READ MORE FROM OUR “HIDDEN MILWAUKEE” FEATURE HERE.
You don’t build a 37-room mansion without sneaking in a few secrets. The stately 1892 Pabst Mansion only housed its namesake beer-brewing family for 16 years, but painstaking restoration has kept much of their original design intact – the ornate woodwork and stained-glass windows, yes, but also its hidden nooks and crannies.
Tell us who you’d pick to be a Betty this year!
A tour will show you some of these smaller secrets. A nook under the stairs with a desk. A hidden-latch cigar humidor in Captain Pabst’s study. A pie safe – steel cabinets that protect treats from pests – makes sense in the butler’s pantry. Less so is a massive actual safe behind a door where you’d expect a walk-in pantry; the family would store money and jewels in its confines.
The bigger oddities are in the basement – not part of the main tour. Much of the lowest level is barrel-vaulted and made of stone. One room stores the carefully cataloged pieces of the mansion’s pavilion, dismantled for preservation in 2024. The pavilion was originally built for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and was relocated to the mansion a year later. “I don’t think [Pabst] was thinking longevity when he attached it,” Sweet says. The nonprofit plans to rebuild it in the future when it has the funds.
The basement also holds Pabst’s wine cellar. “[He] was actually a bigger wine drinker than a beer drinker,” says director of advancement Morgan Sweet. Wait, is that blood splattered on the door? Kind of. Sweet says the nonprofit ran a fundraising haunted house in the basement in the 1970s. Remnants include a radiation warning and a fake bloody handprint smeared on a window.
What about ghosts? “I’ve been here alone at night, and I’ve never experienced anything,” Sweet says. Take her word for it or see for yourself during the Pabst Mansion’s Illuminating the Dark tours, offered only in October.
