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Fort Wayne's best-known ghost was a newspaper story before she was a legend. In the last week of August 1883 the Fort Wayne Gazette reported, on three successive days — 27, 28 and 29 August, page 7 — that a woman in white had been seen late at night on and about Main Street and its bridge over the St. Marys River. The paper named its witnesses: patrolmen Sheridan, Singleton, Lapp and Franke, officers of the city police who had seen the figure in the course of their rounds. And it kept its editorial distance in the same columns: "The GAZETTE is not a believer in the supernatural…" The sightings were news; the ghost was the town's to make of them what it would.
What the town made of them can be followed in the retellings. Fort Wayne Magazine's history of the tale (October 2015) gives the figure her settled form: a woman in a long flowing white gown, seen crossing the Main Street bridge, never seen stepping off at either end; townspeople feared she had thrown herself into the river; a policeman once "got close enough to toss a blanket over the woman, but the mantle fell limply to the ground." The magazine also preserves the tale's built-in explanation, which is hearsay inside the story rather than a finding about it: a man told a friend that he and his cousin, hidden behind window curtains in a house in the West Central neighbourhood, had projected the figure onto the bridge with a magic lantern, dousing the lamp to make her vanish. The magazine itself asks whether a lantern of that era could throw a clear image that far, and FortWayne.com's Answers column later recorded readers debunking the Lady in White on the strength of the confession. The honest summary is the one the stories section of this history gives it: the hoax story is part of the tale from early on, the lantern mechanics remain doubtful, and the 1883 sightings stand in the newspaper record whatever was projected or seen.
The tale's afterlife is a tour-and-list staple: the Waynedale News repeated it on 27 October 2017, Fort Wayne Magazine's haunted-places list sets her walking down Main Street to the bridge and jumping, and the current Summit City ghost walk passes her ground nightly. One recent directory judgement deserves recording beside the others: Haunted Rooms' Fort Wayne guide, revised in November 2026, moved the woman on Main Street out of its main list into its notes, among tales it "could not trace to any witness." Against that stands the older evidence in this history's own record — the Gazette's three nights of August 1883, with four patrolmen named in print. The difference is one of standards, not of facts: the directory asks for a traceable modern witness; the archive holds named witnesses from 143 years ago. Both statements are printed here, and the reader can weigh them.
Sources: Fort Wayne Gazette, 27, 28 and 29 August 1883, p. 7 (transcripts at acgsi.org), as established in the stories section section of this history; Fort Wayne Magazine, "Haunting tales" (October 2015); Waynedale News, "Creepy Tales & Spooky Occurrences," 27 October 2017; Haunted Rooms, "Haunted Places in Fort Wayne" (revised November 2026).