In Brief
The Story Inn in Nashville, Indiana keeps a ghost called the Blue Lady, who appears when the blue nightstand lamp is switched on. The proof isn't a sighting. It's the guest books, where strangers decades apart wrote down the same woman.
The Full Story
The Story Inn in Nashville, Indiana keeps a room called the Blue Lady Room, and the lore is exact about how she arrives. Switch on the blue nightstand lamp. The smell of cherry pipe tobacco fills the room first. Then a woman in a flowing white gown appears near the bed, or in the dresser mirror, or as a reflection in the dark window, watching you with icy blue eyes.
Staff believe she's Jane Story, wife of the village founder, Dr. George Story, though no record confirms a wife by that name ever existed. The identity is an inference from the scent, the cherry tobacco she was said to favor in life. She is also said to leave blue things behind, ribbons and small items, that guests insist they didn't bring with them.
The room sits above the original general store, which is the restaurant now, and the inn keeps a guest book in every room for people to write down what happened to them. When one fills up it goes to the attic and a fresh one takes its place.
That practice is where the story gets harder to wave off. When Rick Hofstetter, an Indianapolis attorney, bought the entire town of Story at a 1999 sheriff's sale, the old guest books came with it. Reading through them, he found accounts of the same ghostly woman written decades apart, by strangers who never met and couldn't have read each other's entries. The descriptions matched.
In December 2005, a team from Hoosier Paranormal spent a night in the building. They logged orbs, doors opening and closing on their own, and objects sliding off shelves. They attributed the activity to the Blue Lady and to a second presence, male, that they couldn't identify and couldn't explain.
The town behind her was nearly lost. Dr. George Story received a land patent for the land here in 1851, and by the early 1900s the village around it had grown into the largest settlement in that corner of Brown County: two general stores, a sawmill, a slaughterhouse, a one-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith, a post office, a church. Then the Depression emptied it. Brown County's population fell by roughly half between 1930 and 1940 as families left for work, and Story slid toward ghost-town status before two men bought the whole place to keep it from disappearing.
The inn is still open, more than a century after Jane Story is supposed to have lived in it. The lamp gets switched on. The cherry tobacco arrives. And the guest books keep filling, one room at a time, with strangers setting down the same blue-eyed woman they had no way of knowing about.
