Haunted South Bend: The Ghost Lore, at Its Addresses

Haunted Places: The Ghost Lore of South Bend, at Its Addresses

South Bend's ghost lore is younger in print than its buildings. No nineteenth-century newspaper haunting from this city has been located in the record reached for this section: the tradition enters print on a college campus in the 1920s, reaches the city's newspaper in a Halloween feature of 2005, gets its book in 2009, and is today carried chiefly by the city's own History Museum — through its podcast series Spooky South Bend of September 2025 and the accounts it supplies to the visitors bureau — and by a commercial tour trade that gathers at a boarded mansion on West Colfax Avenue. What follows takes each place in turn. The lore is given as a telling, with the carrier that carries it and the earliest date it can be traced to. Underneath each telling stands the place's real history, drawn from the documented record elsewhere in this history. Where a claim cannot be traced to any witness or any older source, that is printed too. No building in this section is said to be haunted; several are said, on good evidence, to have been talked about for a very long time.

The boundaries, stated once: the two campuses stand in the unincorporated Notre Dame district north of the city line, and are covered in full under the build order for this history, with the civic fact printed in their entries. Primrose Road and the Portage Prairie Cemetery stand in German Township, in the city's northwest orbit. One famous telling belongs to Mishawaka — the Hacienda mansion — and is entered here at boundary size only, as the pipeline of the lore, not as this city's ground. The graves' documented facts are printed beside the cemetery lore where the record has them; where the record has none, the absence is the entry.