Johnny Appleseed and Fort Wayne Folklore

Folklore: Johnny Appleseed and the Stories Fort Wayne Tells

Folklore, in this section of the record, is handled the way an archive handles a letter: what is told, who told it, and when it was first written down come first, and the checkable record stands beside the telling in plain type. Nothing here is stamped true or false, and no tale is printed without its papers showing. Where a story's claim form has already been taken up in this history, the stories section carries it, and this section gives the tale and its documents. Where a widely repeated story could not be traced to any published telling, it is left out

Part One — Johnny Appleseed: John Chapman of Fort Wayne

The documented man

John Chapman was born at Leominster, Massachusetts, on 26 September 1774. Almost nothing of his first twenty years is documented; the record picks him up in the late 1790s on Brokenstraw Creek in northwestern Pennsylvania — the 1887 history of Warren County places him there from 1795 to 1797 — and briefly at Pittsburgh, where he planted an orchard. He never married. He spent roughly forty-five years as an itinerant nurseryman on the Ohio and Indiana frontier, and he died at Fort Wayne in March 1845 a substantial landowner by frontier standards: the standard accounts, following Robert Price's Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth (Indiana University Press, 1954), put his holdings in Ohio and Indiana at well over a thousand acres. The folk image of a penniless wanderer scattering free seed is the first thing the documents correct: Chapman ran a business, kept it for half a century, and died possessed of land in two states.

The Ohio nursery business

“The first reliable trace of our modest hero,” W. D. Haley wrote in 1871, “finds him in the Territory of Ohio, in 1801, with a horse-load of apple seeds, which he planted in various places on and about the borders of Licking Creek.” Henry Howe's later edition of his Historical Collections of Ohio describes the supply line behind the plantings: Chapman came down the Allegheny and the Ohio with two canoes lashed together, laden with apple seeds gathered at the cider presses of western Pennsylvania, sometimes carrying a bag or two on an old horse, more often on his own back. His method, repeated for decades, was to walk ahead of settlement, clear a spot in the loamy ground along a stream, plant, fence the nursery against deer and stock, and move on — returning on circuits of two or three months to tend, prune and sell. The Richland County accounts put one of his nurseries on Mohican Creek at Mansfield, near the present depot site, and Mansfield was his headquarters for years. The trees were grown from seed, never grafted, and in the main they were cider apples, not eating apples — the point William Kerrigan's Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard (2010) documents at length and the part of the record the schoolroom version leaves out. Settlers paid a few cents a tree, or in trade: Howe records that his clothing was “mostly old, being generally given to him in exchange for apple trees.” Howe also records that he was famous throughout Ohio as early as 1811.

The wartime errand of September 1812 shows the method of this whole section in miniature. After the killings at the Copus and Zimmer cabins near Mansfield, the settlers crowded into the blockhouse and Chapman volunteered to carry the alarm thirty miles to Mount Vernon. Steven Fortriede's Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Myth (Fort Wayne Public Library, 1978) — the Allen County Public Library director's digest of Price — is careful with the variants: the earliest account insists that Johnny rode horseback; the story most often told has him running the whole way barefoot, crying at each cabin, “the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors and a devouring flame followeth after them.” A pioneer's child who heard the cry that night remembered it in print sixty years later with different words — “Fly! fly for your lives; the Indians are murdering and scalping Seymours and Copuses” (Past and Present of Knox County, Ohio, 1912). Both shapes of the story are old, both are in print, and the difference between them is exactly where documentation ends and retelling begins.

“News fresh from heaven”: the Swedenborgian missionary

One of the earliest notices of Chapman anywhere in print is not American. Kerrigan's research (summarized in his “The Invention of Johnny Appleseed,” Antioch Review, 2012, and in JSTOR Daily) traces the first report to an 1817 account by the Manchester, England, Swedenborgian society of the New Church's work in America, which names Chapman as a travelling evangelist for the Church of the New Jerusalem — the Swedenborgian church. The Ohio county histories call him, on a contemporary's authority, “a regularly constituted minister of the church of the New Jerusalem, according to the revelations of Emanuel Swedenborg,” and Fortriede credits him with a hand in establishing a New Church congregation at Mansfield. The recollections agree on the practice: he carried Swedenborg's writings with him, lent them out in pieces — the accounts describe him dividing volumes so more households could read — and offered the reading at cabin doors, in the phrase the retellings preserve, as news fresh from heaven. Haley's 1871 portrait adds, from pioneers who had known him, that Chapman claimed conversation with angels and spirits and expected two wives in a future state if he abstained from marriage on earth. That is printed here as what it is: what Haley reported the man to have believed, collected a generation after his death. What no retelling disputes is the shape of the life it produced — a nurseryman whose trade and whose preaching travelled the same trails, in the same pack.

Westward to Indiana: the Allen County land

Fort Wayne's own obituary of Chapman says he had been “a regular visitor here upwards of twenty years” when he died in 1845, which would put his first comings in the mid-1820s. The local historians' traditions run earlier than the deeds: Allen Helm, an early historian of the county, said Chapman arrived in 1828 and planted a nursery on the west bank of the St. Joseph River north of the town, and John Dawson gave 1830 — a date the History Center's Tom Castaldi repeated in 2014, writing that in the fall of 1830 Chapman began purchasing land in Allen County to establish permanent orchards. The first documentary evidence Fortriede could find is later and precise: in April and May 1834 Chapman paid $250 for two parcels of land along the Maumee River east of Fort Wayne. Records survive for five Indiana parcels in all — the two Maumee plots, a further eighteen acres on the Maumee, seventy-four acres in Wabash Township, Jay County, and forty acres in Eel River Township, Allen County. Of the three Maumee tracts only one was fully developed, but on that forty-two acres he had a nursery of 15,000 trees growing in 1845. His brother-in-law William Broom, husband of his half-sister Percis, cleared some fifteen acres of the Indiana ground and built a barn. By 1836, Fortriede writes, Chapman had completed his move from Mansfield, considered himself a resident of Allen County, and kept up his Ohio nurseries and friendships with summer visits until a year or two before his death. His estate left a long paper tail — the Allen County Genealogical Society's Appleseed pages follow forty-two probate documents — and several of his properties were sold by the county for back taxes after his death, forty-eight acres in Milan Township in 1848 and one hundred sixteen acres in Maumee Township in 1849 (Castaldi, History Center Notes & Queries, 25 September 2014).

March 1845: the death at the Worth house

The accounts agree on the outline. In March 1845 Chapman was working at his nurseries north of the town, along the feeder canal; local tradition says cattle had broken into one of them and he exerted himself setting the fence right. He fell ill — Dawson's word for the sickness was the “winter plague” — and died at the home of William Worth in St. Joseph Township, near the St. Joseph River. The Fort Wayne Sentinel of Saturday, 22 March 1845, printed the notice that anchors everything: he had died “on the same day” as Thomas McJanet, “in this neighborhood, at an advanced age, Mr. John Chapman (better known as Johnny Appleseed),” and the paper added, “His death was quite sudden. We saw him on our streets only a day or two previous.” A second sentence of the obituary survives in the National Register nomination's quotation: “The deceased was well known through this region… He followed the occupation of a nurseryman and had been a regular visitor here upwards of twenty years.” The obituary was lost to researchers for nearly ninety years and rediscovered in 1934 by Eva Peck of the Fort Wayne Public Library (Fortriede, 1978).

The date the record now uses — 18 March 1845 — rests on the chain Fortriede laid out: the Sentinel ties Chapman's death to McJanet's day, and the Fort Wayne Times and Peoples Press of the same date fixes McJanet's death to the 18th; the Goshen Democrat of 27 March 1845 independently printed, “In Fort Wayne, on Tuesday, 18th, inst., John Chapman, commonly known by the name of Johnny Appleseed, about 70 years of age” — and 18 March 1845 was a Tuesday. The rival dates in print are part of the record too. John Dawson, writing in 1871 to correct Harper's, dated the death 11 March 1845, at Worth's house “on the land now owned by Jesse Cole, on the Feeder Canal.” A News-Sentinel retrospective reported that “most believe” he died 12 March. Bert Griswold's pictorial history (1917) put the death in 1843 — an error the 1916 Swinney Park tablet had already carved in bronze, where it also gives his birth as 1776. And Harper's itself, in the article that made him famous, had him dying in the summer of 1847. The documents support the 18th; the variants are printed here because a folklore record that hides its own disagreements is not a record.

The burial question

The burial has a witness. Richard Worth Jr., of the family at whose house Chapman died, was interviewed in 1858 and said: “We buried him respectably in David Archer's grave yard, two and a half miles north of Fort Wayne.” The Archer family burying ground lay on a sandy knoll west of the St. Joseph River, a short distance from the Worth cabin and the Chapman nursery ground, and the neighbors buried there with him are named in the letter John H. Archer, David Archer's grandson, wrote on 4 October 1900 — a letter that also closes the question of the exact spot: “The grave, more especially the common head-boards used in those days, have long since decayed and become entirely obliterated, and at this time I do not think that any person could with any degree of certainty come within fifty feet of pointing out the location of his grave.” When a commission was formed in 1934 to improve the memorial at the Archer site, a rival claimant came forward with tradition and some evidence that the Worth cabin, and with it the grave, stood across the river on the east side, on the farm later owned by Wesley S. Roebuck; Fortriede's pamphlet carries the two stones on its two covers — the Archer Cemetery stone on the front, the stone Roebuck erected on his farm on the back — and a memorial stone of the same pattern stands today by the ninth hole of the Canterbury Green golf course, on that east side of the river, where tradition puts the cabin in which Chapman died. What the record settles is the neighborhood, the burying ground, and the family's testimony. What it does not settle is the spot under the marker; the claim form of the question — that Chapman “lies under the marker in Johnny Appleseed Park” — is taken up in the stories section, and Part One here is the record that claim stands on.

How the legend grew

Chapman was locally famous in his lifetime — Howe says all Ohio knew him by 1811 — but the national figure was manufactured in print, in identifiable steps. The first collector was Henry Howe, who toured Ohio in 1846 gathering traditions and recollections and published his Historical Collections of Ohio in 1847; Fortriede's judgment on Howe is the standing caution for everything that followed: he collected documented facts and personal recollections alike, and “unfortunately, he neglected to distinguish the facts from the memories in his book.” Rosella Rice, who had known Chapman as a girl in Ohio — her father Ebenezer was among the settlers Johnny supplied — published her recollections in Ohio papers, and her account was folded into later editions of Howe. Fort Wayne's own first contribution to the file was a correction: after Harper's printed its sketch in November 1871, John Dawson wrote to set the Fort Wayne facts straight, death date and all. The Harper's article itself — W. D. Haley, “Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November 1871 — is the hinge. Kerrigan's analysis is blunt about its work: Haley, an abolitionist turned Grange organizer, cast Chapman as the saint of the family farm, the embodiment of “piety, frugality, and charity” for a readership of economically battered farmers, and Haley and Rice, copying each other, built “a kind of magical Santa Claus responsible for almost all the apple trees planted across Ohio.” The article also got the death wrong by two years. The Fort Wayne Public Library thought the piece worth reprinting entire in 1955, with a foreword calling it “the nucleus of fact and legend current in 1871” and “the chief source of subsequent articles and sketches.” Lydia Maria Child's poem “Apple-Seed John” followed in 1881. In the twentieth century the legend became visual: Walt Disney's Melody Time (released 27 May 1948) carried “The Legend of Johnny Appleseed,” narrated and sung by Dennis Day as an old settler who had known Johnny, its hero equipped with a tin pot, a bag of apple seeds and a Holy Book — a generic Bible in the cartoon, where the documents give Swedenborg — and the segment was reissued as a stand-alone short at Christmas 1955 and folded into Disney's American Legends for the home-video generations. The scholars' answer came from Fort Wayne and Bloomington: Price's Man and Myth (1954) rebuilt the life from deeds, tax lists and probate files, and Fortriede's 1978 pamphlet put Price's findings into the hands of the city that keeps the grave.

What the contemporaries wrote: the character in the record

On the question the folklore always asks first — was he really barefoot? — the recollections Howe gathered say yes, in the plainest terms: “He went bare-footed, and often travelled miles through the snow in that way.” His clothes were castoffs taken in trade for trees. The same Howe pages carry the campfire anecdote that has trailed him ever since: lying by his fire in the woods, Chapman saw mosquitoes flying into the blaze, filled the tin utensil he wore — “which answered both as a cap and a mush pot” — with water, quenched the fire, and said, “God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort, that should be the means of destroying any of His creatures.” That anecdote, told to Howe by people who had known the man, is as close as any early source comes to the tin-pot hat; as the stories section notes, no source from Chapman's own lifetime puts a pot on his head as a hat. The Mansfield preacher story survives in two shapes, and both are printed in the old county histories as recollection: in one (Baskin & Battey's History of Crawford County), a wandering preacher named Paine points to Chapman asleep on a courthouse foundation stone with his feet up on the block and cries, “See yon ragged, old, barefooted sinner, and be warned”; in the shape more often reprinted, the preacher demands to be shown a primitive Christian, and Chapman rises, sets a bare foot on the stone, and answers. The Sentinel's obituary, the one document written by men who had seen him days before, is plainer than all of it: a nurseryman, well known through the region, a regular visitor for twenty years, dead suddenly. The legend's Johnny is an enlargement of that man, not a replacement for him — the nurseries, the tracts, the bare feet and the refusal to harm living things all have paper behind them; the pot hat, the sackcloth uniform and the saint's halo were fitted afterward, by named writers, on dates this section has given.

Fort Wayne's commemorations

The city's formal keeping of Chapman began seventy-one years after his death. On 5 May 1916 the Indiana Horticultural Society dedicated a monument in Swinney Park — a granite boulder bearing a bronze tablet with a bas-relief of Chapman — and erected an iron fence around the supposed grave in the David Archer cemetery north of town; the tablet's inscription, as transcribed in the Society's Transactions, gives his birth as 1776 and his death as 1843, both wrong, which is itself a fair specimen of the record the society had to work from in 1916. The 1934 memorial commission's work brought the Roebuck rival claim described above. On 26 May 1935 the Optimist Club of Fort Wayne placed the granite stone that stands on the gravesite in the Archer Cemetery. In 1947 William and Ruth McKay gave the cemetery ground — two acres within the larger tract — to Allen County, and on 21 May 1949 the Johnny Appleseed Memorial Park, together with the Johnny Appleseed Memorial Bridge over the St. Joseph, was dedicated. A bronze marker from the Johnny Appleseed National Memorial Foundation and the Men's Garden Club of America followed on 25 September 1963, and in September 1965 a set of symbolic items was installed on the cemetery knoll, all recorded in the National Register nomination. The park and gravesite were entered on the National Register of Historic Places on 17 January 1973 — the oldest National Register listing in Fort Wayne — and the city park of today, thirty-one acres adjoining the county's Archer Park, keeps the marked grave atop the mound among the last stones of the Archer family. The grave tradition has been kept at the centre of a September weekend by the Johnny Appleseed Festival since the 1970s; the festival's own record, including the open question of its founding year, is in the Events section of this history.

Part Two — The Folklore Record of Fort Wayne

The tales below are Fort Wayne's own, each admitted on the same terms as Part One: a published telling, a named teller or recorder where the record gives one, and the checkable facts set beside it. Tales whose claim form is already treated in the stories section are pointed there in one line each at the end.

The Myaamia beginning

The oldest story in this record belongs to the people whose town Kekionga was. In the Myaamia emergence story — the first story, as the Myaamia Center's community history blog, Aacimohtaatiiyankwi, presents it — the Myaamia people come out of the water at Saakiiweeyonki, “the Confluence,” where the St. Joseph River runs toward the lake near present-day South Bend: “At first the Miamis came out of the water,” in the telling Miami University's Myaamia story project prints, grasping their way up the riverbank by tree limbs. From Saakiiweeyonki, the story and the tribe's historians continue, the people built their first village, moved on, and raised towns along the Wabash valley from kiihkayonki — Fort Wayne — south to waayaahtanonki, Lafayette; from that downstream way of life they take the meaning of their name, “the Downstream People.” The telling has papers. The version in use today was told by Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy) to the linguist J. P. Dunn in the early 1900s and is published in David J. Costa (ed.), myaamia neehi peewaalia aacimoona neehi aalhsoohkana — Myaamia and Peoria Narratives and Winter Stories (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, 2010), pp. 52–53; Charles Christopher Trowbridge had recorded Miami traditions, emergence among them, in the 1820s (Meearmeear Traditions). George Ironstrack of the Myaamia Center, retelling the story for the tribe's blog, is careful with its geography and its chronology in the same breath: the emergence place is known, the journey's date is not, and the people were living in Myaamionki for many generations before the Beaver Wars. It is printed here as the Myaamia tell it, in their own publications, because a Fort Wayne folklore record that began with the settlers would be missing its first chapter.

The return to Kekionga

A second Miami tradition, carried in the standard histories rather than in a single named telling, holds that the people's presence at the head of the Maumee was a return. By the oral history the histories summarize, the Miami had lived in the region of northern Indiana, southern Michigan and northwestern Ohio long before, withdrew westward around Lake Michigan under pressure from Iroquois war parties during the Beaver Wars of the seventeenth century, and moved back into their old country around 1700 as French traders armed and encouraged them — reoccupying the portage town at Kekionga that the French records then begin to describe. The written record's shape fits the tradition's: French missionaries first met the Miami around the western shores of Lake Michigan in the mid-1600s, and by the opening of the 1700s the great Miami town stood again at the three rivers. The tradition is printed here at the strength its documentation allows — an oral history preserved in summary by the historians who wrote the tribe's past (it is the account given, for instance, in the standard reference histories of the Miami people) — and no single teller's name attaches to it, as one does to the emergence story above.

How Richardville became chief: the stake and the canoe

The Miami story Fort Wayne's county histories could not resist telling is the rise of Jean Baptiste Richardville — Pinšiwa, the Wildcat. As the History of Miami County, Indiana (1914) tells it at length: a white prisoner, captured by a Miami war party, was brought into the camp on the Maumee and, the succession to Little Turtle being unsettled, was condemned to be burned at the stake. Richardville's mother Tacumwah — Little Turtle's sister — thrust a knife into her son's hand and bade him assert his claim to the chieftainship; the young man cut the prisoner free, and his mother took charge of the rescued man, laid him in a canoe, covered him with peltries, and sent him down the Maumee to safety. The daring of the act, the story says, made him chief. The telling was old when the county histories printed it. The 1896 History of Miami County by John H. Stephens says the story of his rise “was related by him to Allen Hamilton, an Indian agent,” and that Frank C. Riehl had already put it into verse, first published in the Sentinel-Democrat of Alton, Illinois, in August 1890. The same 1896 history then does the honest thing, and its doubt is part of this record: “The story of saving this man's life is probably true, but it is doubtful whether this is what raised him to his power” — Richardville, it notes, became chief on Little Turtle's death in July 1812, when he was about fifty-one years old, not a youth with a knife. Told, printed, doubted by its own printers: the tale stands here in all three states. (The companion Richardville lore — the apple tree at his birth and the size of his fortune — is treated in the stories section.)

The buried boxes: Richardville's silver

The treasure tale grows out of the fortune itself, and the fortune was real. Henry Schoolcraft estimated Richardville's wealth, some years before his death, at about $200,000 in specie — and the 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee River, quoting him, adds the detail that seeded a legend: much of the money “had been so long buried in the earth that the boxes in which the money was enclosed had mainly decayed, and the silver itself become greatly blackened.” Stephens's 1896 county history carries the story the rest of the way: he had over $200,000 in coin, “most of which was buried in boxes on his reservations. After his death considerable money was found in decayed boxes, and it is believed by some of the Indians that a large amount yet lies buried on the Wabash river.” A third printed strand belongs to the family: Doris M. Perry, writing in The Old Fort News (Vol. 53, No. 1, 1990), reports Richardville's granddaughter Mongosehquah's account that after the chief's death it took the family “a day and a night to remove the gold found hidden in the house and on the grounds” of the Bluffton Road house — the house whose safe, tradition and the History Center both note, can still be seen there. Two placements matter. The buried boxes of the tellings belong to his Wabash reservations, downstream toward Huntington and Peru, not to Fort Wayne ground; and the found money is documented in the same sources that report the unfound — the tale's believers and its evidence arrive in the same books. Searches for Richardville's buried silver belong to Indiana treasure lore generally; what is Fort Wayne's is the man, the house, the safe, and the family's own telling.

The canal in memory: the Dock, the music, the first ride

Canal-era Fort Wayne survives in print largely as recollection, and Bert Griswold's Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917) is its great collecting basin. From D. H. Colerick, Griswold prints the memory of the first boat ride on the feeder canal in the spring of 1834, when the water was let in from the feeder dam to the town. From Eliza Hendricks's A Popular History of Indiana (1891) comes the set-piece of 4 July 1835: the first packet, the Indiana, Captain Oliver Fairfield, coming through the completed Fort Wayne–Huntington division to an enthusiastic celebration — thirty-three young ladies in white dresses and green sashes, each carrying a flag for a state or territory, a procession to the public square, a dinner, an address by Hugh McCulloch, and a ball at Zenas Henderson's public house. And from Griswold's pioneers comes the sound of the working canal at its height: behind the Columbia Street buildings lay the space called the Dock, where all boats landed, and the packet Indiana's arrival “was always heralded by the clarionet and violin of Ed Parker and Bill Patchin, employes, as the boat emerged from the aqueduct and rounded the bend west of town.” These are memories printed forty to eighty years after the fact, by named collectors from named rememberers, and they are printed here as such — the texture of the canal as the city chose to remember it, over the engineering record the Story of Fort Wayne section carries.

The battle that wasn't: the canal Irish, 10 July 1835

The canal's labor force was heavily Irish, and canal-digging Ireland exported its faction geography with it: the men of Cork and the men of the Fardown country fought each other on American works from the Erie eastward, and the enmity reached the Wabash & Erie line at Fort Wayne. The History Center's own history site, in “The Fighting Irish: Canal Builders and the Violence of Progress” (drawing on Tom Castaldi's work, 2002), gives the Fort Wayne climax its date: “On July 10, 1835, armed and angry workers from both factions were prepared to meet in battle, to settle their differences.” Local memory has kept the confrontation at the size of a battle; the published history records two armed bodies drawn up and a settlement that did not become the pitched fight the tellings promise. The tale is entered here because the standoff itself is documented and because the inflation is the folklore: a riot that generations of retelling armed more heavily than the record does. The canal was six days past the first packet's celebration when its builders nearly fought over it — that much, the History Center's account and Griswold's both support.

The tunnels under downtown

Ask Fort Wayne about tunnels and the answers arrive as a system: passages under the courthouse square, runs to the old jail and the heating plant, bread and castings moving underground, an entrance behind the Embassy. The tellings have one hard document at their root. G. W. Bond's Guide to Allen County Court House (copyright 1913), written of the present courthouse within a decade of its opening, describes the original: “A tunnel extends from [the] basement, northwest corner, under Calhoun street and, running north, connects the Court House with [the] Power Station north of the Jail. It carries all pipes and wires necessary for heating and lighting, but is not open to the public owing to its small size.” A utility tunnel, in a guidebook, with dimensions implied by a warning. A full-page Fort Wayne newspaper feature of the early twentieth century — its map headed “Plan of the Calhoun Street Tunnel” — gave the system its public shape, describing passages built for utilities and used to move prisoners between the jail, the courthouse and the heating plant, and downtown firms, the Fort Wayne Brick and Tile Company and the Perfection Biscuit Company among them, using the runs to move castings and thousands of loaves of bread underground each day; the page still circulates, reproduced in local-history postings (most recently in December 2025), though the paper's name and date have not been pinned to it. The documented later addition is plainer: when the City-County Building (now the Rousseau Centre) rose across Calhoun Street, a tunnel was built connecting it with the courthouse, and the courthouse also houses a Cold War fallout shelter. For the Embassy end of the story, no printed source exists at all: the Indiana Hotel stood attached to the theatre, which makes an interior connection no mystery, but a subterranean passage belongs, so far, to speech rather than print — the telling exists, the paper does not, yet.

The haunts, as the city now tells them

Fort Wayne's ghost lore in print today runs through tours and directories, and the honest way to record it is to name the circuit. The History Center — the old City Hall of 1893, with its basement jail cells — anchors the modern telling: the commercial Summit City Ghosts tour (US Ghost Adventures) sends its walkers past the old city hall, where “jail cells and ancient artifacts draw eerie entities and unexplained activity,” and past the Masonic Temple, and it retails, alongside the documented dead, two tales that could not be traced to older print — the “Killer in the Rain” of the 1940s and the shoeless apparition of Johnny Appleseed himself, said to wander the banks of the St. Joseph. Both are recorded here as what the tour literature says, no more. Brookside, the John H. Bass mansion at the University of Saint Francis, has the friendliest ghost in the current literature: Haunted Rooms' Fort Wayne guide (revised November 2026) reports Bass himself “said to help people find books” in his old house, and the same guide performs a service this section is glad to copy — it warns its readers that tales passed around online lists for years, the Jehl Park swing among them, could not be traced to any witness, and it moves them to its notes. The Bell Mansion at 420 West Wayne Street is the newest haunt in print: built in 1893 for Robert and Clara Bell to designs of Wing & Mahurin, sold after Robert Bell's death in the house in 1901 to the Noble family, then a funeral home — Klaehn's — for more than ninety years until 2018, and since its preservation purchase in 2020 a venue whose own operators and the paranormal directories (Paranormal Places; The Scare Factor's Indiana haunted-places directory; PBS Fort Wayne's “Folklore Friday” feature of 11 October 2024) retail shadows, disembodied voices, children's laughter in the halls and a woman in jeans on the stairs. The funeral-home decades are documented; the hauntings are documented as tellings of the 2020s. That is the whole of the evidence, and it is enough for a folklore record: a city tells its dead in the media it has, and Fort Wayne's current media are a tour script, a revised directory that corrects itself, and a funeral home that sells tickets to its own ghosts.

Tales treated in the stories section

“The Woman in White haunted the Main Street bridge in 1883” — the Gazette's three nights of sightings and the magic-lantern confession are told and checked in the stories section.

“The Embassy Theatre's ghost is stage manager Bud Berger” — the kind stage manager of 1936–1965 and the stories told of him since the 1970s are told and checked in the stories section.

“Little Turtle's grave was found on Lawton Place in 1912, and Washington's sword proved it” — the discovery, the relics and the identification are told and checked in the stories section.

“Kekionga means ‘blackberry patch’” — the name, Dunn's tradition and McCafferty's examination are told and checked in the stories section.

“Richardville was the richest man in Indiana, and was born under a miraculous apple tree” — the fortune's figures and the birth legend are told and checked in the stories section; Part Two above carries the two Richardville tales that stand apart from the claim: the chieftainship and the buried boxes.

Principal sources for this section: Steven Fortriede, Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Myth (Fort Wayne Public Library, 1978), after Robert Price, Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth (Indiana University Press, 1954); William Kerrigan, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard (2010) and “The Invention of Johnny Appleseed,” Antioch Review (2012); W. D. Haley, “Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine (November 1871), reprinted by the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County (1955); Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (1847; enlarged ed. 1891); Fort Wayne Sentinel, 22 March 1845, and Goshen Democrat, 27 March 1845 (texts via the Allen County Genealogical Society); Tom Castaldi, “Johnny ‘Appleseed’ Chapman,” History Center Notes & Queries (25 September 2014); National Register nomination, Johnny Appleseed Memorial Park (1973); George Ironstrack, “A Myaamia Beginning,” Aacimohtaatiiyankwi (Myaamia Center); David J. Costa (ed.), Myaamia and Peoria Narratives and Winter Stories (2010); History of Miami County, Indiana (1896; 1914); Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889); Bert J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917); Eliza C. Hendricks, A Popular History of Indiana (1891); G. W. Bond, Guide to Allen County Court House (1913); “The Fighting Irish,” fortwaynehistory.com (History Center); Visit Fort Wayne; Haunted Rooms, “Haunted Places in Fort Wayne” (rev. November 2026); US Ghost Adventures, Summit City Ghosts; PBS Fort Wayne (11 October 2024); The Bell Mansion and the paranormal directories.