Crown Hill Cemetery

John Dillinger is buried at Crown Hill. But the real haunting is Section 37: 699 dead children in one pit, heard playing.

John Dillinger is buried at Crown Hill, and people keep trying to take pieces of his grave home. The headstone has been replaced several times because of the chipping. Over in Section 37, 699 dead children are buried in a single 30-by-50-foot pit, and visitors keep hearing them playing. Crown Hill Cemetery is 555 acres and contains about 225,000 people, which makes it the third largest non-governmental cemetery in the United States. Most of the ghost stories attach to the two corners of it that you'd never find unless someone pointed.

The cemetery opened in the middle of the Civil War. It was incorporated September 25, 1863 and dedicated June 1, 1864 on scenic farmland north of downtown Indianapolis, designed by Pittsburgh landscape architect John Chislett Sr. along with Prussian horticulturist Adolph Strauch. By 1866, 707 Union soldiers had been reinterred here from Greenlawn. In 1931, another 1,616 Confederate soldiers and sailors who had died at Camp Morton, the Indianapolis prisoner-of-war camp, were moved to the Confederate Mound. Close to 2,400 military dead before you get to the famous occupants.

The famous occupants are a lot. President Benjamin Harrison. Vice presidents Charles Fairbanks, Thomas Hendricks, and Thomas Marshall. Ten Indiana governors. Colonel Eli Lilly, founder of the pharmaceutical company, who was a civil war officer before he was a pill man. The poet James Whitcomb Riley is buried at the summit of Strawberry Hill, which the cemetery calls The Crown, and his grave has the best view in Indianapolis. Thomas Taggart is here too, the former Indianapolis mayor who ran French Lick Springs Hotel and whose ghost apparently still checks the sixth floor of that hotel a hundred miles south.

Section 37 is called Community Hill, and the story there is sad in a way the rest of the cemetery isn't. Between 1892 and 1980, the Indianapolis Children's Asylum, the Children's Guardians Home, and the Asylum for Friendless Colored Children sent 699 dead children to Crown Hill, most of them from disease, starvation, or neglect. A little more than half were boys. Two-thirds were white. Their ages ranged from a few months to fifteen. They were buried together in a single pit, unnamed. The Hearts Remembered Memorial, a statue of a weeping woman, was dedicated over the grave on June 4, 2006.

Visitors to Section 37 keep hearing children laughing and playing near the memorial, and the sound of crying coming up from the pit. In 2007, paranormal investigators Keith Age, John Zaffis, and Steven LaChance filmed a documentary called Children of the Grave at the site. Their sound crew captured what sounded like children screaming during preliminary audio checks with nobody present.

The rest of the cemetery produces ghost stories that could be transplanted onto any big-city graveyard. A woman holding a baby, wandering among the headstones, vanishing when approached. Local legend says she's a young mother who got locked in at closing, walked the fence along 38th Street, and wasn't seen alive again. Soldiers in Union blue and WWI khaki, walking the paths. A phantom horse-drawn carriage on the cemetery's 25 miles of paved road at night. Floating lights among the graves, which cemetery-gas chemistry can actually account for. Near the Robertson family plot, visitors have described a weeping angel statue appearing to weep blood over John and Sarah Robertson's infant, who died at birth. None of these stories attach specifically to Crown Hill. They're the background hum.

Crown Hill runs a Ghost Stories at Crown Hill event every fall, where storytellers work the paths with lanterns and tell these tales in the dark. Even in daylight, walking past the Dillinger grave feels like standing on history. The kid-sized footsteps in Section 37 feel like something else.