Stepp Cemetery

Stepp Cemetery, in what's now Morgan-Monroe State Forest about 15 miles north of Bloomington, sits on land Reuben Stepp bought in 1856; it passed to Will Peterson in 1884 before the State of Indiana purchased the forest tract in 1929. Roughly 114 graves are here, the oldest likely belonging to Isaac Hartsock, a War of 1812 veteran born in 1793. The cemetery's best-known legend is the "Lady in Black," a woman in mourning dress reported sitting on an old tree stump, humming to a baby in her arms — locally said to be a mother who lost her husband in a quarry dynamite explosion and later her daughter in a car accident, and who was eventually buried here herself. Considered one of the most persistently reported haunted sites in south-central Indiana.