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Lore as carried in November 2026; park ground 1969 – present
The lore, told as lore: the park is said to be haunted by children who drowned there. HauntedPlaces.org, an aggregator of user-submitted haunting reports, carries Potato Creek State Park under North Liberty, Indiana, in words that recur across its state and county pages: "It is said to be haunted by ghostly children who have drowned here while swimming or fishing over the years. The plaintive sound of a child crying or calling for its mother has been rumored to come" from the park. No witness is named, no date is given, no drowned child is identified, and the entry misstates the park's own size in its opening line, describing 327 acres of fields and woodlands — 327 acres is Worster Lake; the park is 3,840 acres. That is the whole of the lore as any carrier reached presents it.
The documented history of the place, told separately: the park stands in Liberty Township about three miles east of town, designated in 1969, dedicated 6 June 1977 as Potato Creek Recreation Area, and raised to state park status in 1983 (The Story of North Liberty, banked). Its lake is man-made — Worster Lake did not exist to drown anyone before the park was built — and the ground before the park was farmland, documented in the 1990 "Farmland to Parkland" oral-history project, whose twenty interviews and more than 250 family photographs sit at the park's Nature Center and at The History Museum in South Bend (The Story of North Liberty, banked). Against that record, the claim inside the lore was tested: no drowning of a child at Potato Creek State Park, in the lake or on the creek, was found in any carrier reached — not in the DNR's park materials, not in the park accounts of Visit South Bend Mishawaka, and not in the web record searched. That does not prove no accident ever happened on the ground; it establishes that the aggregator's "children who have drowned here over the years" has, in the record reached, no named case under it. The lore is therefore printed as aggregator lore without a documented case, at exactly that weight and no more. Its settler is the St. Joseph County coroner's and the South Bend Tribune's accident record for the park years, neither pulled first-hand — a named gap.