Nicholson-Rand House

A 1997 photo of the Nicholson-Rand House mid-move caught a small girl staring from an empty upstairs window. She's been the main ghost since.

In 1997, the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana picked up the Nicholson-Rand House and moved it half a mile south along Southport Road to keep it from getting bulldozed. A newspaper photographer covering the move took a shot of the building on its movers. When the photo ran, it showed a small girl looking out of an upstairs window at the workers below. Nobody was inside the house.

That photograph is why most Indianapolis people know this house's name.

The girl is the ghost everyone talks about, though nobody has ever pinned down who she's supposed to be. The story most commonly attached to her is that a child was killed in an accident near the property, but that's a story, not a record. Paranormal investigators have worked the house repeatedly in the decades since the photo ran, and most of them have logged something. A second apparition, a woman described as benign, shows up often enough that people treat her as separate from the girl. There's also an unverified but persistent claim that a boarder hanged himself in an upstairs bedroom during the house's decline, which is where visitors report the smell of rot and, occasionally, what they say looks like blood weeping through the walls.

David Nicholson, a stonemason born in Dumfriesshire in 1823, came to Indianapolis in 1852 and made his name in the firm Scott and Nicholson, which did the stonework on the Marion County Courthouse. He built this house for himself between 1870 and 1876, right after his first wife Marion died and right around a short second marriage that ended in divorce. He sold the property to Allison Remy in 1879. The Rand family had it from 1903, then it passed through descendants until it ended up abandoned by the 1970s. By the 1990s it was looking at a date with the wrecking ball.

It's a standout Gothic Revival house for Marion County, pitched scrollwork and decorated rafter tails and a cluster of dormers off the roofline, drawn off Andrew Jackson Downing's pattern books. It got added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, six years after the move that produced the photograph.

There's also a murkier story about the Underground Railroad. Some accounts say the Nicholson House, like the better-known Hannah House not far away, served as a stop for escaped slaves, and that a group hiding in the basement died when the space caught fire, and that the family sealed the basement off afterward to avoid prosecution. No historical documentation supports any of this, and the parallel to the Hannah House legend is close enough that one story may have lent itself to the other. But people who walk the house have reported screams, which is either the lingering trace of a real event that nobody ever wrote down or the pressure of a story told long enough to stick.

Since the 1997 photograph, the house has been listed for sale a few times. The haunted reputation goes with it every time.