In Brief
The James Allison Mansion at Marian University in Indianapolis keeps two ghosts: the millionaire who built it, and a little girl said to have drowned in the basement pool. People still hear her cry near it. No record of any drowning has ever surfaced.
The Full Story
The James Allison Mansion sits on the Marian University campus in Indianapolis, and the story people tell about it is about a little girl who cried in the basement. She's said to have drowned in the indoor swimming pool down there, and visitors report hearing her near the old pool, feeling the air go cold, watching objects move on their own.
There's no record any child ever drowned at the house. No name, no date, no newspaper line. By some accounts she was an infant who fell in. The crying is the most-told story here, and there is nothing under it.
The pool itself was real, and so was the man who put it in. James Allison built the estate, then called Riverdale, between 1910 and 1914, on 64 acres on a bluff above Crooked Creek, with spring-fed lakes, four miles of footpaths and bridle paths, and a staff of 28 to keep it. The house earned a nickname: the House of Wonders. The basement pool was one piece of it. There was an elevator, a central vacuum system, a telephone intercom, closets that lit themselves when you opened them, ice water pumped through the walls, an aviary on the first floor. Allison had the money for all of it. He co-founded the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909, and Prest-O-Lite, which made acetylene headlights, before that. He hired one architect to build it, dismissed him halfway through, and brought in another to finish.
He didn't live to see it pass on. Allison died of pneumonia on August 3, 1928, at 55, and was buried across town at Crown Hill. The Sisters of St. Francis bought Riverdale in 1936, and it became part of Marian the next year. Today the restored mansion is the university's conference center and the home of the president's office, and the grounds Allison laid out are a 55-acre wetland the campus walks through.
Allison is the second ghost. He's been called the most haunted thing in Indianapolis, and the reports tied to him are smaller than the girl's: missing items, books moved out of order, voices with no one speaking. The rich man who can't leave the house he built.
The accounts that survive are thin. One visitor wrote up voices in the attic, objects moving on their own, an EMF meter spiking into the hundreds near the lower basement and at a basement window. There's no named team, no published investigation, no report with a date on it. Just the readings, and the cold, and the crying.
So the mansion carries two hauntings at once. One is the man, documented down to the day he died. The other is a child whose death may never have happened, still crying near a pool a century on.
