In Brief
The Broadway Hotel and Tavern in Madison, Indiana keeps a ghost named Charles Morgan. An owner pulled the name out of a Ouija board in 1992, along with a whole biography. No record of any such man has ever turned up.
The Full Story
The Broadway Hotel and Tavern in Madison, Indiana has a ghost everyone can name. They call him Charles Morgan. He's said to appear in the dining room and the tavern, a man in older clothing, and the strange part isn't that people see him. It's where the name came from.
When Libby Mann bought the place in 1992, the previous owners told her it was haunted. During her remodel, the story goes, the lights came on by themselves. Doors opened and closed. The jukebox played in the middle of the night. One day she came home to find her locked upstairs apartment door standing open.
So she bought a Ouija board. She sat down with a friend and asked if anyone was there. The planchette slid to "Yes." The friend, a man named Ty Boling, left and called her crazy. Mann and her sister kept going.
Question by question, the board spelled out a man. Charles Morgan, it said, a Chicago liquor-runner who came to the Madison area during Prohibition and worked with the Mob. The local newspaper account has him shot in French Lick in the 1920s, though some retellings move the killing onto the premises. The board said he loved a woman named Betty Yunker, buried in North Vernon. It said the Broadway sold liquor out of its basement back then.
There was one part of that night Mann couldn't explain away. The planchette kept sliding between two letters, back and forth, C and O. The next morning the building's furnace was found malfunctioning, and the carbon-monoxide levels inside had climbed to dangerous. C-O. She always read it as a warning.
None of the rest of it is on the record. No newspaper, no death certificate, no historical source confirms a Charles Morgan, a Betty Yunker, or the basement speakeasy. The whole biography came out of one séance in 1992.
The Broadway has older ghosts than him. The building dates to 1834 and bills itself as Indiana's oldest tavern, a few blocks up from the Ohio River. People report a woman in white in the older sections, footsteps and voices, glasses moving on their own. A local author put the place in his roundup of Madison's most haunted, and a Louisville news crew filmed there on Halloween in 2018.
But the one that stays with people is upstairs, in the bed-and-breakfast rooms. Guests report a woman they never see, only hear, calling for help somewhere between dusk and dawn.
She has no name. Nobody held a séance for her. She just keeps calling.
