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The Empty Tomb | Crown Hill Cemetery, Indiana · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:14
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Crown Hill Cemetery, located in Indianapolis, Indiana.
0:25
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:30
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug and cozy up.
0:32
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:35
Kristin: There's something about fall air after a stifling summer that propels many outdoors for crissfall walks.
0:41
Kristin: The perfect Thames have many seeking places to walk and take in the fall foliage.
0:46
Kristin: Not many know about Crown Hill.
0:48
Kristin: Its gates, however, don't hold back on the stunning architecture that meets each visitor crossing its threshold.
0:54
Kristin: At 555 acres, it's the largest cemetery in Indiana and the third largest non-governmental cemetery in the country.
1:03
Kristin: Its residents are as varied as the grounds are sprawling.
1:07
Kristin: A president, three vice presidents, public enemy number one, and the founding fathers of Indiana Racing.
1:13
Kristin: It doesn't fall short of who might be within.
1:16
Kristin: The grounds, though, didn't begin as a place of ghosts and hauntings.
1:20
Kristin: Like many cemeteries, its story began because of a growing city running out of room for its dead.
1:26
Kristin: By the early 1860s, Indianapolis was expanding rapidly.
1:30
Kristin: Its existing cemeteries were overcrowded, and its city's main burial ground, Greenlawn Cemetery, was already feeling the pressure of a population that kept growing.
1:40
Kristin: So in 1863, a group of Indianapolis businessmen and civic leaders, when looking for a new location, they wanted something larger, something outside the growing city, and something that reflected a changing idea of what a cemetery could be.
1:53
Kristin: They found it on a piece of land known as Strawberry Hill.
1:57
Kristin: Northwest of the city, the property sat high above the surrounding landscape, with sweeping views of Indianapolis below.
2:03
Kristin: Its highest point would become known as simply the Crown, and it was here that Crown Cemetery began.
2:09
Kristin: The founders though weren't interested in a simple burial ground.
2:12
Kristin: They were inspired by the park-like cemeteries of Europe, including Pierre Lachey in Paris.
2:17
Kristin: So they hired John Chislett, a landscape architect from Pittsburgh, to design the grounds.
2:23
Kristin: Instead of straight roads and tightly packed graves, Chislet lay Crown Hill out along the natural landscape.
2:29
Kristin: Its roads curved through the rolling hills, trees and natural features were preserved.
2:34
Kristin: The idea was a place where the living could come not only to mourn, but to walk, reflect, and spend time among the dead.
2:41
Kristin: Crown Hill was officially dedicated on June 1st, in 1864.
2:45
Kristin: Its first burial was Lucy Ann Seaton, a 33-year-old mother who had died from consumption.
2:51
Kristin: From here, the cemetery grew quickly.
2:54
Kristin: It was a cemetery though built at a time when death was impossible to ignore.
2:58
Kristin: The Civil War was still raging, and communities across the country were mourning their dead.
3:04
Kristin: At Crown Hill, those losses would become part of the landscape itself.
3:08
Kristin: But what makes the ground so unusual is that it was never meant only for grief.
3:12
Kristin: In the 19th century, people came here to picnic, take carriage rides, and walk in the winding roads.
3:18
Kristin: Families visited simply to enjoy the landscape and the view of the city from atop of the crown.
3:23
Kristin: It may seem strange to us now, but at the time cemeteries like Ground Hill were among the few places people could experience something resembling a public park.
3:33
Kristin: Of course, this particular park came with monuments, mausoleums, and graves.
3:38
Kristin: Over the years, Gothic structures were added throughout the grounds, including a chapel designed by Indianapolis architect Dietrich A.
3:45
Kristin: Bolin.
3:46
Kristin: Architects and artists kept shaping the landscape, turning Crown Hill into something far larger than its founders may have imagined.
3:53
Kristin: Today it holds more than 225,000 graves.
3:57
Kristin: By 1866, the Civil War had been over for a year, but Indianapolis was still living with the aftermath.
4:04
Kristin: Soldiers who died in the camps and hospitals around the city had been buried at Greenlawn Cemetery.
4:09
Kristin: On August 27, 1866, Crown Hill offered a 1.4-acre plot, known as Section 10, to the state to use as a national cemetery.
4:19
Kristin: Governor Oliver P.
4:20
Kristin: Morton accepted on the state's behalf, and Congress paid to bring the Union dead to their new home.
4:25
Kristin: Morton himself will later be buried at Crown Hill, one of the ten Indiana governors who now rest here.
4:31
Kristin: That October, the government hired local undertaker William Weaver to oversee the transfer.
4:36
Kristin: His men relocated the remains of 712 soldiers from Greenlawn, including 217 United States Colored Troops.
4:44
Kristin: Just try to picture that.
4:46
Kristin: Hundreds of graves opened, hundreds of soldiers carried across the city all within a matter of weeks.
4:52
Kristin: Two years later, on May 30, 1863, crowds gathered here for one of the nation's first Memorial Day observances.
5:00
Kristin: It has been held at Crown Hill ever since.
5:03
Kristin: Today the National Cemetery is a small footprint within the larger grounds, but it now holds more than 2,000 veterans and their dependents.
5:11
Kristin: It's a minor part of the cemetery by Acreage, yet it carries a tremendous amount of history.
5:16
Kristin: And history took an unexpected turn here because Crown Hill eventually became the final resting place for soldiers from both sides of the Civil War.
5:24
Kristin: Just north of Indianapolis was Camp Morton, a prison camp for captured Confederate soldiers and sailors.
5:30
Kristin: More than 1,600 of them died there.
5:34
Kristin: They too were buried at Greenlawn, but their story didn't end there.
5:38
Kristin: By the 1930s, industry was closing in around the old cemetery, and the Confederate graves had to be moved.
5:45
Kristin: In the 1930s, those remains were brought to Crown Hill and buried in a mass grave in Section 32.
5:51
Kristin: Today that site is simply known as the Confederate Mound.
5:54
Kristin: In 1993, ten bronze plaques were added, listing the names of 1,616 Confederate soldiers and sailors who died at Camp Morton.
6:04
Kristin: These men had been enemies in life, fighting for opposing causes.
6:08
Kristin: More than 60 years after the war, they were brought into the same cemetery as the Union soldiers, still separated by the cemetery's layout, but sharing the same grounds.
6:17
Kristin: Crown Hill's military history, though, didn't end with a civil war.
6:21
Kristin: More than a century later it added a section honoring veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
6:27
Kristin: The Field of Balor was dedicated in 2004, followed by the Eternal Flame in Eagle Plaza the next year.
6:33
Kristin: You can now walk through Crown Hill and see generations of American military history in one place.
6:39
Kristin: Eventually the military sections give way though to something different.
6:42
Kristin: Trees and lots of them.
6:44
Kristin: Crown Hill is home to more than 11,000 trees, representing 137 species.
6:50
Kristin: Deer wander the grounds, birds nest in its branches, and smaller animals make their homes among the monuments.
6:57
Kristin: In 2022, Crown Hill was accredited as a level two oberedum.
7:01
Kristin: It's not just a barren place frozen in time.
7:04
Kristin: It's constantly changing.
7:06
Kristin: Trees grow, animals move through, seasons come and go, and all the while the people buried here remain beneath it.
7:13
Kristin: You can be walking past a row of old graves and suddenly realize you're under a canopy of trees, listening to birds instead of traffic.
7:21
Kristin: Then when you look down and remember that beneath your feet are generations of people who once lived in the city around you.
7:27
Kristin: And scattered throughout that landscape are some incredible works of art.
7:31
Kristin: The Forest Memorial tells a deeply personal story.
7:34
Kristin: Albertina Allen Forrest died in 1904, and her husband Jacob commissioned Venezuela's sculptor Rudolf Schwartz to create a monument for her grave.
7:43
Kristin: The result was a statue in repose, a woman kneeling and mourning.
7:48
Kristin: He lost the woman he loved, and instead of a simple headstone, he commissioned a sculpture that would keep mourning her after he was gone too.
7:56
Kristin: And that's exactly what it's done.
7:58
Kristin: Jacob died in 1930 and was buried beside her.
8:01
Kristin: His own grave, though, is unmarked.
8:03
Kristin: Then there are statues that aren't connected to a grave at all.
8:06
Kristin: Three limestone figures in the Greek goddesses of Themes, Demeter, and Persephone once stood outside the old Marion County Courthouse.
8:14
Kristin: When the courthouse was demolished in 1962, they were saved, and eventually brought to the grounds.
8:20
Kristin: Now these ancient goddesses stand among the graves.
8:23
Kristin: The more you learn about Crown Hill, the more it feels like you're walking through a piece of Indianapolis itself.
8:29
Kristin: Soldiers brought here when the burial grounds disappeared.
8:32
Kristin: Confederate prisoners moved decades after they died.
8:35
Kristin: Families commissioning sculptures to express a grief they couldn't put into words, even pieces of a demolished courthouse.
8:42
Kristin: And that's what I find so fascinating about old cemeteries.
8:45
Kristin: They're never just about the people underground.
8:48
Kristin: They're also about the people who buried them, the people who remembered them, and the people who came along generations later and decided their stories were worth keeping.
8:57
Kristin: Some of these stories are easy to overlook.
8:59
Kristin: In 1978, the Indiana University School of Medicine purchased a section of the cemetery for cremated remains of people who donated their bodies to medical science.
9:10
Kristin: A memorial now stands here, and more than a thousand donors have been recognized.
9:14
Kristin: People who chose to keep helping others after their own lives had ended.
9:19
Kristin: The Indiana AIDS Memorial was dedicated in 2000, the first prominent AIDS Memorial located in the cemetery.
9:26
Kristin: It sits in a wooded section among older graves, a place to remember people who died during an epidemic that brought only devastating loss, but fear and stigma.
9:35
Kristin: The Heroes and Public Safety Monument honors police officers, firefighters, and other first responders who died on the line of duty.
9:43
Kristin: And perhaps most heartbreaking is the Hearts Remembered, dedicated in 2006 to Indianapolis children who were orphaned or abandoned or later died.
9:53
Kristin: Many of them buried without a marker.
9:55
Kristin: Not everyone within the grounds had a family able to afford a monument or even a headstone.
10:00
Kristin: Some arrived with grand memorials that have survived for generations.
10:04
Kristin: Others were nearly forgotten.
10:06
Kristin: Once you though start looking at who is buried at Crown Hill, you realize how much of Indianapolis's history sits behind those gates.
10:13
Kristin: And let's start with power.
10:15
Kristin: Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President of the United States, was born into a political family and followed that path himself.
10:22
Kristin: Serving in the U.S.
10:23
Kristin: Senate before becoming a president in 1889.
10:26
Kristin: His presidency is remembered for the admission of six new states and the Sherman Antitrust Act.
10:32
Kristin: After the White House, he came home and went back to practicing law.
10:36
Kristin: When he died in 1901, he was buried beside his first wife, Carolyn.
10:40
Kristin: His second wife, Mary, rests here too.
10:43
Kristin: His remains are the only president buried at Crown Hill.
10:46
Kristin: But the grounds hold three vice presidents, Thomas A.
10:49
Kristin: Hendricks, who served as governor of Indiana, and then as vice president under Grover Cleveland, for only about eight months.
10:56
Kristin: He died in November of 1885, just as Crown Hill's new Gothic gate and waiting station, designed by Adolph Schurer, was completed.
11:04
Kristin: His funeral procession was among the first to pass through them.
11:07
Kristin: Charles W.
11:08
Kristin: Fairbanks, who served under Theodore Roosevelt, is also within, and Thomas Riley Marshall, vice president under Woodrow Wilson, who is remembered for his dry humor and his most famous line, What this country needs is a good five cent cigar.
11:22
Kristin: I had ten Indiana governors, fourteen Indianapolis mayors, and more than a dozen Civil War generals, and the political roll call runs deep.
11:31
Kristin: Then there are the builders.
11:32
Kristin: Colonel Eli Lilly served as a Union officer in the Civil War, and in 1876 he opened a small pharmaceutical business in Indianapolis.
11:42
Kristin: It became Eli Lilly and Company, one of the largest drug makers in the world today.
11:47
Kristin: Brothers August and Frederick Dusenberg built some of the most advanced and extravagant cars for their era.
11:53
Kristin: So much that a doucy came to mean something exceptional.
11:56
Kristin: And you can't talk about Indianapolis without talking about Indianapolis Motors Speedway.
12:00
Kristin: Four of its founders are buried here: Carl Fisher, James A.
12:04
Kristin: Allison, Frank Wheeler, and Arthur Newby.
12:07
Kristin: Fisher was a promoter through and through.
12:09
Kristin: Beyond the Speedway, he upgrade the Lincoln Highway and developed Miami Beach.
12:14
Kristin: He died when Florida became home to the family mausoleum at Crown Hill.
12:18
Kristin: And then there are the writers and artists.
12:20
Kristin: James Wickham Riley, the Hoosier poet, who became famous for a verse written in the dialect of everyday Indiana life.
12:28
Kristin: Poems like Little Orphan Annie and The Raggedy Man made him a household name, and he toured the country giving readings to packed halls.
12:36
Kristin: When he died in 1916, more than 35,000 people filed past his casket at the Indiana State House.
12:44
Kristin: His body waited in Crown Hill's vault for more than a year while his family debated where he should rest.
12:50
Kristin: Indianapolis wanted him, his hometown Greenfield also wanted him, though.
12:54
Kristin: Then Crown Hill offered something hard to refuse, the Crown itself.
12:59
Kristin: The summit of the cemetery.
13:00
Kristin: On October 6, 1917, Riley became the only person buried there.
13:05
Kristin: His monument still looks out over the city.
13:08
Kristin: Booth Tarkinton, the Pulser Prize-winning author of the magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, wrote about the ambitions and changing fortunes of Midwestern lives.
13:17
Kristin: Ether Ridge Wright's story, though, is very different.
13:21
Kristin: He began writing poetry while in prison, and after his release, his work, shaped by poverty, incarceration, racism, and addiction, became an important voice for the black arts movement.
13:32
Kristin: Then came the people who broke barriers.
13:34
Kristin: James Basket, best known as Uncle Remus in Disney's Song of the South, became the first African American to receive an Academy Award, an honorary Oscar in 1948.
13:45
Kristin: The film itself has been long criticized for its romanticized portrayal of plantation life, and the accounts say Beckett didn't attend its 1946 premiere in segregated Atlanta, though exactly why is still debated.
13:58
Kristin: He was honored by Hollywood for a role in a film he may not have been welcome to see premiere.
14:03
Kristin: Bill Garrett helped break a barrier in college sports when he became the first African American to play regularly on a Big Ten basketball team at Indiana Versity in the late 1940s.
14:14
Kristin: His presence on the court changed the color line that still ran through college athletics.
14:19
Kristin: And some people are here for reasons you'd never guess.
14:22
Kristin: Howard Garnes was an Indianapolis architect.
14:25
Kristin: His name might not mean much, but you certainly know what he created.
14:28
Kristin: In the 1970s, he designed the number puzzle the world now knows as Seduco.
14:33
Kristin: And then of course there's John Dillinger.
14:35
Kristin: Dillinger was born in Indianapolis in 1903 and spent much of his early life in trouble.
14:41
Kristin: After a stint in Indiana State Prison, he emerged in the 1930s as one of America's most notorious bank robbers.
14:48
Kristin: His gang hit banks across the Midwest, escaped from the police, and broke associates out of jail, earning him the FBI's title of Public Enemy No.
14:57
Kristin: His story ended outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934, when FBI agents shot him as he left a movie.
15:06
Kristin: Three days later he was buried at Crown Hill.
15:09
Kristin: His grave became a macabre tourist attraction, with so many visitors that the ground around it was reportedly worn down by their footsteps.
15:17
Kristin: A president, three vice presidents, a pharmaceutical pioneer, poets and authors, racing legends, barrier breakers, and one of America's most infamous criminals are all here.
15:28
Kristin: The famous and forgotten lie here together.
15:31
Kristin: Some graves have enormous monuments, some have simple stones, and some have no marker at all.
15:37
Kristin: But the cemetery has found ways to remember.
15:40
Kristin: Step back and look at Crown Hill as a whole, and it becomes a record of Indianapolis itself.
15:46
Kristin: Though one life at a time, the people buried here didn't live the same kind of life, and they didn't leave the same kind of legacy.
15:53
Kristin: But every one of those stories ends in the same place, under the trees behind the gates on Crown Hill.
16:00
Kristin: By now you've heard the real history behind these gates.
16:03
Kristin: But a place this old, this sprawling, doesn't just collect graves, it collects stories.
16:08
Kristin: Crown Hill has a reputation.
16:10
Kristin: Some call it the most haunted cemetery in Indiana.
16:14
Kristin: Others go further and say it's one of the most haunted places in the country.
16:18
Kristin: Whether or not you believe that, the legends haven't passed down for generations, and sometime directly back to the people we've already met.
16:25
Kristin: Somewhere on these grounds stands a tomb that looks as if it's been through a fire.
16:30
Kristin: It's built in Egyptian style out of sandstone, and over the decades its surface has slowly turned dark and scorched.
16:37
Kristin: The name on it belongs to Caleb Bloodsmith, and the story behind the Blackened Stone is one of Ground Hill's oldest legends.
16:44
Kristin: As the tale goes around the turn of the century, members of Indianapolis' African American community would gather at this tomb and light fires.
16:51
Kristin: They believed that one of the conspirators in Lincoln's assassination was buried within, and that as long as those flames kept burning, his spirit would never be able to escape and haunt the city.
17:02
Kristin: But here's the twist no Hoosier was ever implicated in Lincoln's assassination, and Caleb Ludsmith was certainly no conspirator.
17:10
Kristin: In fact, he was Indiana's first member of the presidential cabinet serving as Lincoln's own secretary of the interior.
17:17
Kristin: And by most accounts, he was Lincoln's friend.
17:19
Kristin: And the story gets even stranger, because while his wife and children rest within the tomb, Caleb himself isn't.
17:26
Kristin: His remains have never been found.
17:28
Kristin: So what we're left with is a tomb that bears his name and carries a legend that has nothing to do with him and doesn't even hold his body.
17:36
Kristin: Not every legend here belongs to Crown Hill alone, though.
17:40
Kristin: Some of them are stories you'll hear in cemeteries all across the country, like the tale of the Gypsy King.
17:45
Kristin: Before he died, he's said to have asked his family to leave a bottle of wine on his grave every night.
17:51
Kristin: They kept their promise, and every morning that bottle was gone.
17:55
Kristin: And then there's Crown Hill's version of a ghost story you've probably heard before: The Woman in White, sometimes called the Ghostly Hitchhiker.
18:03
Kristin: It begins on a rainy night near 38th Street and Martin King Luther Jr.
18:07
Kristin: Boulevard, when a young man driving past notices a teenage girl standing alone by the road.
18:12
Kristin: She's soaked through and dressed for a dance, so he pulls over and offers her a ride home.
18:17
Kristin: She climbs in and gives him an address, but by the time he arrives, the seat beside him is empty, and all that's left is dampness where she sat.
18:26
Kristin: Confused, he walks up and knocks on the door to explain, and the woman who answers goes pale as he describes the girl.
18:32
Kristin: That was her daughter, she tells him.
18:35
Kristin: She died on the night of her prom years ago.
18:37
Kristin: It's a classic piece of American folklore, told in dozens of towns with a different local landmark standing in for that street corner, and Crown Hill just happens to be where Indianapolis tells it.
18:48
Kristin: Some of the stories people tell here though lead us back to graves we've already visited.
18:52
Kristin: You may remember Hearts Remembered, the memorial to the city's forgotten children.
18:56
Kristin: It honors 699 children from Indianapolis orphanages and children's homes who died between 1892 and 1990 from disease, neglect, and maltreatment, and every one of them was buried without a headstone.
19:10
Kristin: Over the years, visitors have said that near this part of the cemetery they've heard the sound of children laughing and playing where there are no children anywhere in sight.
19:18
Kristin: Of all the stories told about Crown Hill, this may be the saddest one, because there were children who were nearly forgotten in life, and yet somehow they're still being heard.
19:29
Kristin: Others say they've seen soldiers standing among the graves, men dressed in period uniforms, not only from the Civil War, who are there one moment and simply gone the next, in a cemetery that holds Union dead, Confederate prisoners, and veterans from every war sense that perhaps shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
19:48
Kristin: There are also reports of a woman carrying a baby, wandering slowly between the headstones as though she's lost, trying to find her way home until she quietly disappears.
19:59
Kristin: And along with her, people describe strange lights drifting across the grounds after dark, cold spots near certain family plots that never seem to match the weather, and the sound of footsteps falling close behind them as they walk the pass.
20:13
Kristin: But of all the mysteries at Crown Hill, none has drawn more attention than the grave of John Dillinger.
20:18
Kristin: Earlier I mentioned that his grave has become something of a tourist attraction.
20:22
Kristin: What I didn't tell you is what's said to have happened next.
20:25
Kristin: According to the History of Crown Hill published by the Indiana Historical Society Press, Dillinger's father was so worried about grave robbers and souvenir hunters that he had his son's casket buried again, this time under a layer of concrete mixed with scrap iron, with slabs of rainforced concrete stacked on top of that.
20:45
Kristin: Simply the story was spread simply to scare off anyone who might try to dig him up.
20:50
Kristin: Whatever really lies down there, the rumors have taken on a life of their own.
20:54
Kristin: In 2019, Dillinger's nephew obtained a state permit to exhume the grave, arguing that there was reason to doubt whose body was actually buried there.
21:03
Kristin: Crown Hill refused to allow it, so he took the cemetery to court in December of that year.
21:08
Kristin: A judge dismissed the case, ruling that the cemetery's consent was required.
21:13
Kristin: The grave has never been opened, and the mystery of what's beneath those concrete slabs remains unsolved to this day.
21:20
Kristin: Of course, none of these stories can be proven, and I'm not going to pretend that they can, but Cronell has embraced them all the same.
21:27
Kristin: For years now, the cemetery has hosted a fall ghost stories night, when local storytellers gather beneath a tent among the headstones to keep these tales alive for one more year.
21:37
Kristin: And maybe that's fitting, a cemetery that was built to be walked through and not simply visited was always bound to collect a few stories along the way.
21:46
Kristin: For now, the stories of Crown Hill slid back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
21:52
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil of Crown Hill Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
21:58
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.