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On Saturday, 30 October 1915, the Fort Wayne Daily News put a ghost story on its front page. The headline was "SCHOOL TEACHERS TO BRAVE HORRORS OF HAUNTED HOUSE," and the occasion was a party: twenty young women who taught at the Bloomingdale school, accompanied by their principal, Miss Margaret McPhall, were to spend Halloween night at "the old house on the Leo road" — a house belonging to the McPhall family — expressly, the paper said, "for the purpose [of] finding and accosting the spirit which is supposed to have cast its spell over the structure," and to "investigate the 'ghost' stories as a Halloween lark." The teachers, the paper noted, had holidayed together at Lake James the summer before; this was a reunion with a haunting attached.
The paper then told the house's story as the city then understood it. The house was old, "dating back to Fort Wayne's early days," and "was first owned by Mr. Aveline, and used as a private residence. This was as early as sixty or seventy years ago" — which places the first ownership in the 1840s or 1850s. The Avelines were among the city's founding families: fur traders who came to Fort Wayne in the 1820s, and whose name the downtown Aveline Hotel also carried. The Leo Road house later "became tavern or inn," a rendezvous for oyster suppers and, in winter, a favourite stopping place for sleighing parties. In the horse-thief era, the paper continued, the house became the headquarters of an organisation "for the apprehension of thieves and the protection of citizens," whose members "were known as 'regulators.' " Then the sentence on which the haunting rests: "It was here that one of the regulators was killed, and since that time the house has been haunted, so they say."
The documented record underneath that sentence is thinner and stranger than the telling. Regulator companies were real in northern Indiana: a state act approved 9 March 1852 authorised the formation of companies for the detention and apprehension of horse thieves and other felons — arrest only, whatever more the companies later claimed. The Fort Wayne companies of that world are treated in the Crime chapter of this history, where the organised violence of the 1850s — the breaking of the horse-thief and counterfeiting gangs, and the Regulators' own hanging of Gregory McDougall — is documented from the county histories. But no source located names the regulator said to have been killed at the Aveline house, or dates his death, and the Daily News itself carried the killing only as tradition: "so they say." Of the haunting, the paper reports no sighting at all — only that "strange sights been seen and strange sounds heard time and again in the old relic-ridden house," a flourish it immediately undercuts by observing that the house "has probably been the scene of more gala occasions than grewsome ones." By 1915 the house had passed out of tavern use, been rented to private families until a few months before, and stood in the ownership of Mrs. J. A. McPhall. What became of it after the teachers' Halloween is not traced in the sources reached for this section; the house's survival or demolition is an open entry.
One confusion should be cleared away, because the city's own genealogical society pauses over it on its Aveline page: the haunted house on the Leo Road is not the Aveline Hotel. The hotel — built by Francis S. Aveline at Calhoun and Berry, finished in 1863, for forty-five years the city's leading house — burned in the early morning of 3 May 1908 with the loss of twelve lives, the disaster told in the Fire chapter of this history. The hotel carries no ghost tradition in the record. The haunted Aveline was the family's older house out the Leo Road, and its ghost was in print by 1915 — which makes Fort Wayne's haunting tradition, as a matter of newspaper record, more than a century old.
Sources: Fort Wayne Daily News, 30 October 1915, p. 1, transcribed in full by the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (Allen INGenWeb) from the Newspapers.com clipping; B. J. Griswold, "Stories of Old Ft. Wayne — No. 12: Aveline Hotel," Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 10 July 1921 (hotel history and the 1908 fire); the Crime Addendum section of this history (the Regulators and the act of 9 March 1852); the Fire & Safety section of this history (the 1908 Aveline fire, 11–12 dead as the sources divide).