The Shape of the Record — A One-Address City

The leg's whole finding, stated once

What the test found: Mishawaka's documented haunting record, run place by place at full strength, is this — one house with a thirty-year print tradition in two incompatible forms and a documented record that supports neither form's deaths; one cemetery with a permitted paranormal tour and an eccentric-burial story, and no ghost; one landmark theater, one hospital and a full school stock with no claims at all; and one ghost, the nun, whose telling spends Mishawaka's facts and keeps South Bend's address. The city's ghost lore is not thin because the city is young or its record poor — the same searches in the same carriers return a dozen addresses for the city across the river — it is thin because the tradition, for whatever reason the record does not give, gathered at one brewer's table and nowhere else. The 1992 Tribune item is the tradition's floor: no nineteenth-century Mishawaka newspaper haunting was located in the record reached, and no telling older than the restaurant era attaches to any address in the city. A haunting, in this section's discipline, is a claim with a teller and a date; counted that way, the Princess City has one haunted house, and this section is its whole file.

What would change it: the named pulls stand open for the update cycle, each with its settling source: the Mishawaka Enterprise's full run, at the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, searched for haunting reports as the Tribune was searched for South Bend's; the pages of Osborne's South Bend Ghosts and Willis's two Hoosier Trails volumes, read first-hand for any Mishawaka address the publicity does not enumerate; the original WSBT Hacienda segment, of which this section holds only the 2023 roundup's report; the City Cemetery's burial books, for William Aldrich's line; and the Poor Handmaids' house records, for any testimony of the Mishawaka hospital's own that the conflated account may have borrowed. Until those pulls are made, this section stands as the measured record: complete at the strength of the carriers reached, and printed at its true size.

Sources:

1. The carriers searched for this section, in full in the entries above: the South Bend Tribune of 1992, 1999 and 2008 (via the ProQuest newspaper file); the Shadowlands Haunted Places Index — Indiana; hauntedplaces.org; HowStuffWorks; Visit South Bend Mishawaka (30 October 2025); the Enterprise "Pursuits" feature; the 2023 station roundup carrying WSBT's check; Today's Catholic (13 August 2020); the Gypsy Journal carrying Russell's book account; the INGenWeb cemetery transcriptions.
2. This history — Businesses, Food, Theaters, Hospitals, Schools, Neighborhoods, Wars, Culture and Folklore sections, the documented records beneath each telling.