I finished this short book yesterday. The author is from Ohio, but I'm from Indiana. This is my two cents and experiences with Haunted Indiana: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Hoosier State.
The first section is called South Bend and Northern Indiana, which is where I'm from. The very first story is about Bremen, a very small town which can be most easily reached by going next door to South Bend - to Mishawaka - and then heading directly south on the highway. I've only been to Bremen a few times and know little about it, but apparently when teens go legend tripping, they go to Ewald Cemetery, reach through the high fence, and try to throw coins onto the graves of children, hoping to hear the ghostly voice of a child on whose grave a coin lands.
Now, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any actual living person has heard such a ghostly voice. That's the main drawback to this collection: the tales may be creepy, but they're basically only creepy rumors with nothing substantial to back them up.
The third story in the collection is about a circus train that originated in Peru, Indiana, which during the 20th century billed itself as the Circus Capital of the World. There's still a circus museum there, but I've never visited it. (Peru is also the hometown of Cole Porter.) In 1918, the circus train from Peru got into a terrible crash with another train in Hammond, Indiana. Hammond is a stop along the South Shore train and is located in Lake County, technically the only part of Indiana that counts as Greater Chicagoland.
It's the site of the crash that's said to be haunted. People report hearing the disembodied sounds of people and animals in distress as they would have been after the horrific crash of the wooden train cars and the fire that followed. (Wooden train cars were lit with kerosene lamps in the 1910s; that's just asking for trouble.) I've read this story before, although I can't exactly remember where. Maybe Wikipedia, maybe a magazine article about Chicago hauntings, since the bodies of the unfortunate victims of the circus train crash were buried on the other side of the Illinois border.
Next comes the ghost story nearest and dearest to my heart, the one about the old Gipper. Unless you're from South Bend or a Notre Dame alumnus, you may not be familiar with the story of turn-of-the-20th century college football star George Gipp, who died tragically young from a terrible case of pneumonia. If you're old enough to remember former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, you might know that Reagan played Gipp in the movie Knute Rockne, All American. If you've heard of Rockne, you probably know he was Notre Dame's coach in the late 1910s and early 1920s.
George Gipp is buried in his native Michigan, but an often-told legend around the Notre Dame campus is that Gipp's ghost haunts the old theater building, Washington Hall. Washington Hall is the place where I watched Richard III, but larger productions are now staged at the theater hall Regis Philbin donated to the Notre Dame campus about 10 years ago. I've been to Washington Hall many times, and although I've seen the bat that lives there, I've never seen George Gipp's ghost.
From Notre Dame, the book skips to Merrillville and then to Lake County's Gary, both of which are said to have vanishing hitchhikers of the kind one might read about in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The next ghosts occupy a cemetery in Crown Point, a pretty little Lake County town you'll glimpse in the Christian Bale movie Public Enemies. Its jail once held the notorious Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger.
Dillinger is buried in Indianapolis (his hometown), but Dillinger-related hauntings don't merit a mention in Haunted Indiana. He's sometimes said to haunt a building he once robbed in South Bend, a building that longtime SB residents will know as the Dainty Maid bakery building. One of my cousins used to work as a baker there, but she never saw the ghost.
Nor is there any mention of Posey Chapel, where my sister-in-law was once menaced by some of kind of spirit as a Ouija board-wielding teen. Skipped, too, is Mishawaka's haunted house, now a Hacienda Mexican restaurant (part of a local chain) but once a home belonging to the Kamm family, whose former brewery is only a few yards away. The former Kamm house is said to be haunted by the spirit of a servant who killed herself over an ill-fated affair with a Kamm heir.
Mention IS made of Mishawaka's tiny eastern neighbor Osceola. A house there is said to have been troubled by a poltergeist. The paranormal activity begin and ended, once and for all, in 1966. If you get a chance to visit Osceola, do so not for its alleged poltergeist, but for Ferrettie-Baugo Creek County Park. Baugo Creek is very pretty place to go for a peaceful canoe ride on a hot summer day.
Ghosts of Indianapolis
If I wanted to get haunted in my current home of Indianapolis, where would I go? The two most likely candidates, according to this book, are the Slippery Noodle Inn and the campus of Marian University. The Slippery Noodle claims to be the oldest continually-operating bar in Indiana. Located near Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, it's tremendously popular on the days of Colts home games. I'm ashamed to say I've never been there, even though I was within walking distance when I lived downtown.
It's said that barware at the Slippery Noodle will sometimes be moved around by ghostly hands, but for your best chance to spot a ghost, you have to go to the second floor. That's where the old bordello was. The ghosts of sex workers are said to prefer female visitors and may occasionally slap a man who wanders into their territory.
Marian University has two mansions on its campus that are said to be haunted. One is the current Admissions building, which used to be the private home of Frank Wheeler. Wheeler shot himself to death with a shotgun inside the home, but the most commonly reported haunting there is a phantom carriage that pulls up into the porte cochere. A phantom woman gets out of the carriage, heads toward the house, and disappears. Marian's other haunted house is Riverdale, the former home of James Allison, one of the founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Allison is said to occasionally rearrange the books in his former private library.
Should pandemic conditions ever lift and I ever go to see a show at the Old National Center, formerly the Murat Shrine Center, I might see the ghost of the old Shriner's temple's builder, Elias J. Jacoby.
And those are the hauntings closest to me. What's haunted in your town?
