Mounds State Park

Pukwudgies, goblin-like folklore the Lenape warned about, still get reported at Mounds State Park's 2,000-year-old ceremonial earthworks.

The Lenape called them Puk-wud-ies. Two to three feet tall, grayish skin that sometimes glowed in the dark, with enlarged noses and ears and fingers that looked wrong. They could turn invisible, start fires with a thought, and lure hikers off the trail if they felt like it. Paul Startzman was ten years old in 1927 when he said he met one near the mounds, "a little man half his size" with "dull blonde hair that covered his head like a helmet, which left his round ears to protrude." He spent the rest of his life looking for them. He wrote a book about it: The Pukwudgies of Indiana.

Mounds State Park sits on 251 acres along the White River outside Anderson, and the ten earthworks the park is named for are very old. The Adena people started building them around 160 BCE. The Hopewell kept using them until about 50 CE. The Great Mound, the biggest one, stretches 390 feet across, with a circular embankment nine feet high aligned to astronomical events that the people who built it tracked obsessively. The Lenape (Delaware) lived on this land later, and it's their oral tradition that seeded the Pukwudgie story. The U.S. forced them out around 1818. The stories stayed.

The Indiana Historical Society takes the folklore seriously enough to document it. In 2020 they published Cheyenne Grimes's piece on Pukwudgies, which lays out Startzman's account and also a woman identified only as Eloise H., a resident of an Anderson nursing home who said "a group of little people" approached her, curious, speaking in high-pitched voices in a language she couldn't understand. The Pukwudgie accounts aren't scary. They're weird. The entities aren't hostile, they're just present, interested in the humans wandering through their territory.

Then there's the Bronnenberg House.

Frederick Bronnenberg Jr. built the house in the mid-to-late 1800s for his family, German immigrants who settled on this land and stayed for generations. The house still stands inside the park, and Indiana's DNR runs Haunted Halloween tours through it every October.

Visitors say Mrs. Bronnenberg watches from the windows when the house is empty. The Herald-Bulletin of Anderson collected accounts of "a woman in the dressing mirror in full stage makeup, children running, things thrown from the balcony." Indiana Paranormal investigators working the house picked up what they described as two distinct presences: an older Black man in period clothing tied to the family's history, and an older gentleman in a black suit with a vest and gold pocket watch chain, balding, with facial hair, who seemed worried about the house's preservation.

Kayla Moriarty, a staff writer for The Owl, investigated the house herself. She reported feeling unwatched and unwelcome on the upper floor. A black garment hanging in Ransom and Sarah's Room moved when there was no air moving in the room. Her camera kept refusing to focus in specific spots. Not everywhere. Just certain rooms, the same rooms every time. Her write-up is careful, skeptical, and her conclusion is basically: something is off in this house, I can't tell you what.

The strangest claim at Mounds isn't the house or the Pukwudgies. It's the time loss. Hikers say they spend what feels like two hours on the trails near the Great Mound and come out to find six hours gone. Watches read fine. Phones read fine. The sun has just moved four hours further than it should have. Visitors keep describing it, unprompted, in different trail sections, in different seasons, in nearly identical terms.