The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The Bell Mansion, at 420 West Wayne Street, was built in 1893 for Robert and Clara Bell to designs of Wing & Mahurin. Robert Bell died in the house in 1901; the house passed to the Noble family, and then began the tenure that gives the present lore its substrate: for more than ninety years, until 2018, the mansion was Klaehn's funeral home. A preservation purchase followed in 2020, and the house reopened as an event venue. Its ghost tradition is the youngest in this section and the only one that can be dated to the decade of its telling: since 2020 the mansion's own operators and the paranormal directories have retailed shadows, disembodied voices, children's laughter in the halls and a woman in jeans on the stairs, and the house sells ghost hunts alongside its history tours. PBS Fort Wayne carried the mansion in its "Folklore Friday" feature of 11 October 2024.
The record should be stated as plainly as the Folklore chapter of this history states it: the funeral-home decades are documented; the hauntings are documented as tellings of the 2020s. No telling of a Bell Mansion ghost from the funeral-home years themselves has been located in print. The house is also a standing warning about the speed of the modern lore industry — one recent visitor guide manages to misdate the mansion's construction to 1884 while retailing its ghosts — but as a publishing fact the Bell Mansion matters: it is the first Fort Wayne haunt created entirely in the era of the commercial ghost economy, by a venue whose business includes the haunting.
Sources: the Folklore section of this history (the mansion's building, funeral-home and preservation record, and the directories' tellings); PBS Fort Wayne, "Folklore Friday," 11 October 2024; the Bell Mansion's own event listings.