The legends of La Porte County, told short.
Ghost stories, graveyards and one true-crime case that really happened. Each one is marked: what the records show, and what is only legend. "Haunted" here means a story people tell, not a fact. Pictures with these stories are drawn, not photographs, unless a credit says otherwise.
Stories people tell in La Porte County.
The doctor who walks
The story goes that sometime in the 1900s, a doctor lived out here with his wife and daughter. When they died, he couldn't let them go, and kept their bodies in barrels. On full-moon nights, people say his lantern moves into the woods beside a servant with a hook for a hand.
The records: there is no record any of it happened. It was listed as one of the county's most haunted places in a 2011 News-Dispatch article. People live on Orr Lake Road, so if you drive it, keep rolling.
The scraping on the roof
Some people in La Porte call Orr Lake Road "Hangman's Road." The story goes that a couple's car died out there one night. He went for help and told her to lock the doors. All night she heard a slow scraping across the roof…
The records: there is no record it ever happened here. Folklorists call it "The Boyfriend's Death," a legend told across Indiana for generations (Indiana State University Folklore Archives, Lake County, 1970). Did you hear it growing up?
The coffin that came up wrong
When La Porte moved its old city cemetery, a story came up with the coffins. Many of the dead were reburied at Pine Lake Cemetery, marked only as unknown. People say one woman was found upside down and twisted in her coffin, as if she'd been buried alive.
The records: the unknown-persons marker is real. One account says the graves were moved in 1871 and the marker says 1893, and we found no record of the coffin story, which is told about old cemeteries everywhere. Pine Lake is also said to hold a mass grave of about ten unknown men from the Belle Gunness farm, split between two caskets. Visitors report shadows like mist above the stones. Visit in daylight, and pull into the cemetery rather than stopping on US-35.
Where some of her victims rest
Patton Cemetery dates to 1841 and holds some of the oldest graves in the area. Belle Gunness's teenage foster daughter, Jennie Olson, rests here, and so does Andrew Helgelien, the farmer who answered her ad. Visitors describe shadows between the stones, voices with no one there, and a heavy sadness near her victims.
The records: the burials and the 1908 case are documented. The sounds and shadows are what visitors say, nothing more. Families still visit these graves: go by day, and keep it respectful.
The headless woman, dug up again
In 1908 a headless woman's body was found in the ashes of Belle Gunness's farmhouse, and she was buried near Chicago at Forest Home Cemetery, in the plot of Belle's first husband. In November 2007, University of Indianapolis researchers exhumed her and tried to match her DNA to an envelope Belle had mailed to a suitor.
The records: the old sample couldn't be properly tested, so the answer is still buried. In April 2008, descendants of her victims finally gave their graves headstones. Remember them. Photo credit: Steve Shook via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. The envelope, the DNA and the cemetery in our pictures are drawn.
Read the real Belle Gunness history →The only man convicted
Ray Lamphere worked on Belle Gunness's farm from August 1907, until she fired him in February 1908. After her farmhouse burned on April 28, 1908, he was arrested and tried. In November 1908 a jury found him guilty of arson, but not of murder. He died in custody on Dec. 30, 1909. About two weeks later, in January 1910, a Methodist minister, the Rev. E. A. Schell, made public a confession Lamphere had given him. The prosecutor said he was satisfied it was a faithful account.
The records: the arrest, the trial, the verdict and the date of his death are documented. What the confession said is where accounts split. One January 1910 newspaper report says he admitted killing four people but denied setting the fire. Other accounts describe it differently: that he helped bury victims and said Belle escaped the fire alive. Sources also differ on where he gave it (the county jail in 1908, or the state prison) and on the length of his sentence. We would rather tell you the sources disagree than pick a side. We have not yet found the original 1910 pages to settle it. Sources: La Porte County Historical Society Museum; the Fort Wayne Sentinel, Jan. 19, 1910, as transcribed by Genealogy Trails; Edward Bechly (Wikipedia).
Read the real Belle Gunness history →The woman in Los Angeles
In February 1931, retired Chicago lumberman August Lindstrom died in Los Angeles. His housekeeper, Esther Carlson, and a neighbor, Anna Erickson, were charged with poisoning him for the $2,000 in his bank account. Word got out that Carlson might be Belle Gunness, and people who had known Belle were brought to see her. Carlson was seriously ill with tuberculosis, was granted a separate trial, and died in a Los Angeles hospital on Wednesday, May 6, 1931, before she could be tried. Erickson was acquitted.
The records: the charges, the bank account, Carlson's illness and death, and Erickson's acquittal are all in the May 1931 papers. Whether Carlson was Belle is where accounts split. The Evening Star (May 5) reported that Belle's friends denied it. The South Bend News-Times (May 15) reported that two men had been positive. No one has proved it either way. Sources: Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), May 5, 1931; The Indianapolis Times, May 7, 1931; South Bend News-Times, May 15, 1931; all via the Library of Congress, Chronicling America.
Read the real Belle Gunness history →Ten men, three pistols, and a mystery
On September 26, 1933, ten inmates broke out of the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. They used three pistols that John Dillinger had smuggled in. He wasn't there: he had been paroled that May, and four days earlier he had been arrested in Dayton, Ohio. Among the ten were Harry Pierpont and Charles Makley, who became the core of the "Dillinger gang." On October 12, 1933, some of them freed Dillinger from the jail in Lima, Ohio, and Sheriff Jess Sarber was killed.
The records: the date, the ten escapees and the three pistols are documented. How the guns got inside is not. The most widely believed theory is that they were hidden in boxes of thread sent to the prison's shirt factory, and one account says they were thrown over the wall. Even the pistols' caliber differs by source. Pierpont was captured in Tucson, Arizona, on Jan. 25, 1934, and executed in Ohio on Oct. 17, 1934. Sources: History.com; Wikipedia (Harry Pierpont, Indiana State Prison, John Dillinger); the Chicago Tribune front page, Sept. 1933.
Bells, bouncing lights and a woman in white
Posey Chapel Cemetery near Hesston is the one many people name first. The stories: bells, bouncing lights and a woman in white.
The records: see what we found on Posey Chapel. Cemeteries are for daylight.
Four places people say the dead don't rest
- Posey Chapel Cemetery, near Hesston: bells, bouncing lights and a woman in white.
- Patton Cemetery: a neighbor says they hear people talking at night, and no one is there.
- Pine Lake Cemetery: shadows like mist drift over a mass grave of Belle Gunness's victims.
- Orr Lake Road: a doctor's lantern is said to move through the woods under a full moon.
Which one would you visit? Tell us, or send a sighting from the history page.
Sources: Patricia Harrison, "La Porte County's Top 10 Most Haunted," The News-Dispatch (2011); Ashley Hood, Haunted Cemeteries of Indiana (2020), via the La Porte County Herald-Dispatch; Indiana State University Folklore Archives. These are legends. Be safe and respectful: stay off private land and railroad tracks, and visit cemeteries in daylight.
Want the real history behind the legends?
Our history page has two free documentaries: Belle Gunness: The Black Widow of La Porte, Indiana and Haunted La Porte County, Indiana: What's Real and What's Legend.