Crown Hill Cemetery

The roll is famous and enormous — some 200,000 burials on roughly 550 acres, the third-largest non-governmental cemetery in the country. Section 13 holds the twenty-third president, Benjamin Harrison, buried March 1901, along with three vice presidents. James Whitcomb Riley lies on the Crown itself, the highest point in Marion County. In 1931 the cemetery accepted 1,616 Confederate prisoners who had died at Camp Morton, gathered them under a Confederate Mound, and set their names in bronze — the enemy dead filed, at last, by name.

And in Section 44, Lot 94, lies John Dillinger — killed by the FBI outside the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934, buried three days later, and so visited that a 1943 newspaper noted no grass would grow on the plot. His markers have been replaced repeatedly; visitors chip souvenirs off them and leave baseball mitts in return.

The built fabric grew with the list. D.A. Bohlen designed the Gothic chapel around 1876; Adolf Scherrer — who would later draw the statehouse — produced the 1885 gate and waiting station. The first family mausoleum went up in 1864 for Caleb Blood Smith, Lincoln's Secretary of the Interior. And the founding generation left its own annotation: board member Calvin Fletcher wrote in his diary that he felt, at the lot auction, 'no spirit of rivalry where I shall be buried — he may have any place he chooses, and I will lay down where it may be quiet.' Fletcher is, in fact, buried there.

In one corner of the cemetery, 699 children lie in a single mass grave — wards of the city's orphanages: the Indianapolis Children's Asylum, the Board of Children's Guardians Home, and the Asylum for Friendless Colored Children. They died in care across most of a century, most of disease, and each was buried under a number where a name should have been.

The grave stayed uncounted until an intern, Anna Sturgeon, was sent into the handwritten records of the Children's Guardian Home chasing an old deed and began tallying the dead. On June 4, 2006, the cemetery dedicated the Hearts Remembered Memorial over the pit — black granite carrying all 699 names, front and back, and a bronze of two seated children.

The haunting claims at Crown Hill collect, predictably, around the numbered grave. Visitors at the Hearts Remembered Memorial report children laughing and playing nearby, and crying that seems to rise out of the ground — reports the archive files as testimony, unverified and persistent. Elsewhere on the grounds: a Woman in White near the 38th Street gate, a phantom hitchhiker picked up and vanished, and the apparition that the dossier files under Dillinger's own grave — Public Enemy No. 1 seen, reportedly, at rest.

The cemetery's official posture is hospitality without endorsement: it keeps the mitts off Dillinger's stone and the names on the children's, and lets the visitors' accounts stand as what they are — grief's oldest documentation.