Monroe County History Center

Downtown Bloomington's local history museum, sitting inside a Carnegie library building from 1918. It holds Monroe County artifacts and runs exhibits on local history.

The Monroe County History Center occupies the former Monroe County Carnegie Library at 202 East Sixth Street in Bloomington, a Neoclassical limestone building designed by architect Wilson Boyden Parker and dedicated in February 1918. Before the library was built, the site housed Center School from 1854, which became the segregated Colored School for African American children in 1881 and operated until 1913. Parker, an MIT graduate who designed more than twenty Carnegie libraries across Indiana, constructed the building entirely of large limestone blocks quarried locally, a material choice that gives the structure an imposing, almost fortress-like presence. The library served Bloomington for over fifty years before closing in 1970, and the Monroe County Historical Society acquired the building in 1994 for one dollar.

The haunting reports at the History Center span decades and involve multiple witnesses, from current and former staff members to interns to visiting parapsychologists. The most chilling account comes from a longtime member of the cleaning staff who was working in the building one evening when she saw a young girl crying on the main staircase. Assuming the child had been separated from her parents, the woman approached and reached out to take the girl's hand. The moment she did, the child vanished into thin air. The cleaner was so shaken by the experience that she refused to work in certain parts of the building afterward.

The ghostly girl on the staircase isn't the only spirit reported in the building. A child has also been spotted inside the pioneer cabin exhibit, one of the center's displays featuring an original 1840s log cabin. Staff members working late have reported hearing loud, thudding footsteps stomping across the floor above them when the upper level was completely empty. Visitors and employees alike have discovered furniture and historical artifacts that have mysteriously shifted position overnight, found in different spots than where they were left the previous evening despite no one having access to the building.

During one paranormal investigation, an investigator reported seeing a dog walk across the street outside the building, then pass directly through the exterior wall and into the interior -- something that defied any rational explanation. The variety of phenomena, from visual sightings of children to phantom footsteps to objects moving on their own, suggests the building may harbor multiple spirits, possibly connected to the generations of children who attended school on this site dating back to 1854 or to the countless patrons who passed through during its fifty-two years as a public library. The History Center is open to visitors at 202 East Sixth Street in downtown Bloomington and continues to collect stories from staff and guests who encounter something they can't explain within its limestone walls.