In Brief
The Monroe County History Center in Bloomington, Indiana is a county museum that keeps a child on its main staircase. A cleaner once reached to take the crying girl's hand, and the girl simply wasn't there.
The Full Story
The Monroe County History Center in Bloomington, Indiana is a county museum, a building that exists to file away local history. It also keeps a crying girl on the main staircase.
A long-time cleaning staff member found her there one day, a young girl in tears. She assumed a child had wandered off from her parents, and she reached to take the girl's hand. The girl vanished. After that, the cleaner refused to work in certain parts of the building at all. She would not go back to where she had seen her.
The girl is the apparition staff describe most often, but she isn't the only thing reported here. According to the local Visit Bloomington account, people working late have heard heavy, thudding footsteps stomping across the floor above them. They climbed up to check on the colleague they assumed was working overhead, and found the upper level empty, with that colleague still at her desk down on the main floor. A child has been spotted in the pioneer cabin exhibit, too. The downtown building, the story goes, has been frequented by ghosts for decades, with visitors reporting strange noises and artifacts that move on their own.
The oddest account belongs to a paranormal team that spent a night in the building. One of the investigators said he watched a dog at street level cross Sixth Street and walk straight through the exterior wall to come inside.
Why a county museum would hold onto a child is where the address starts to do its quiet work. The building opened as Bloomington's Carnegie library in 1918 and served as one for 52 years, until it relocated in 1970. But the lot underneath it had belonged to children for far longer. A one-room schoolhouse stood on this corner from 1854, first as Center School, later converted around 1881 into the Colored School for Bloomington's African-American children, who attended there until about 1913. The schoolhouse was torn down in 1914 to make room for the library.
So children came and went on this corner for nearly sixty years before a single book was ever shelved. No source names the girl on the stairs. None of them tie her to a student, a patron, or any child who actually lived and died here. The connection between the apparition and the lot's long childhood is a thing people reach for, not a thing anyone has proven. The record only confirms who was here first. The staff still walk that staircase every morning.
