Mishawaka City Cemetery — The Tour in the Dark, and the Man Buried Sitting Up

The city's burying grounds, in the old Indiana City plat · the tour from 2008

The grounds: all of Mishawaka's cemeteries lie within the former plat of Indiana City, the north-bank paper town of 1836 that failed as a town and succeeded as the city's burying ground — Howard's county history of 1907 records the fact, and the Neighborhoods section of this history carries it whole. Three grounds stand together in the same city square, in the diocesan newspaper's phrase: Mishawaka City Cemetery, the pioneers' ground; St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery, founded in 1863, the parish's ground, holding the priests' section and the city's largest crucifix; and Fairview Cemetery, across the street, part of which was once the diocese's. The documented course of the grounds in this history is a burial record, not a lore record: the City Cemetery's burial books are among the sources the Wars section names for settling the city's First World War roll, and the Kamms of the brewery lie in St. Joseph's, where Adolph Kamm's 1930 burial is transcribed in the cemetery's INGenWeb record. No ghost is attached to any of the three grounds in the standing compilations — hauntedplaces.org and the Shadowlands index carry no Mishawaka cemetery at all. What the City Cemetery carries instead is a tour, and a burial story, and this entry prints both at their documented size.

The tour: in the autumn of 2008 the South Bend Tribune reported a night gathering in Mishawaka City Cemetery: around fifty people gathered around tombstones in the dark, at "the final resting spot for many early pioneers," for "Voices of the Dead," a haunted historical tour run by the Indiana Paranormal Investigator Society as its fourth annual fundraiser — the fourth annual, which places the tour's beginning in 2005. The society had been granted permission to be in the cemetery after dark. Its director, Kurt Richardson, reminded the gathering that cemeteries are a place of respect for the dead — "All cemeteries close at dusk," he said, by way of explaining the permission — and Richardson and Andrea Badke guided the tour, Badke dressed as the crypt keeper and Richardson as himself, a paranormal investigator. Other society members dressed in period clothing to recount, in the Tribune's summary, "cemetery history, lives of founding fathers, eccentric burials, tragic deaths and a few souls who refuse to rest." That sentence is the whole of the cemetery's documented haunting claim, and its form is worth stating plainly: the claim here is a tour's framing, not a sighting. No apparition at this ground is reported in the article, no named witness tells of meeting anything in it, and no earlier or later telling in the record reached attaches a specific ghost to a specific grave. The tour is a documented event in the ground's modern course — a paranormal society's fundraiser, permitted, reported, and by its own director's account conducted as history with costumes — and it stands in this section as the cemetery test's positive: the test finds a tour, not a tale.

The burial the tour would have told: the "eccentric burials" of the Tribune's summary have one documented Mishawaka instance in print, and it is a story about a burial, not about a ghost. Nick Russell's Highway History and Back Road Mystery II, carried on his Gypsy Journal site (posted January 2020; reposted November 2025), tells what he learned at the City Cemetery of William Aldrich: born about 1840, "an eccentric and self-proclaimed atheist, along with being a gambler, horse trader, and some claim, a horse thief," who fell ill with tuberculosis and, in his last days, could only sleep sitting up. Aldrich commissioned a local undertaker to build a coffin in which he could sit up for all eternity, and spent hours sitting in it while he lived, trying the fit; when he died the coffin was too big for any hearse, so pallbearers carried it to the cemetery, where he was laid in an oversize vault of five by seven feet that he had decorated with photographs of Indians, frontiersmen and favorite horses — and furnished, Russell writes, with a card table and a deck of cards, his pipe and tobacco, and a bottle of whiskey, with his favorite saddle and a shotgun buried with him, "just in case the Devil cheated." The story is printed here at the strength of its carrier: a travel writer's book account, learned at the cemetery, of a burial no period source reached for this section confirms — no obituary, directory entry or burial-book line for Aldrich was located, and the City Cemetery's burial books, which exist and are named in this history's Wars section as a settling source for the war roll, are the named settling source for him too. What the account is evidence of, at full strength, is the ground's story-stock: the sitting-up burial is the tale a visitor is told at Mishawaka City Cemetery, and it belongs to the same shelf as the tour's "eccentric burials" — the dead remembered as characters, which is a different thing from the dead reported as present.

The other tours of the same ground: the City Cemetery and its two neighbors have a second, separate tour tradition, and printing it beside the first keeps the record honest about what kind of attention this ground actually draws. Pete De Kever, the city's commissioned historian — appointed historian laureate by Mayor David Wood in 2019 — has given tours of Mishawaka's cemeteries for years: Today's Catholic's account of 13 August 2020, titled "Faithful spirits," describes his gravesite tours of St. Joseph, Fairview and the City Cemetery, built on the histories behind the gravestones — the priests of the priests' section, Father August Oechtering's thirty-six years at St. Joseph's, the Kamm and Schellinger families at their plot — with the diocesan paper's own framing: the dead are members of the communion of saints, and the tours are works of memory, not of haunting. Two tour traditions, then, work the same square of ground: a paranormal society's annual fundraiser of the 2000s, framed on souls who refuse to rest, and a city historian's standing history tours, framed on remembrance. The grounds themselves, in every carrier reached, keep the same silence in both: no haunting claim attaches to St. Joseph Cemetery or to Fairview in any source this section reached, and the City Cemetery's claim is the tour framing printed above — nothing more was found, and nothing more is printed.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, "Voices of the Dead" (2008), indexed in the ProQuest newspaper file — the Indiana Paranormal Investigator Society's fourth annual fundraiser tour in Mishawaka City Cemetery; about fifty gathered; permission to be in the cemetery after dark; director Kurt Richardson and Andrea Badke guiding; "eccentric burials, tragic deaths and a few souls who refuse to rest."
2. Nick Russell, "Buried Sitting Up," Gypsy Journal (January 2020; reposted November 2025), from his Highway History and Back Road Mystery II — William Aldrich's sitting-up coffin and furnished vault in the City Cemetery, as learned at the cemetery; carried at book-account strength, no period corroboration located.
3. Today's Catholic, "Faithful spirits" (13 August 2020) — De Kever's cemetery tours; St. Joseph, Fairview and Mishawaka City cemeteries "in the same city square"; St. Joseph founded 1863; the Kamm and Schellinger families interpreted at their plot; the historian-laureate appointment of 2019; the tours' framing as remembrance.
4. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X — all of Mishawaka's cemeteries within the former plat of Indiana City; as carried in this history's Neighborhoods section.
5. Haunted Places (hauntedplaces.org) and the Shadowlands Haunted Places Index — Indiana, read November 2026 — no Mishawaka cemetery in either compilation; the negative as searched.
6. This history, Wars and Neighborhoods sections — the City Cemetery burial books as a named settling source; the Indiana City plat and the burying grounds' place in it.