Story Inn, the Blue Lady room

One inconvenient location since 1851. That is the inn's own slogan, and it is fair.

Story sits in Van Buren Township, Brown County, Indiana, named for Dr George P. Story, who received a land patent for 173 acres from President Millard Fillmore in 1851. That original patent is on display at the Story Inn. Dr Story moved out from Ohio during the early 1850s, and over the next twenty years family farms, his medical practice, a township school and a grist mill grew up around him, enough that people started calling the place Storyville.

The village was formally created in 1882, when Dr Arnold S. Griffitt carried on the medical practice and the farming, opened a dry goods store that housed the first post office, and the first church congregation was founded. The Story-Griffitt House, an I-house from about 1858, is part of the inn today.

Through the 1880s and 1890s the place turned around the store and the grist mill, run first by Griffitt and later by Willard Fulks. A saw mill was added, and older accounts mention a blacksmith shop and a slaughterhouse. In 1900 Alra and Mary Wheeler bought the store and mill and lived in the Queen Anne style Wheeler-Hedrick House of 1894 across the road, which is also part of the inn. They enlarged the store between 1911 and early 1915, and it burned in November 1915.

There is a line drawn across this ground you cannot see. An old boundary ran from Raccoon Creek on the Wabash River near Montezuma to Seymour, marked by the shadow cast at ten o'clock each 30 September, and it passed through the heart of what became Story. The Story Monument on the village green marks where.

The Wheeler-Hedrick General Store, which local lore says also served as a Studebaker buggy dealership, now holds four bed and breakfast rooms. One of them is called the Blue Lady. The inn describes her as a harmless apparition in flowing white robes whose cheeky behaviour has been noted by staff and written into the guest books since the 1970s.