Story Inn

In 2003 Story Inn owner Rick Hofstetter read decades of guest books and found strangers describing the same Blue Lady. Cherry tobacco is the tell.

When Rick Hofstetter bought the Story Inn in 2003, he started reading the guest books. The old ones, going back decades. What he found is the single most useful piece of evidence in this case. Strangers staying in the same upstairs bedroom ten, twenty, thirty years apart had written down the same specific encounter, in nearly the same language, with a woman in a white gown and striking blue eyes who appeared when the blue nightstand lamp was on. They couldn't have read each other's entries. They didn't know each other. They all smelled cherry tobacco when she was there.

Her name, per staff consensus, is Jane Story, wife of Dr. George Story, who founded the tiny Brown County village of Story in 1851 as a farming community around his general store. Mrs. Story smoked cherry-scented pipe tobacco in life, which is why the scent is the tell. She doesn't announce herself. The smell shows up first, then she does.

The Blue Lady Room sits above the original general store, which is still the spine of the building. She appears at the foot of the bed, in the dresser mirror, or as a reflection in the dark window next to the bed. Sometimes she makes eye contact. Sometimes she just wanders the room like she owns it, which she kind of did. Hofstetter mentions blue ribbons turning up on the floor in the morning that guests swear they didn't bring. That detail shows up in accounts across years.

Story the town has maybe ten year-round residents. During its peak in the late 1800s it was the biggest settlement in that corner of Brown County: two general stores, a sawmill, a slaughterhouse, a schoolhouse, a blacksmith, a post office, a church. The railroad and the highways routed around it. By the 1930s it was close to a ghost town. A couple reopened the general store as an inn in the 1970s, and Hofstetter took over in 2003 and ran with the haunting rather than hiding it.

On December 27, 2005, the Hoosier Paranormal investigation group set up equipment overnight. They logged orbs, doors opening on their own, and objects sliding off shelves. They also reported a second presence alongside the Blue Lady: a male figure they couldn't identify. The second ghost theory has never fully caught on, but it keeps coming up in investigation notes from other teams too.

Fox 59 ran the Story Inn as one of the Indianapolis area's most haunted locations. In 2024, a documentary called Paranormal Adventures 3: The Haunted Story Inn devoted its whole runtime to the place. The Blue Lady Room books out months ahead most seasons, and it's also the room Hofstetter gets asked about by name.

Some of this is tour polish. The guest book evidence isn't. Strangers twenty years apart describing the same woman in the same gown, in writing, independently, is a harder thing to dismiss than a one-off sighting.

The guest books still live at the front desk. Hofstetter adds every new entry to the stack.