Reeder Road

Paranormal investigator Dale Kaczmarek went to Reeder Road in 2016 and found no record of Elizabeth Wilson at Ross Cemetery. None.

Reeder Road is not really a road anymore. It's a crumbling asphalt path through the swamp between Griffith and Merrillville, closed to cars since the 1970s, overgrown on both sides, and the center of just about every ghost story Northwest Indiana has produced in the last fifty years. The best part about Reeder Road is that a professional paranormal investigator went out there in 2016 and concluded, on the record, that almost none of it holds up.

Dale Kaczmarek of Indiana Ghost Research led a team of seven out there on June 27, 2016. They brought a ghost box, an Ovilus, digital recorders, and cameras. The centerpiece legend is Elizabeth Wilson, a young woman who supposedly drowned in the swamp and now rides in the passenger seat of whoever picks her up along the road, vanishing when the car passes Ross Cemetery. Sometimes the seat is wet when she goes. Kaczmarek's team got two apparent ghost box hits near the railroad tracks: "I thank you," and a "Yes" to the question "Does anyone know Elizabeth Wilson?" Two hits. That was the whole take.

Kaczmarek's conclusion, in his own words: "most, if not all, the stories that circulate this forgotten highway to be that of urban legends since none were able to be validated." He couldn't find burial records for Elizabeth Wilson in Ross Cemetery. He couldn't find any record of the railroad engineer who supposedly fell from a train in the 1940s and whose silhouette is said to walk the nearby tracks at night. He couldn't find the old church where the phantom screams are supposed to originate. None of the cornerstone stories survived a records check.

The Mafia story is slightly more plausible as background, less as ghosts. Northwest Indiana in the 1930s did in fact serve as a convenient disposal ground for Chicago Outfit killings. Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago sit a short drive from the Loop, and the swamp along Reeder Road would hide a body about as well as any swamp could. Mike McDowell of Chaos Haunted Tours claims he's recorded voices on ghost-hunting equipment out there answering questions "using mob lingo." Whether that means much depends on how generous you want to be with ghost-hunting equipment.

The 1980s added another layer of story. McDowell grew up hearing that biker gangs stretched piano wire across the road at neck height, so that anyone riding a snowmobile through at night would be decapitated. That one has the exact shape of a Satanic Panic rumor, the kind that moves through a high school lunchroom and gets reported as fact in the local paper. Nobody has produced a victim.

What people actually see out there is more modest. Will-o'-the-wisps over the swamp, which are a real natural phenomenon caused by methane and phosphine gas. Misty apparitions that might be apparitions or might be fog rising off standing water. Footsteps that start when you walk and stop when you stop. A sense of being watched, which every dense piece of swamp on earth generates at night regardless of ghosts. A phantom train the Chicago ghost hunter Richard Crowe claimed to have heard along the nearby park tracks.

Kaczmarek's team didn't log any unexplained experiences during their daytime visit. They attributed the spooky atmosphere to heat and insects.

So what's Reeder Road, really? It's a legitimately creepy place with a legend that doesn't check out, a Mafia history that probably includes some bodies, and a modern reputation as the place teenagers in Griffith dare each other to walk after midnight. Walk it once and you'll come out with muddy shoes, a few mosquito bites, and the uneasy sense that some of the old stories were probably real, even if the current versions of them almost certainly aren't.