109 Cat Graves and a Glass Coffin: The House of Blue Lights

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 9, 2026 · How we verify

Every city keeps one house that teenagers dare each other to drive past, and in Indianapolis, Indiana, that house was the House of Blue Lights. It stood on the far northeast side, strung year round with blue Christmas lights, and the story attached to it was specific enough to be repeated with confidence for decades: somewhere inside, a dead woman lay in a glass coffin, lit blue, waiting. The house belonged to a wealthy eccentric named Skiles Edward Test. The coffin did not exist. Almost everything else about the place was odd enough that nobody needed it to.

Who Skiles Test Actually Was

Test was an Indianapolis millionaire with a taste for building things nobody else had. His home started as a wood-frame farmhouse and ended up faced entirely in white opaque glass brick, with glass solariums and greenhouses bolted on over the years and a crowd of lightning rods bristling from the roof. Behind it sat the feature that fixed the estate in local memory: a swimming pool measuring forty by eighty feet, fed by a solar heating system that ran the water through aboveground pipes to warm in the sun before recirculating it. The pool had a three-story diving tower and a motorized surfboard pulley. Next to it stood an ornate brick pool house with guest quarters.

This was in the decades before solar heating was a selling point on anything. A man who builds that and then wraps his house in blue lights all year is going to attract stories whether he wants them or not.

The Wife in the Glass Coffin, and Why She Was Never There

Local folklore held that Test’s deceased wife had been embalmed and placed in a glass coffin inside the house, surrounded by the blue lights. It is a tidy legend, and it is false in a way that is easy to check. Test married three times, and all three women outlived him. After his death, nothing on the property suggested a wife had ever been buried there.

What makes the House of Blue Lights unusual among haunted-house legends is that the owner appears to have fed it. Test kept 109 cats, and when they died he buried them on the grounds in carpeted caskets marked with brass nameplates. A man quietly running a pet cemetery with engraved brass behind a glass-brick mansion is not going to dispel a rumor about a coffin in the parlor. He encouraged the talk instead. When the contents of the property were later sold at public auction, the sale only sharpened the picture of an eccentric later life.

The Haunted Reputation After 1964

Test died in 1964. The reputation did not. The house continued to be widely regarded as haunted long after his death, and it remains part of the folklore and culture of Indianapolis to this day. It is worth being plain about the shape of this: the sources record a persistent haunted reputation and a persistent legend, rather than a documented catalog of apparitions or verified incidents. The drawing power was the blue glow, the cat graves, the story of the woman in glass, and the kind of secondhand retelling that carries a place for generations without anyone needing to witness anything.

The legend attracted writers as well as trespassers. A local author, Kay Miclot, produced a self-published account titled Skiles Test and the House of Blue Lights, which Test’s nephew judged a flattering but somewhat inaccurate depiction of the man. Even the publication date is slippery: the article text places it in 1979 while the bibliography lists 1975. That small inconsistency is a fair warning about everything else told secondhand about this property.

Demolition and the Skiles Test Nature Park

Test’s heirs bequeathed the property to the City of Indianapolis in 1974. Most of the structures were still standing at that point, though in poor repair. In 1978 the Parks Department decided to demolish all of them, over public protest and despite interest from the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana. The glass-brick house, the solariums, the pool with its diving tower, the brick pool house: all of it came down.

Years later the land was developed into the Skiles Test Nature Park. That is what a visitor will find today. There is no house to see, no blue lights, no coffin and no mansion ruin, only a natural resource area carrying the name of the man whose eccentricity gave the city one of its most durable ghost stories. Visitors who come looking for the house itself are about half a century too late. Those who want to walk the ground where it stood can do so in daylight, as a park, which is the only lawful and sensible way to approach it.

Address: Skiles Test Nature Park, Indianapolis, Indiana

See The House of Blue Lights for Yourself

Sources

• The House Of Blue Lights
• Garry's Story
• FamilySearch.org
• www.testfamilygenealogy.net
• Skiles Test Nature Park
• Wikipedia: The House of Blue Lights

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