Mishawaka Historical Mysteries: The Open Questions of the Record

Mysteries · The Open Questions of the Record

Most of this history is a record of things that can be proven. This section is the opposite shelf: the questions the record itself leaves open. A mystery, as the word is used here, is not a rumor and not a ghost story. It is a documented case — a village that stood at the rapids and left no chief's name in any treaty roll, a road the city still names a street for whose surveyed line no one has produced, a fire that took nine-tenths of the business district in a night and whose cause the next day's newspaper declined, in so many words, to assign. Each entry below states what is known, states what is not known, and marks where the trail ends. Where a question has a keeper — an agency, a library, an archive whose file would settle it — the keeper is named. The boundary of this section is printed once, here: unidentified persons and open criminal cases belong to the Unsolved section of this record, not to this one. The one killing the press of record carries as unsolved stands at the close of the Crime section and is dug in the Unsolved leg, whose file has not yet been run for this city; it is pointed to here and not retold. The tales this city tells about itself — the princess, the haunted house, the line in the Air Force's sky book — are carried whole in the Folklore, Haunted Places, and Aliens & UAP sections, and are pointed to, once, and left where they belong.