Indiana Statehouse

Three Statehouse ghosts: a mail cart employee who fell from the fourth floor, a 19th-century stable worker in the basement, and the Ghost Lady.

The squeaky wheels are the worst part. Staff working late on the upper floors of the Indiana Statehouse hear a mail cart rolling behind them on marble floors, dry axle-squeal and all. When they turn around, nothing. The ghost everyone talks about at the Indiana Statehouse is a mailroom employee who went over the fourth-floor balcony with his cart, either a fall or a jump depending on who tells it, and he's been pushing the cart ever since.

He's one of three.

Down in the basement, workers hear horses. Specifically, horses whinnying, which is not a sound you expect to hear in the lower levels of a state capitol building in 2026. The story anchoring the noise is an early-operational-era accident where a blacksmith's horse spooked and killed a worker outright. The building had stables then. It doesn't now. The whinnies kept coming.

And on the upper floors, a woman in a long 19th-century gown shows up and then doesn't. Visitors see her, employees see her, nobody has ever identified her. Staff just call her the Ghost Lady. She appears, she vanishes, witnesses stand there afterward trying to figure out if they imagined it. The Statehouse also has a drifting gray orb that people have watched move through the rotunda before blinking out.

The building itself is worth the story. Indianapolis architect Edwin May won the commission in early 1878, his design chosen from 27 competing submissions. Renaissance Revival, cruciform plan, central domed rotunda, Indiana limestone outside and sky-lit interior courts inside, inspired by Thomas U. Walter's U.S. Capitol. May never saw it finished. He'd been ill for years, and in February 1880, not long after construction began, he died on a trip to Florida. His chief draftsman Adolf Scherrer took over and finished the building over the next eight years. The Statehouse opened in 1888 at a cost of $2 million.

It's been home to the Indiana House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Court of Appeals ever since. An $11 million restoration from 1986 to 1988 stripped out a century of piecemeal alterations and brought the original 1888 interior back. A building this heavily reworked and continuously occupied for 138 years is going to accumulate stories. The Statehouse has accumulated three specific ones.

The mailroom employee on the upper floors. The horse in the basement. The Ghost Lady also upstairs. Each ghost is tied to a plausible or at least plausible-sounding incident from the building's first few decades, before workers' compensation and OSHA and the basement being a place for mechanical systems instead of horses. US Ghost Adventures runs Statehouse tours that walk visitors through all three. Night staff volunteer the same three ghosts before anyone asks. The cart, the horses, and the Lady are the ones that keep showing up.

The spiral staircase up to the fourth floor is the spot most staff avoid after hours. The squeaky cart starts rolling when the building empties out, dry axle grinding across marble toward the balcony nobody wants to lean over.