The Victorian Lady of the Pfeiffer House in Delphi

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 8, 2026 · How we verify

Antique stores tend to accumulate stories the way they accumulate furniture, and the Pfeiffer House in Delphi, Indiana has more than most. The building dates to 1866, was raised as a Victorian family home, and now trades in vintage furniture, jewelry and glassware. Shoppers come for the inventory. A steady number of them leave talking about footsteps on empty floors and a woman in old-fashioned dress at the windows.

Getting Your Bearings at the Delphi Antique Store

• Where: Delphi, Indiana
• Built: 1866, originally as a Victorian residence
• Now: an antique store, with stock spread between the main house and an adjacent barn
• Earlier use: a restaurant, before the antique business took over
• The claim: a Victorian-dressed woman seen at the windows and on the grounds, plus footsteps, whispers and cold spots inside

An 1866 House That Kept Changing Jobs

The construction date is the firmest thing about the building’s history. Everything after that is a sequence of reinventions. What began as a private Victorian home in the years just after the Civil War later became a restaurant, and later still the antique store it is today. Each change stripped out one set of fittings and installed another, which is worth remembering when people describe the place as untouched by time. It is old, but it has been worked over repeatedly.

One frequently repeated detail deserves a flag. Local accounts hold that the property served as a stagecoach stop at some point in the 1800s. That claim circulates widely in Delphi and turns up in most retellings of the house’s story, but it belongs to local lore rather than to anything documented in the retellings themselves. Anyone who wants to settle it would do better in the town’s archives than in a ghost story. It may well be true. It has simply not been demonstrated in the sources that repeat it.

The Woman at the Windows

The best known figure associated with the property is a woman in Victorian dress. Visitors describe seeing her through the windows from outside, or catching sight of her moving across the grounds. The usual interpretation offered locally is that she was a former resident who never quite left the house she loved, and some tellings identify her with Mrs. Pfeiffer, the family matriarch, still keeping an eye on the place.

That identification is an interpretation layered onto a sighting, not a fact established by any record. No account gives a date for a first appearance, and nobody is named as a witness. What survives is the shape of the story, retold often enough that it now travels with the address.

Footsteps, Whispers and the Case for the Boring Explanation

Inside, the reports are more ordinary and more common: footsteps with nobody walking, whispers with nobody speaking, and the sense of a presence in a room that is plainly empty. These are the standard complaints of any large timber building in its second century, and skeptics in Delphi say so directly, pointing to the age of the structure and its odd acoustics. A house that has been a home, a restaurant and a shop has been remodeled enough times to produce a peculiar sound map, and a store full of hard surfaces and old wood is a good place to hear things that turn out to be the building settling or another customer two rooms away.

None of the reported phenomena here has been verified. What can be said honestly is that enough people have described the same handful of experiences, footsteps, voices, a cold presence, a figure at the glass, that the reputation has stuck.

Browsing the Pfeiffer House Yourself

This is one of the easier haunted sites in Indiana to visit, because it is a working business rather than a ruin or a private residence. The antique stock runs to vintage furniture, jewelry and glassware, and it is worth knowing that it is not all under one roof: the barn beside the house holds more of it, so anyone who only walks the main building is seeing half the collection. Go during trading hours, treat it as a shop first and a ghost story second, and do the courtesy of buying something. Visitors interested in whether the stagecoach tradition holds up will find the local archives in Delphi a more productive stop than the sales floor.

Sources

• What Lies Beneath
• What Lies Beneath (2000)
• What Lies Beneath Director
• What Lies Beneath (2000), Production Notes
• Clark Gregg
• Wikipedia: What Lies Beneath

Ghost Tours Nearby

Wicked Wraiths of White River: Indianapolis Ghost Tour★ 4.1 (114)from $26The Ghosts of Indianapolis Tour Family Friendly Haunted History★ 4.5 (2)from $30Indianapolis Adults Only Ghost and True Crime Tourfrom $35

Affiliate links: BeyondHaunted may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

More Haunted Houses

House Of Blue Lights IndianapolisIndiana State HouseHannah HouseWolf MansionCherry Hill Murder AlbanyFerry Plantation House