In Brief
Deep in Indiana's Morgan-Monroe State Forest, a woman in black is said to sit by a baby's grave at Stepp Cemetery, mourning a lost child. Two folklorists once cataloged 27 versions of her. The grave under all of them belongs to a stillborn infant.
The Full Story
At Stepp Cemetery, a clearing of graves reached on foot through oak scrub in Indiana's Morgan-Monroe State Forest, the story is the Woman in Black. Locals tell it that a woman dressed all in black sits on a tree stump at the edge of the cemetery, drawn to a baby's grave, humming to a child who isn't there.
People have told it so many ways that it became scholarship. In 1972, two folklorists, William Clements and William Lightfoot, published a paper in *Indiana Folklore* cataloging 27 distinct versions circulating among Indiana students. In some she's a grieving mother; in others a witch, or a disfigured living woman, or a ghost. The grave she's tied to shifts too: a husband, a daughter, an infant.
The stump grew its own curse. They came to call it the Warlock's Chair, and the story goes that anyone who sits on it dies within a year. The original stump is gone now, rotted or burned depending on who tells it, and the one tourists point to at the baby's grave isn't the real one anyway.
The grave is. It reads "Baby Lester, 1937." Unlike the rest of the lore, that one has a paper trail. He was Paul Lester, stillborn to Harley and O'Leatha Lester of Morgan County, and the local *Reporter-Times* ran three lines about him on July 6, 1937: "The infant, stillborn this morning to Mr. and Mrs. Harley Lester, was buried this afternoon in the Steppe cemetery."
Those three lines are the whole of him on the record. A stillborn son, buried the same afternoon. Everything else, the woman, the wolves, the curse, grew up around a grave that holds an infant who lived no part of a day. The cemetery around it isn't even the lonely handful of stones the legend trades on. Genealogists have transcribed more than a hundred burials there, the oldest a War of 1812 veteran named Isaac Hartsock who died in 1851. Legend-trippers only ever notice the small cluster near the baby.
At least one stretch of the sightings has a confessed author. In 1966, a man named John Findley admitted he and a friend had spent nights out there fooling visitors, howling like wolves, shaking the bushes, staging phantoms in the dark. Some of what people swore they saw at Stepp Cemetery was two pranksters in the trees.
Visitors still leave toys on the grave. The marker has been vandalized for decades, replaced at least twice, once carried off and found broken in Bloomington before someone cemented it down. And the Lesters who are left have said they don't find any of it charming. They wish people would let the baby alone.
