Pettigrew Home & Museum

The house at the corner of Duluth Avenue in Sioux Falls was built in 1889 for the attorney Thomas McMartin and his wife Jenny. It is a two-and-a-half-story Queen Anne in red brick and the pink Sioux quartzite that is the signature stone of the city, and it stands in what is now the Cathedral Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. In 1911 it was bought for $12,000 by Richard F. Pettigrew, a Dakota Territory legislator and one of South Dakota’s first United States senators, a reformer who championed farmers, working people and women’s rights.

Pettigrew was also a lifelong collector. He filled the house with objects from his travels and digs – Native American artifacts, firearms, curios such as a jar of water from the River Jordan and a cane that had belonged to Queen Liliʻuokalani – and began opening the collection to the public in 1925. He died in the house in 1926 and left both the property and the collection to the city of Sioux Falls on condition that they be maintained. The city expanded the building in 1934, and it still operates as a free museum under the Siouxland Heritage Museums, with Pettigrew’s papers, once stored in the attic, held as a research collection.

The ghost stories come mostly from the people who work in the building. In a 2012 report for South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Kevin Gansz, who helps manage the museum, described a heavier mood on the second floor, a strong smell of perfume that he once noticed while cleaning Mrs. Pettigrew’s bedroom, and an uneasy feeling when he was alone in the house. He suggested the presence might be Pettigrew’s second wife or Jenny McMartin, and said his own research showed that the McMartins had lost a child in the home. Later local reporting repeats the perfume, a woman said to be the first owner’s wife and a child seen on the stairs.

These are impressions rather than documented events, and the museum’s own pages concentrate on Pettigrew’s career and collection. The house has hosted an interactive murder-mystery evening, and its mix of a grand family home, a bereaved first household and a museum full of other people’s belongings makes it a natural subject for local ghost lore.

A heavy atmosphere on the second floor, the smell of perfume in a bedroom, uneasy feelings when alone, and a woman or child said to be seen on the stairs.

The second floor, Mrs. Pettigrew’s former bedroom and the main staircase.

The house has hosted interactive murder-mystery evenings, and local media regularly include it in roundups of Sioux Falls hauntings. Senator Pettigrew’s own life, as a reformer and collector, is the museum’s main story.