Hannah House

The Hannah House legend says slaves died in a basement fire. Historians say no, not one scrap of evidence. The real tragedy is the stillborn baby.

The most famous Hannah House story is that a group of escaped slaves died in a fire in the basement and Alexander Hannah buried them in the dirt floor. That story is almost certainly false. Indianapolis historian Jessica Fischer has gone on the record: "There is no evidence to say that his house was a part of the Underground Railroad." The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis calls the legend an "insensitive urban myth." There are no fire records. There are no burial records. There is no documented Hannah involvement in the Underground Railroad. The story is what people want it to be, which is a tidy explanation for why a mansion on Madison Avenue feels the way it does.

Alexander Moore Hannah grew up on Samuel Hannah's farm, went west as a California Gold Rush prospector, came home wealthy, bought 240 acres from his father, and built a 24-room Italianate brick mansion on the property in 1859. He ran the Indianapolis-Southport Toll Road across his own land. He served as sheriff, postmaster, Circuit Court clerk, and state legislator. He was a Quaker. He was an abolitionist. He married Elizabeth Jackson in 1872, at age forty-something, and she was his only marriage. On March 16, 1875, their only child, a daughter they planned to name Elizabeth, was stillborn. The baby was buried in an unmarked plot between her parents' graves at Crown Hill. Alexander died in 1895, childless.

John and Gladys O'Brien have been reporting activity since the 1960s, when they leased the place and ran an antique business out of it. Foul smells without a source. Spoons flying off tables. Doors and wall hangings moving. Voices in empty rooms. In the first bedroom at the top of the stairs, visitors have repeatedly described the smell of rotting flesh, sudden, strong, and gone. A rocking chair on the front porch that rocks by itself, observed by multiple people over multiple years, with no wind to explain it.

A man in a black suit walks the upstairs hall. Most people who see him think it's Alexander. A woman appears in a second-floor window to people standing in the yard. In the upper bedrooms, guests have described a baby or small child in the room with them, sometimes bumping into their legs, sometimes just a presence. The Hannahs' stillborn daughter is the obvious answer if you're looking for one. In the basement, investigators have described being grabbed on the forearm by an unseen hand.

The Hannah House was sold in 1899 to Roman Oehler, a Württemberg immigrant and Civil War veteran. His daughter Romena married Marion Elder, which is how the property became the Hannah-Oehler-Elder House on the National Register of Historic Places on December 1, 1978. It now hosts overnight paranormal investigations from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., and the Paranormal Meet and Greet has been running annual research events there since 2008.

The Hannah House basement is bad enough on its own. Neighbors have described partially collapsed tunnels on adjacent property whose trajectory could support an Underground Railroad story. Nobody has published an archaeological survey. Until somebody does, the tunnel rumor lives in the same folder as the fire. The rocking chair is real. The stillborn baby is real. The rest can wait for evidence.