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Fort Wayne's hauntings support a small, durable industry, and its history can be told in three media. The first was the newspaper: the Gazette's Woman in White in 1883 and the Daily News's haunted house in 1915 were October journalism before Halloween journalism had a name, and the News-Sentinel was still printing its courthouse phantom, straight-faced and sourced to a court official, a century later. The second medium was the folklore book. Wanda Lou Willis, an Indianapolis folklorist and fifth-generation Hoosier, published Haunted Hoosier Trails in March 2002 — seventy-eight tales arranged by county, with maps and directions, frankly offered as a travel guide — and More Haunted Hoosier Trails in 2004. Between them the two books collected most of what is now the Fort Wayne canon: the Embassy's protective spirit, the Pfeiffer House incidents, Lindenwood's stroller, Lincoln Tower's floors. The combined reissue of her work as Haunted Hoosier Tales (2025) keeps the canon in print. Fort Wayne Magazine domesticated it for the city itself: "Haunting tales" in October 2015, and the magazine's haunted-places list — twelve sites, from the Wells Street Bridge's dog to Jehl Park — that anchors its Fright Night coverage.
The third medium is the tour. The preservation organisation ARCH built Halloween programming on the lore: its "Murder! Mystery! Mayhem!" walking and bus tours of downtown's documented dark corners, and its "Walk with the Spirits of the Past" through the West Central neighbourhood, run each year inside the downtown Fright Night festival — priced in the 2024 program at twenty dollars for the walks and thirty for the bus — alongside a separate Haunted Walking Tour of West Central. The Old Fort sells its Lantern Tours the same night. The History Center opens its old jail. Since the early 2020s the trade has also gone national and nightly: US Ghost Adventures sells its Summit City Ghosts walk — "Fortunes, Fire & Frontier," about a mile of downtown, roughly an hour, twenty-four dollars, running nightly year-round from the Johnny Appleseed statue on Jefferson Boulevard, past the Embassy and the Masonic Temple — and markets the same walk under its Lizzie Borden Ghost Tours brand. The online directories complete the circuit, and the best of them have begun to correct it in public: Haunted Rooms' Fort Wayne guide, revised in November 2026, states that the old lists carried tales with "nothing behind them," re-checks every place against the National Register and local reporting, replaces lore that fails — the Embassy's grey figure giving way to the staff's own Berger — and moves the untraceable, Jehl Park and the rest, into its notes.
That self-correction is where the publishing history that opens this section arrives. Fort Wayne's ghosts began as newspaper copy, were gathered as folklore, and are now sold as tourism and audited as content. The places are real, and their histories are in this book. The ghosts are the tellings — dated, sourced, and, at their best, as carefully kept as this section has tried to keep them.
Sources: Wanda Lou Willis, Haunted Hoosier Trails (Emmis Books, 2002) and More Haunted Hoosier Trails (2004); Haunted Hoosier Tales (2025); Fort Wayne Magazine, "Haunting tales" (October 2015) and "Scary Summit City" Fright Night coverage; Downtown Fright Night program (2024) — ARCH tour and Old Fort Lantern Tour listings and prices; WhatzUp, Fright Night coverage (Murder! Mystery! Mayhem! tours); US Ghost Adventures, Summit City Ghosts / "Fortunes, Fire & Frontier" listings (GetYourGuide and the company's own pages, November 2026); Lizzie Borden Ghost Tours, Fort Wayne page; Haunted Rooms, "Haunted Places in Fort Wayne" (revised November 2026).