James Allison Mansion

Marian University's 1914 "House of Wonders" holds an infant who drowned in the basement pool, plus Allison himself, who rearranges the library.

James Allison's house had an indoor swimming pool in the basement, and the crying comes from the drain. An infant supposedly fell in and drowned, and visitors at what's now Marian University still hear her from the old pool plumbing, even though the pool itself was converted into an eco-lab years ago. Students who cut through that part of the building describe a sudden temperature drop near the eco-lab and a crying girl they can't place.

Allison himself is said to still be in the house. Books in the library get reorganized overnight. Furniture gets moved. Objects go missing and reappear in rooms they weren't in. Staff and visitors hear voices from the attic and crying near the basement drain. People who walk into the lower basement say they feel watched.

The house is worth the story on its own. Allison built Riverdale between 1911 and 1914 on a 64-acre estate overlooking Crooked Creek, and the Indianapolis papers took to calling it the House of Wonders. It had an elevator, a central vacuum system, a telephone intercom, automatically lighted closets, pumped-in ice water, an indoor basement pool, and indirect lighting engineered into the ceilings. The shell was reinforced concrete with a red brick exterior, Arts and Crafts inside, built with Prohibition-era industrialist money and a long list of features to show it.

Allison was worth that money. Born in Michigan in 1872, he co-founded the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909 with Carl Fisher, Frank Wheeler, and Arthur Newby. The first 500-mile race followed in 1911. Before the Speedway he'd invented the Allison Perfection Fountain Pen. He co-founded Prest-O-Lite, which put compressed acetylene in car headlights. He founded what became Allison Engineering, which General Motors bought in 1929 and later split into Allison Gas Turbine and Allison Transmission. He caught pneumonia and died in August 1928 at 55.

The Sisters of St. Francis of Oldenburg bought Riverdale in 1936 and turned it into Marian College, which is now Marian University. The mansion has served as library, classrooms, sleeping quarters, and administrative offices over the decades. Today it holds the Office of the President and the Office of Conferences and Events. The stories started almost immediately after Allison's death and haven't really slowed down. The building has been called the most haunted house in Indianapolis, which is a title with some competition in this town, but the House of Wonders is a contender.

What's unusual is that there's no corroborated record of any child actually drowning in the Riverdale pool. The infant-in-the-basement story is one of those pieces of local lore that circulates without a name attached, which is either evidence the story was made up later to explain the crying, or evidence that whatever happened didn't leave a paper trail the way a wealthy industrialist's death would. Both kinds of stories attach to houses like this one: the wealthy owner who can't leave, and the anonymous tragedy that probably never happened but won't go away. Riverdale carries both, and neither has budged in a hundred years.