{"id":2792,"slug":"angel-mounds-evansville-indiana","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Angel Mounds is the WPA's dig — the Mississippian town on the Ohio River where 277 WPA workers under Glenn Black excavated 2.5 million artifacts from 1939-42, the largest Depression-era archaeology project. The town held 1,000 people behind a palisade; they left around 1450 and nobody knows why.","The site was the town — the 12 mounds and the plaza, the palisade with bastions, the corn agriculture that fed a permanent community for 400 years. Black's WPA crew dug it with Depression labor; the collection filled the laboratory that now bears his name.","The site is still there — the National Historic Landmark, the interpretive center, the mounds you can walk. The file keeps the dig: the Mississippian town, the WPA excavation, and the 2.5 million artifacts that are the Midwest's archive.","Angel Mounds is the archive's Mississippian file — the WPA dig, the 12 mounds, and the town that emptied before Columbus."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Angel Mounds is the archive's Mississippian file — the largest WPA excavation, the palisaded town, and the 2.5 million artifacts.","A dig that employed the Depression keeps its workers — the file's suggestion being that Angel Mounds's hold is the WPA: the 277 men who dug, the 2.5 million artifacts, and the town that was Indiana's biggest before Indiana."]}],"name":"Angel Mounds","aliases":[],"type":"SITE","type_label":"Site","cats":["LOCAL_FOLKLORE","INDIGENOUS","ARCHAEOLOGY"],"groups":["legends"],"desc":"The Mississippian town on the Ohio—1,000 years of memory.","full_desc":"Angel Mounds is a site in Evansville, Indiana. The Mississippian town on the Ohio—1,000 years of memory. HauntHunt files it with Indigenous heritage, archaeology and local folklore. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 documented fact — documented record and retelling kept side by side. The site is open to visitors. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"Evansville","county":null,"state":"Indiana","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":37.987737,"lon":-87.534705,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":"Historic site","research_notes":"IN batch; VERIFY task auto-queued.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":59.4,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":2446,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Reported a presence at the mounds. The reports at Angel Mounds are the site's second history — unofficial, unverified, and stubbornly retold. Witness accounts, no evidence file: the claim is anecdotal and stays that way. The report is preserved in sources like 'Angel Mounds'. Whatever walks there, it walks often enough to keep the reports coming.","evidence":"ANECDOTAL","evidence_label":"Anecdotal","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Angel Mounds","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Mounds","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"The site’s ~1000-1450 occupation is documented. A documented history gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that spine. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. The record appears in 'Angel Mounds'. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Angel Mounds","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Mounds","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Site access varies; verify before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Angel Mounds","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Mounds","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Angel Mounds","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Mounds","desc":"Archaeological site in Indiana","extract":"Angel Mounds State Historic Site (12 VG 1), an expression of the Mississippian culture, is an archaeological site managed by the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites that includes more than 600 acres (240 hectares) of land about 8 miles (13 km) southeast of present-day Evansville, in Vanderburgh and Warrick counties in Indiana. The large residential and agricultural community was constructed and inhabited from AD 1100 to AD 1450, and served as the political, cultural, and economic center of the Angel chiefdom. It extended within 120 miles (190 km) of the Ohio River valley to the Green River in present-day Kentucky. The town had as many as 1,000 inhabitants inside the walls at its peak, an","img":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Angel_mound_with_turret_HRoe_2008.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","score":104,"lat":37.9425,"lon":-87.45722222},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}