A Schoolhouse Fire No Record Confirms: Heady Lane Cemetery

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 20, 2026 · How we verify

Heady Lane Cemetery is one of those places where the legend is far better documented than the event behind it. The burial ground sits in Fishers, Indiana, a small family plot dating from the early 19th century, and it is reportedly haunted. What makes it unusual among roadside ghost sites is that the story attached to it hangs on a fire for which no record has yet turned up.

A Family Plot in What Was Delaware Township

The cemetery dates back to the early 19th century and holds headstones for many members of the Heady family. That is the whole of the verifiable history: a private burial ground of the kind that dotted rural Hamilton County before municipal cemeteries existed, established by one family on or near its own land and then gradually surrounded by the suburb that Fishers became.

Nothing in the record connects the graves themselves to any disaster, epidemic or crime. The names on the stones are the names of a farming family, and they were buried the way farming families were buried.

Delaware Township School No. 2 and the Fire Nobody Can Date

The ghost story local to this stretch of road involves a schoolhouse. An 1866 surveyors map of Delaware Township shows Delaware Township School No. 2 standing on the northeast corner of 126th Street and Allisonville Road, and that is the school attributed to the legend. The map is real, the school existed, and it stood close enough to the Heady plot for the two to be spoken of together.

The fire is another matter. No further information about the fire has been found. There is no confirmed date, no casualty figure, no newspaper account cited alongside the legend. A reader should treat the burning schoolhouse as folklore that has attached itself to a genuine building on a genuine map, rather than as an event with a paper trail. Until something surfaces in county records, that is the honest position.

What Is Actually Claimed at Heady Hollow

Paranormal writing on the area generally files it under the name Heady Hollow rather than Heady Lane Cemetery, and the claim made is broad rather than specific: the site is said to be haunted. The available reference material does not set out a catalogue of apparitions, sounds or photographs, and no named witness or dated encounter is documented in it.

That vagueness is itself worth knowing before you go. Sites like this tend to accumulate detail through retelling, with each account borrowing furniture from the last. Anyone hoping for a well attested sequence of sightings will not find one here. What exists is a persistent local reputation, a school on an old map, and a fire that may or may not have happened.

Before You Go Looking for the Graves

Heady Lane Cemetery is a small family burial ground in a built-up part of Fishers, not a managed attraction with parking and interpretive signs. Access arrangements are not set out in the available sources, so check locally before walking in, and assume that neighbouring land is private and that the usual rules for small cemeteries apply: daylight visits, no disturbance of stones, nothing left behind.

Anyone wanting the region’s documented past rather than its rumoured one will find Conner Prairie nearby, which covers the same corner of Hamilton County with actual records behind it.

Address: Fishers, Indiana

Sources

• Encyclopedia of Haunted Indiana
• In (official)
• rootsweb.ancestry.com
• Find a Grave
• GeoHack – Heady Lane Cemetery
• Wikipedia: Heady Lane Cemetery

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