Actually seeing the Butler Mansion, Des Moines Landmark

Anyone who's travelled Fleur Drive south of downtown has almost certainly passed the driveway to the "landmark" Butler Mansion. While I've certainly passed by more than one hundred times, I'd never actually seen the mansion... until last Friday.

Now the home of The Integer Group, an Advertising/Agencies, Communications/Public Relations, Internet/Web Site Design business, the mansion took part in the 10th Annual Holly & Ivy Holiday Tour last December. They earned "special thanks to The Integer Group for its “Twelve Days of Christmas” theme throughout the seven-story Butler Mansion." Seven stories?!

The mansion apparently also has some permanent guests. The following story is taken from the Des Moines Business Record:

The first ghost sighting at the Butler Mansion occurred in early 1990, just months after Liz Newell and Jack Kragie bought the building to house their advertising and public relations agency, Kragie Newell Inc.

Newell remembers being told that a creative director for the firm was working late. She was alone in the building. She walked up the home's central ramp to Newell's office, which was located in the late Earl Butler's bedroom. As she was dropping off some materials on Newell's desk, she saw a hazy figure in the office's bathroom.

It appeared to be a woman, dressed in a bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her head as though she had just stepped from the shower. Thinking that it was Newell, the creative director quickly left the room. Newell wasn't anywhere near the office that night.

"She thought it was me, just getting out of the shower -- that's how real it was," Newell said. "That was the first one."

Several months later, a woman was dropping off her son at the mansion, which is located on Fleur Drive just south of Gray's Lake. He was an intern at Kragie Newell.

As he walked into the building, the mother noticed that a woman, again dressed in a bathrobe with a towel around her head, was looking at her through the window in the building's kitchen, which was located beneath Newell's office. The mother, who didn't work at the agency, had never heard the story about the first sighting....