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The Old Fort on Spy Run Avenue is a reconstruction: Historic Fort Wayne, Inc., established in 1964, rebuilt the American post of 1815–16 from Major John Whistler's 1814 drawings, and the new fort opened in the Bicentennial year, 1976. Its museum history is told in the Museums chapter. A stockaded wooden fort, lit after dark by lanterns, was always going to attract ghost talk, and the published form that talk takes is the fort's own programming: during downtown's Fright Night each October, the Old Fort offers Lantern Tours, in which, as Fort Wayne Magazine's Fright Night guide describes them, visitors walk the candle-lit grounds while "a historic interpreter will share tales of encounters with the Fort's resident ghosts." Admission in the published program was five dollars, children under nine free.
That is the documented extent of the Old Fort's ghost tradition in print: resident ghosts, plural and unnamed, retailed by the fort's own interpreters one night a year. The same guide's promise to "keep an eye out for the Headless Horseman" is program dressing borrowed from Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow — a story the Fort Wayne Ballet was performing the same weekend — and not a fort tradition of any age. Researchers should also be warned off a namesake: "Historic Fort Wayne" is also a nineteenth-century fort in Detroit, Michigan, whose ghost-soldier literature — burial grounds, apparitions, televised investigations — fills search results for this city's fort and belongs to another state entirely. Indiana's Old Fort has no equivalent file. What it has is a lantern tour, and the honesty to sell the tales as tales.
Sources: Fort Wayne Magazine, Fright Night guide (fortwayne.com, "Scary Summit City"), Old Fort Lantern Tours listing; the Museums section of this history (Historic Fort Wayne, Inc., 1964; reconstruction opened 1976).