The Hacienda — The Brewer's House at 706 Lincolnway West

706 Lincolnway West · the house of 1853 · the lore from 1992

The house: the mansion in the Kamm & Schellinger brewery complex at 100 Center Street — the brewery John Wagner built in 1853, bought in 1870 by Adolph Kamm and Clemens Dick, incorporated in 1883 with Adolph Kamm president, and run by the Kamm and Schellinger families until beer production ended in 1951. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 11 October 1979 and converted as 100 Center; in 1978 the brewer's residence at 706 Lincolnway West became the first Hacienda Mexican Restaurant, the founding house of the chain, and it is a restaurant still. The house's documented course — the brewery, the families, the conversion, the restaurant — stands whole in the Businesses and Food sections of this history. No death in the house stands anywhere in that record, and the point matters enough to this entry to be stated here, before the tellings: the documented deaths the record attaches to this ground belong to the works, not the house, and the one the check below names is a fall from the brewery tower.

The first telling — the brewer himself, 1992: the earliest telling this section could reach is a newspaper's. The South Bend Tribune of 29 October 1992 reported the haunting as the restaurant's employees told it: they had seen a ghost in the house, "in either blue overalls or a Civil War Union suit," and they believed it was Adolph Kamm, the founder of the Kamm and Schellinger Brewing Company — the brewer walking his own house in work clothes, a proprietor's ghost, checking the plant. The 1992 report is carried here through the Tribune's own later telling of it, the paper's 1999 "Michiana Roots" column on researching haunted houses, which cites the date and the detail and frames the whole matter in one sentence: "Many Michiana residents think the Hacienda Restaurant on Lincoln Way West is haunted." The brewer-ghost is the tale's original form, and it is the only form of the tale that names a person who demonstrably lived in the house.

The second telling — the witnesses of the index: the Shadowlands Haunted Places Index, the oldest of the standing compilations, carries exactly two Mishawaka entries, and both are this house. The first, filed under "100 Center," gives the maid's story (below). The second, filed under the restaurant's name, is a first-person staff account, undated in the index: workers claim to hear whispers and see apparitions throughout the old house; the restaurant's office then stood upstairs, by the attic, and a manager closing up would turn off the office light and set the alarm, walk away, and look back to find the light on again — so, the account says, she unscrewed the bulb and laid it in the middle of the floor, walked away, and looked back to find the light on again anyway; "well needless to say that room is now closed off." Others, the same entry reports, would be alone in the bathroom and have the lights go off and on and the water come on by itself. This is the fullest witness-level telling the compilations hold for any Mishawaka address: named roles if not named people, a specific room, a specific remedy attempted and defeated.

The third telling — the maid: in the tale's modern compilation form the brewer gives way to a romance. As the haunted-place directories and roundups now tell it — hauntedplaces.org, whose Mishawaka list gives this restaurant as the one entry inside the city; the HowStuffWorks haunted-Indiana survey; the Halloween-season station roundups — the house is haunted by a maid: she had an affair with the mansion's owner, became pregnant, was shunned by him, and hanged herself in the attic; the owner's spirit is said to manifest in the basement, where he is believed to have taken his own life — in the fuller directory form, to have shot himself. Lights, water and appliances turn on and off on their own. The tourism version, in Visit South Bend Mishawaka's October 2025 "Stranger Things" roundup, with its information provided by The History Museum, tells it one degree softer: a maid employed by the home's owner "perished in an upstairs room," strange occurrences followed, and the manifestations continued under the restaurant, the lights and the bathroom faucets named. The bureau's page also links a broadcast visit, the Around The Bend episode on the restaurant, in which the visitors "learned about more spirits than expected." Between 1992 and the compilations, then, the ghost changed sex, story and floor of the house: the tale grew by accretion, each carrier keeping the address and replacing the dead.

The named witness of the modern record: the Enterprise rental company's "Pursuits" investigation of haunted Indiana, a first-person back-roads feature read for this section, stopped at the flagship restaurant and interviewed a working employee: Christopher Hein, a host and busser who had worked at the restaurant three months and whose duties took him to the basement, which he called the most haunted area in the building. "One night I heard a man's voice, a mumble. I couldn't quite make out what he said, but I was creeped out, disturbed. I always feel a presence when I go down there. You can always feel the presence of footsteps. Sometimes you can even feel it pass like wind, even though the basement is completely still." The feature's own verdict on the haunting's weight is a business fact: the reported ghosts do not keep customers away — there was a thirty-minute wait on the Wednesday evening the writer investigated. The chain's own website, as the 2023 station roundup notes, has acknowledged the house is "said to be haunted." The claim attached to this operating business is printed here as what it is — a documented claim with tellers and dates, one line of the house's modern course — and nothing in this entry promotes it.

The record beside the tale: the checkable parts have been checked, on the record, by the region's own broadcaster and by the cemetery transcription. WSBT reported that there is no evidence of anyone dying in the house. The one death the report names on the brewery ground is of a different kind and place — a young man who, while the brewery was still operating, fell to his death from the brewery tower: a documented industrial accident at the works, not a death in the mansion. Of the compilation tale's two deaths, neither survives the record at all. No maid, no pregnancy and no attic hanging stand in the house's record in any source reached. And the owner who is said to have shot himself in the basement has a documented end of another kind entirely: Adolph Kamm — the only owner the 1992 telling names, and the brewer whose house this was — died in Mishawaka on 16 December 1930, aged eighty-eight, and lies in St. Joseph Cemetery, where the Kamm family plot stands and where the city's historian now interprets the family on his cemetery tours. A man who dies at eighty-eight, thirty years after selling nothing and forty-eight years before the restaurant opened, is a poor fit for the basement of the tale; the tale, it should be noted, never names him — the nameless "owner" of the compilations is precisely the part of the story that cannot be checked against a person, because it declines to be one. The house itself is documented without any of it: built in 1853 in the brewery complex, the brewer's residence, the complex National Register-listed in 1979, the restaurant founded in 1978. The tale is printed here whole, in all its layers, because it is the city's one standing ghost story at an address; the record beside it is printed whole because that is this section's discipline.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, 29 October 1992 — the employees' ghost "in either blue overalls or a Civil War Union suit," believed to be Adolph Kamm; as cited and quoted in the Tribune's "Michiana Roots" column (1999) on researching haunted houses, indexed in the ProQuest newspaper file.
2. The Shadowlands Haunted Places Index — Indiana (theshadowlands.net), read November 2026 — the index's two Mishawaka entries, both this house: the "100 Center" entry (the maid) and the "Hacienda Restaurant" entry (the manager's light-bulb account, the bathroom lights and water), undated in the index.
3. Haunted Places (hauntedplaces.org), Mishawaka, Indiana — the Hacienda as the list's one in-city entry: the maid, the affair, the pregnancy, the attic hanging, the owner's suicide in the basement; and HowStuffWorks, "Exploring Haunted Indiana" — the same form.
4. Visit South Bend Mishawaka, "Stranger Things in South Bend | Haunted Stories & Local Legends" (30 October 2025), information and stories provided by The History Museum — the maid who "perished in an upstairs room," the lights and faucets; the linked Around The Bend Hacienda episode.
5. Enterprise, "Haunted Houses & Hotels in Indiana" ("Pursuits" feature, undated in the copy reached; read November 2026) — the employee Christopher Hein's basement account, in his own words; the thirty-minute Wednesday wait.
6. WSBT reporting, as carried in the 19 September 2023 haunted-places roundup (newstalk1280.com) — no evidence of anyone dying in the house; the brewery-tower fall as the documented death on the ground; the chain's website acknowledging the house is "said to be haunted."
7. St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery, Mishawaka — the INGenWeb transcription of the cemetery (walked and photographed by Janet Mickelson and contributors) — Kamm, Adolph, Sr.: died at Mishawaka 16 December 1930, buried in St. Joseph Cemetery; and Today's Catholic, "Faithful spirits" (13 August 2020) — the Kamm family among the families interpreted on De Kever's St. Joseph Cemetery tours.
8. This history, Businesses and Food sections — Adolph Kamm (born 13 June 1842, Zöbingen), the 1853 brewery complex at 100 Center Street, the 1883 incorporation, beer's end in 1951, the National Register listing of 11 October 1979, the Hacienda founding of 1978 at 706 Lincolnway West.