The Legendary Lost Giants of Walkerton, Indiana

When a St. Joseph County farmer unearthed human bones of impossible size, the story spread nationwide. A century later, the truth is still buried.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED OCTOBER 12, 2025

Walkerton doesn't look like the kind of place that keeps secrets. It's flat country — cornfields, creeks, and old county roads that go straight until they give up. It's land where everything seems visible, where the past should lie quiet beneath the soil. But every so often, it doesn't.

In the fall of 1925, a seventy-year-old farmer named Grove Vosburg decided to dig. On his land, beneath the roots of a fallen oak, there was a small mound that had always nagged at him. When harvest ended and the weather turned cool, Vosburg gathered a few neighbors and started shoveling.

Five feet down, they hit dirt and rocks. Ten feet down, the same. Then something harder: bone. A jaw large enough to cradle walnuts between its teeth. Ribs like barrel staves. A skull broad and heavy, human-like but wrong.

When the digging was done, they counted eight skeletons, arranged in a wheel, heads toward the center. One appeared to wear copper armor, its skull pierced by an arrowhead still lodged in bone. Around them lay relics: pipes, stone tools, and bits of metal that looked, to the untrained eye, like silver or gold.

The story was irresistible.

Within days, the South Bend Tribune published an illustrated feature. By month's end, newspapers as far away as California and even Time Magazine had picked it up. “Skeletons of Giants Found Near Walkerton,” one headline read. For a small farming town, it was a sudden brush with national attention.

The find seemed extraordinary, but the idea behind it wasn't new. Long before settlers mapped northern Indiana, Indigenous peoples told stories of giant beings — warriors, builders, and sometimes monsters who roamed the continent in an age before memory.

The Lenape spoke of the Alligewi, a race of enormous people who once ruled the river valleys east of the Mississippi. The Choctaw told of pale-skinned giants called the Nahullo, feared for their strength and appetite. Farther west, the Paiute remembered the Si-Te-Cah, red-haired cannibals who made war on everyone until their enemies trapped them in a cave and set it ablaze.

The details shifted from tribe to tribe, but the pattern held: a vanished people of impossible size, wiped out in some distant cataclysm. When settlers later uncovered large bones or ancient mounds, they reached for those stories to explain them — and often, to rewrite them.

Long before the shovels hit Vosburg's mound, another legend had already taken root in the American imagination. It claimed that centuries before Columbus, a Welsh prince named Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd had sailed westward in 1170, escaping civil war and landing somewhere along the New World's coast.

According to the story, Madoc established a colony, returned to Wales for more settlers, and then vanished forever. Generations later, European explorers in North America heard Native tales of light-skinned, red-haired people who spoke a strange tongue. From those coincidences, they conjured a myth: the Welsh Indians, descendants of Madoc's lost expedition.

For 18th- and 19th-century Americans, the idea was deeply convenient. It implied that Europeans had reached — and perhaps even owned — the continent long before Indigenous nations did. The "mound builders” and the “giants” became proof of an ancient white civilization, a notion that both excused colonization and romanticized it.

Historians now know the truth: Prince Madoc never existed outside propaganda. The first written mentions of him appeared in the 1580s, when the British Crown was eager to claim moral rights to American territory. The supposed linguistic ties between Welsh and Native languages were illusions, born from wishful ears. No credible archaeological evidence has ever supported a pre-Columbian Welsh colony.

Still, in 1925, when those oversized bones emerged from the Indiana soil, the story fit a ready-made narrative. Maybe these were Madoc's men. Maybe the giants proved that Europeans had been here all along. The myth wrote itself:

“A skeleton in copper armor; the bones of eight other men of some period far distant in the past… eight skeletons lying like the spokes of a wheel, with skulls at the center.”

The article described copper breastplates, silver-colored ore, and pipes carved into strange animal shapes. One skeleton, the reporter wrote, might have stood nine feet tall.

There was no scientific verification — no archaeologists on-site, no state museum inspection, no photographs. Yet the paper declared that “the antiquity of the mound has been established” and that local Native residents “professed ignorance” of its origin.

It was the kind of story that begged for follow-up. But none came.

According to the Tribune, “part of the bones, the pipes, and the copper pieces” were taken to the homes of the Litchfield brothers, the neighbors who helped dig. After that, the trail goes cold.

No museum catalogs list them. No academic report cites them. There's no box in a courthouse basement labeled Walkerton 1925.

What happened next is anyone's guess.

Some say the Smithsonian collected the bones and locked them away — a favorite conspiracy among giant-hunters, though unsupported by evidence. Others think a traveling circus bought them as curiosities. One rumor even claims the artifacts went to the Northern Indiana Historical Society, now The History Museum in South Bend.

Could it all have been a hoax? Maybe not. Archaeologists generally agree that burial mounds are common throughout the Midwest, built by ancient Indigenous cultures such as the Adena and Hopewell. Bones unearthed from those mounds often appear larger or distorted due to soil pressure and mineralization. Without context, it's easy to mistake them for something extraordinary.

In other words, the Walkerton dig probably happened. The bones were likely real — but their supposed size, armor, and “white-gold ore” may have been embellishments that grew with every retelling.

And once those artifacts left the ground without preservation or study, their story became all that survived.

Learn more about the legend of the Lost Giants of Walkerton in Season 5 of A Bend In Time.