Читать книгу More Haunted Hoosier Trails - Wanda Lou Willis - Страница 23

LAGRANGE COUNTY

THE COUNTY was organized in 1832 and named for Marquis de Lafayette’s country home near Paris. The county seat, Lagrange, was platted in 1836.

Lagrange County is home to the Pigeon River State Fish and Wildlife Area headquarters, just east of the town of Mongo. Created in the 1950s, the 11,500-acre state facility contains marshes, hydraulic dams, and a one-hundred-acre nature preserve featuring the largest tamarack bog forest in Indiana. The facility also offers state-regulated fishing and hunting, camping, canoeing, picnicking, bird watching, and mushroom and berry picking.

A large Amish population now inhabits Lagrange County, and Shipshewana is a bustling center for buying and selling Amish goods. The town was founded in 1889 and named after Chief Shipshewana, leader of the Potawatomi Indians who lived in the area.

She Still Waits

Lagrange County, founded in 1832, was still sparsely inhabited when a young couple from New York settled on land somewhere between Howe and Cedar Lake. They built a sturdy three-story home out of bricks delivered from Fort Wayne. The home featured a tall, castle-like turret towering above its roof.

The couple lived in tranquility until the Civil War erupted. Perhaps hoping they were too far removed from the war, they stayed to themselves. But one day, the husband was called to duty as an officer in the Union Army. They were childless, and when the husband left, the young wife found herself alone and isolated. It is said she spent most of her days in the turret, watching the countryside, and hoping to see her husband on his horse riding home to her.

Day after day, she watched. Unwilling to cease her vigil even when night came, she began sitting in the turret with a lamp lit hoping to see her husband, illuminated by the moon, riding toward home. Finally her worst fear came true on that fateful day when she received word that he had been killed. She now felt totally alone and forsaken. She retreated further into herself and her home, never venturing out, grieving herself into insanity and death.

The house stayed vacant for years, but before it disappeared from the landscape, people in the area said that at night, if the wind was just right, they could hear the woman moaning, and crying out her husband’s name. Some people even professed to see a light in the turret window.

Of course, this is only a story people tell—especially around Halloween. Or is it?