Haunted Hoosier Trails. Wanda Lou Willis
Merbrink. Each year it was painted anew, the piano was tuned, the water and gas pipes were checked, and any needed carpentry work done.
The grass in summer would be cut weekly. When the willow trees dropped their leaves and twigs, the yard was cleaned. And, when the waves cast driftwood over the concrete wall between the yard and the blue lake, the caretaker disposed of the debris. The snow and sleet that would blow across the wide veranda were regularly cleaned away. All was kept in readiness.
Why did they not marry? Was there some impediment? Did Mrs. Cooper object? No one knew, but the house stood beautifully groomed, obviously prepared for the love of Brunning’s life.
After Nellie’s mother’s death, the two sweethearts were at last married. Miss Nellie was nearing sixty while her husband was twelve years her senior. The newlyweds moved to Evansville, where Brunning still maintained his spice company. But as they had in years past, every other weekend they would go to Merbrink. Their years as man and wife would be short-lived; Nellie became ill and died, and her husband followed a few years later.
The stories of these old houses are often ones of neglect and negligence, as one generation that doesn’t care succeeds the one that did. Merbrink went to Brunning’s nephew in California. He had no interest in the property and finally the county took it for back taxes. It was sold in 1931 to Donald White and his wife, and upon their deaths one of their two daughters, Anna Lou, became the new owner and is to this day.
Merbrink is located at 410 Administration Boulevard, Winona Lake, IN, 46590. The wraparound porch can be seen from the front.
There have been many stories written about the house. In a number of them, Anna Lou has expressed her love for Nellie and William’s Merbrink. She has also stated emphatically that she feels a presence in the house, not a malevolent, but a comforting presence, which may be Nellie.
Sometimes young lovers holding hands walk three times around the house, believing this will bless their love and insure it will last like Nellie and William’s—forever.
LA PORTE COUNTY
Before 1830 all of La Porte and Starke Counties were a part of the Potawatomi Nation. In 1830 all of northwestern Indiana from Elkhart County to the state line on the west was designated as St. Joseph County. Finally in 1832 an area consisting of 462 square miles was separated and a new county was created and named La Porte, meaning “the door.” The area was a natural opening through the forest, which served as a gateway to the north. In 1850 twenty sections of land were taken from St. Joseph County on the east and added to La Porte County.
The area encompassing the Sauk Trail was chosen as the location for the county seat and named La Porte, for the county. La Porte city was nicknamed “The Maple City” for the maple trees lining the streets, planted as early as the 1850s. In 1829 Mrs. Benedict, a widow, and her family were the first white settlers to come to La Porte County, locating in an area just north of present-day Westville. In 1941 the United States government constructed the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant on 13,454 acres of farmland near a town laid out in 1835. The plant employed over 20,000 workers, nearly half of them being female. Testing sites, barracks, bunkers and dormitories filled the area, which was crisscrossed with railroad tracks and highways.
Pinhook was originally called New Durham and platted in 1847 and named for Durham, New York. It was supposedly nicknamed “Pinhook” for a jog in the main road, or possibly as a scornful epithet hurled at it by the neighboring village of Flood’s Grove, two miles south.
Many small lakes dot the county, which is known for its beauty.
The Ghost of “I” Street
One of the longest reported periods of hauntings in Indiana is in the town of La Porte at the corner of I and Tenth Streets.
For nearly one hundred years people connected with this land have reported experiencing hauntings. Perhaps these folktales reflect events that may even have been going on long before.
Originally the property where the medical clinic sits belonged to Dr. George L. Andrew, who moved to Indiana in 1845 and married a daughter of one of the founders of the city. Soon after the couple began the construction of a three-story mansion on what would become the corner of I and Tenth Street.
With a columned veranda and many rooms, the home was impressive. Five rooms were set aside above the kitchen for servants’ quarters. The doctor commissioned Fredrick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City and a part of the Biltmore Estate, to landscape his spacious yard: Olmsted planted one of every tree native to Indiana.
When Dr. Andrew retired in 1885, the home was sold. It had gone through several owners and some remodeling, including the removal of the servants’ quarters, by the time Charles Gwynne purchased the house in 1904. The Gwynnes were the first to notice the hauntings.
The story of their forty-four-year life with a live-in ghost came mainly from Mrs. Madeline Gwynne Kinney, their daughter, who was the former curator of the La Porte County Historical Museum.
One day Madeline was cleaning a closet when she heard a sound behind her like something being dropped. Turning around she saw four coins on the floor: two pennies and two nickels, dated 1876, 1877, 1867 and 1869, respectively. Where they came from was a mystery, and still is. There were no holes or cracks in the walls. From where in the world (or out of it) had these things fallen?
The ghost first made itself known by tampering with a front doorbell which had to be twisted to produce a ring. One winter night, during a particularly fierce snowstorm, the bell began to ring incessantly. Mr. Gwynne rushed down the stairs and opened the door, thinking it was someone in need of assistance, but the porch was empty. What was even more mysterious was the fact that there were no footprints in the fresh snow.
After that experience, the ghost made certain the Gwynne family didn’t forget that this was its house, too. Frequently the family would hear footsteps going up and down the main staircase, and of course, no family member had been on the stairs at the time.
Before retiring, Mr. Gwynne would make certain that all doors and windows were securely locked. On a number of occasions the family would wake up to find the doors standing open and even some of the windows opened. Crashing sounds, like something being thrown or dropped, would shatter the stillness, but nothing was ever found broken.
Robert Zimmerman, La Porte’s Director of Redevelopment, purchased the house from the Gwynnes in 1958. His family was the last to live in the house. They were not aware that they had purchased a house complete with a live-in ghost. Shortly after moving in they began to experience unexplained disturbances.
About 2:00 AM one night, they were awakened by a crashing sound that shook the house. Immediately afterwards there was a metallic sound that Zimmerman likened to chains clanking on sheet metal, a very tinny sound that went on for nearly thirty seconds.
They searched the house but couldn’t find anything that would account for the noises. Zimmerman thought that it might have been a sonic boom and called Bunker Hill Air Force Base to see if any planes were flying in the area. He was told that because of public concerns the Air Force had curtailed flights of the B51s a month earlier.
Four months later when the daughter of the previous owner, Madeline Gwynne Kinney, asked if she could include the house in a historic home tour, she added information to Zimmerman’s tale. Mrs. Kinney told the group about the “friendly ghost” that had been a part of her family when they lived there. Afterwards the new owner asked Mrs. Kinney to describe for him some of the manifestations she had experienced.