In Brief
In 1997 the abandoned Nicholson-Rand House was lifted onto a trailer and hauled down Southport Road in Indianapolis to save it from demolition. A photographer caught the move, and his picture shows a blond girl in a blue dress at an upstairs window of an empty house.
The Full Story
The Nicholson-Rand House in Indianapolis is the reason a lot of locals know there's a ghost story attached to it at all, and that reason is a single photograph.
In April 1997, the house was abandoned and condemned. The Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana had bought a parcel half a mile away, near Southport and Mann Roads, and rather than let the place be demolished, they jacked it up onto a trailer and rolled it down the road. An Indianapolis newspaper photographer named Mike Fender shot the move for the front page. In the picture, a small figure stands at the center second-story window, looking down at the workers below: blond hair, a blue dress, the shape of a little girl. The house was empty. No one was inside it, and no one had been for years.
Fender never bought it himself. "A reflection, a piece of fabric or something," he said of his first reaction. "No way it could be a little girl." When the photo ran in print, he looked again. "It did look like it could be a little girl," he said, "but I was sure it wasn't." Years later he guessed it might have been a window screen. He shot thousands of pictures after that one and never settled it. But the photo ran, and the story started, and people have told it ever since.
The house was finer than most before any of that. David Nicholson, a stonemason from Scotland, finished it in 1876 in the Gothic Revival style, with decorated brackets and a cluster of dormers. Nicholson had laid the cornerstone of the Marion County Courthouse a few years earlier, and the floor tile in three of the rooms matches the courthouse tile exactly, as if some of the same material went into both. After he sold it in 1879 the house passed to Allison Remy, then to the Rand family in 1903, then to DePauw University, and by the 1970s it sat empty.
The girl isn't the only thing people report. The story attaches a second apparition to the place, a benign woman, described as separate from the child. Who the girl is supposed to be, no record says. The tale is that a child died in an accident nearby, but it's a tale, not a name on any document. Just a figure at the window of a house that was empty, watching the men who came to move it.
