Haunted Places — A Century of Ghost Stories in Print

Fort Wayne's ghost lore is, before it is anything else, a publishing history. The city's hauntings were not first whispered on porches and written down later; several of them were born in print, in the city's own newspapers, and the record of the tellings can be dated almost to the day. A woman in white crossed the Main Street bridge in the columns of the Fort Wayne Gazette in August 1883, with named patrolmen listed as witnesses and the paper itself disclaiming belief in the same breath. A haunted house on the Leo Road made the front page of the Fort Wayne Daily News on 30 October 1915 — the earliest Fort Wayne haunting paper trail this history has located, and the anchor of this section. A county courthouse administrator discussed his building's phantom with the News-Sentinel, on the record and by name. In the present century the lore passed to the folklore collectors — Wanda Lou Willis's Haunted Hoosier Trails (2002) and More Haunted Hoosier Trails (2004) gathered most of the modern canon between covers — and then to Fort Wayne Magazine's October features, to the preservation society's Halloween tours, and finally to the national ghost-tour companies and online directories, which now sell and rank the city's ghosts nightly.

What follows takes each place in turn. The lore is given as what it is: a telling, with the publication that carries it and the date it can be traced to. Underneath each telling stands the place's real history, drawn from the documented record elsewhere in this history. Where a tale has a documented ordinary explanation, the explanation is printed. Where a claim cannot be traced to any witness or any older source, that is printed too. No building in this section is said to be haunted; several are said, on good evidence, to have been talked about for a very long time.

Sources: Fort Wayne Gazette, 27–29 August 1883 (transcripts, Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana); Fort Wayne Daily News, 30 October 1915; Wanda Lou Willis, Haunted Hoosier Trails (2002) and More Haunted Hoosier Trails (2004); Fort Wayne Magazine, "Haunting tales" (October 2015) and the magazine's Fright Night haunted-places list; The News-Sentinel historic archive, "Peculiar proceedings"; Haunted Rooms, "Haunted Places in Fort Wayne" (revised November 2026); the Folklore and The stories section sections of this history.