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Do you believe in ghosts? Are you a ghosthunter?
While channel surfing the other night I came across a SciFI Channel TV show called “Ghosthunters” featuring a group of so-called professional ghosthunters who travel around the country investigating reports of hauntings and ghosts.
I watched only long enough to conclude the show was hokey, lacked spontaneity like a good reality show and was about as entertaining as a Rosanne re-run. I changed channels.
The brief encounter reminded me of a book the editor gave me some time ago titled “South Bend Ghosts and Other Northern Indiana Haunts.” Author Stephen Osborne, who claims to be a Purdue University graduate and former pizza parlor and book store manager, compiled a collection of personal ghost accounts, legends and folklore from this part of the state.
In the chapter Small City Haunts are stories from “The Small, Haunted City of Kendallville.” He cites the website The Shadowlands.net for some of his information (I’ll call it nonsense because I don’t believe any of it). You decide for yourself.
Osborne relates a story about a ghost in the East Noble High School gym. “If you find yourself walking alone in the school gym, look quickly beside you. Some have seen a ghostly man walking beside them. Sometimes he’s been seen up in the bleachers, staring down on you.”
The Strand Theatre is haunted by one of its previous owners, according to Osborne or the unnamed source who provided him with this account. There have been numerous sightings of a ghostly figure in the Main Street cinema over the years. As the story goes one of the theater’s owners allegedly committed suicide in the projection room. The author states, “To this day people report looking up at the projection room to see a man’s face quickly duck away.”
In his book Osborne tells readers a church in Kendallville has a “reputation of being haunted.” People have reported hearing footsteps on the stairs and felt cold spots. While in this church people claim, “They’ve seen faces behind them in mirrors, been touched by icy hands and reports of getting scratched or finding odd marks on their skin and mysterious bruises on their stomachs.”
The website TheShadowlands.net locates this church at the corner of Mitchell and Riley streets — the old Mitchell Street Methodist Church building that now houses the Restoration Lutheran Church. It’s also a location for distribution of free food from the Community Harvest Food Bank.
The website describes how a female ghost in a wedding dress haunts the Brushy Prairie cemetery in LaGrange County. Motorists traveling on U.S. 20 between midnight and 5 a.m. near the cemetery might see the Lady in White. She allegedly wanders down the highway toward the cemetery in a white dress. Many people have stopped to pick her up but she just disappears. She is most active around holidays.
A ghost story from DeKalb County is also included on the website. Located just outside Butler off U.S. 6 is a road that goes to the right over railroad tracks. There is a cemetery there that is supposedly haunted. They say at night if you park in the cemetery by the old crematorium you can hear cries of the departed.
The anonymous account goes on to describe a disturbing incident in the area in the early 1900s involving Gypsies and a farmer’s daughter that gives the site an even more sinister reputation.
When I was a teen-ager in the 1960s Spook Hill was the popular place for an eerie experience. In high school I belonged to a Rotary-affiliated boys only club (Rotary was men only then) called the Interact Club. We’d meet one evening a month in City Hall’s old council chambers, pay dues and plan community projects like moving library books from the old Kendallville Public Library at 124 E. Rush St. to the new library building at 126 W. Rush St.
For a Halloween activity the club’s officers organized a scavenger hunt with Spook Hill as one location for gathering an item from a list of items we had to collect from Kendallville area sites to win the hunt. I don’t remember Spook Hill’s location now but the place had a reputation for being haunted. It was an old cemetery among trees on a small hill beside a rural road not far from Kendallville.
I remember my visit on a chilly night to Spook Hill searching the cemetery covered in dried, fallen leaves for the object my group needed to continue the scavenger hunt. One member of the group whispered for everyone to stop and not make a sound. We froze in our tracks for a few seconds and the only thing I remember hearing was the rustling of leaves in the wind until a jokster kicked a rock or a stick. We ran down the hill, jumped in the car and left.
(South Bend Ghosts and Other Northern Indiana Haunts by Stephen Osborne was published this year by Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Atglen, Pa. Shadowlands.net was created by Dave Juliano and Tina Carlson.)
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