast corner, and a porte-cochere juts from the west side. Right after the mansion was finished, a fire gutted the interior and the Studebakers couldn't move in for another year. His son George stayed until 1933, when the Studebaker Corporation's collapse forced him out. E.M. Morris bought it in 1941 and donated it as a school for handicapped children. Continental Restaurant Systems restored it and opened the restaurant in 1980.

Clement seems to stick close to his old office. Staff have reported a sudden drop in temperature, the smell of cigar smoke in a no-smoking building, and framed pictures swinging on the walls as if something passed through. In May 2015, a father and son in the library watched a shadow move behind a leather chair while the cigar smell intensified and the lights dimmed. Employees have told diners they avoid the library alone. In 2007, multiple family members reported a woman in Victorian dress sitting at a second-floor window who vanished when they went to check. In 2017, a guest saw another Victorian-dressed woman walk into the ladies' restroom; the only other person inside said she had been alone the whole time. In 2011, a visitor standing in the foyer reported being shoved about a foot sideways with nobody near him.

A maid named Beatrice has been seen by staff, and loud noises come from the attic when nobody is up there. The most retold of the employee stories is the chair incident. A worker was closing the restaurant alone and had stacked chairs on the tables in one dining room. He walked down the hall to the bathroom. When he came back, every chair had been taken down and set neatly on the floor. No sound. No time for anyone to have done it.

Stephen Osborne's book South Bend Ghosts documents the haunting in detail, and the restaurant has never shied from its reputation. The exterior alone does most of the atmospheric work: dark glacial stone, heavy Romanesque arches, steep gables, the conical tower. Inside, Tippecanoe Place keeps turning out Woman in White sightings across four decades of staff, with nobody able to say who she was in life. Four decades is a long time for a ghost to keep showing up without a biography. The Studebakers left through the front door, their names attached to the suicide myth and the dead children who were never in the house. Whoever is descending the staircase with only half a body is wearing a white dress from a century nobody has traced yet.