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The building is real enough to anchor anyone's imagination: the Allen County Courthouse of 1897–1902, Brentwood S. Tolan's Beaux-Arts landmark on Calhoun Street, its cornerstone laid on 17 November 1897 in what the marker calls the largest public ceremony held in Fort Wayne to that time, dedicated on 23 September 1902 at a final cost of $817,553.59, and designated a National Historic Landmark on 31 July 2003. Its murals, its rotunda and its fourth floor are treated in the Architecture chapter. Its ghost belongs to the News-Sentinel.
The paper's historic archive carries a courthouse miscellany, "Peculiar proceedings," with a section headed "Phantom of the courthouse," and the witness it quotes is not a tour guide but the building's own administrator. "Yeah, it's haunted," Circuit Court Administrator Gayle Ort told the paper. "I've talked to seven or eight people who claim they've seen it. It's always late at night, and it's always on the catwalk on the east side of the fourth floor… It's supposed to be a man with long hair and dark clothes. Nobody's ever seen it long enough to tell how old it is or get a good description, but they claim they've definitely seen it." Ort said he had tried to spot it himself, most often in the small hours while waiting on a jury, and never had. Asked whether he believed, he gave the answer that has carried the tale ever since: "The people who told me about it didn't have any reason to lie. On the other hand, I haven't gone around yelling 'Here, ghost, here, ghost,' either." Every sighting in the piece is second-hand and every witness unnamed; what is documented, precisely, is that a senior court official relayed the tradition to the city's newspaper without embarrassment. The archived page shows no original publication date, and none is claimed here.
The same article preserves the courthouse's second eerie mystery — and its fully documented, ordinary answer. For a season, food left on desks overnight vanished, and suspicion fell on the custodial staff. Then noises were heard from the fourth floor, which had stood unoccupied and unused for years, and workers going up to look flushed out a homeless man who had been living there undetected for some time, feeding himself on what the desks provided. The janitors were innocent. It is the only haunting-adjacent episode in this section that ends with a person found, and it is worth its place for exactly that reason: the courthouse record contains both kinds of story, the kind that resolves and the kind that does not, printed side by side by the same newspaper.
Sources: The News-Sentinel historic archive, "Peculiar proceedings" (egen.fortwayne.com), read in full for this section; the Architecture and Famous Locations sections of this history (courthouse construction, dedication and landmark designation).