Monroe County History Center

A cleaner reached for a crying girl on the stairs and she vanished. The Bloomington Carnegie sits on a lot that was a school since 1854.

A cleaner at the Monroe County History Center saw a young girl crying on the main staircase. The cleaner reached out to take her hand, thinking the kid had gotten separated from her parents. The girl disappeared. The cleaner refused to work in certain parts of the building after that.

This is an odd building for a ghost story because it's not supposed to be a ghost story. It's a county museum in the old Bloomington Carnegie Library, a Neoclassical limestone block at 202 East Sixth Street designed by Wilson B. Parker, a well-known Indianapolis architect who designed numerous Carnegie libraries across Indiana. Parker's building opened in 1918 with about 2,000 books and 400 patrons. It quietly sat on a much older footprint: a one-room schoolhouse called Center School had operated on this same lot since 1854, and in 1881 it was converted into the Colored School, serving Bloomington's African-American children until 1913. Then came the Carnegie library. Then, in 1970, the library closed. The Monroe County Historical Society bought the building in 1994 for one dollar.

Five decades of school. Fifty-two years of library. A long count of children who came in and out of the same lot. When a ghost story at this address sounds like a child, it tracks.

Staff have been collecting these encounters for years. One common one: upstairs footsteps. Loud, thudded stomping across the upper floor late in the evening, which sends someone up to check on the colleague they assume must be working late, only to find the upstairs empty and the colleague still at her desk on the main level. Nobody has an explanation. It keeps happening.

Multiple staff, including current employees, former employees, and interns who came through for a semester and left, have independently reported the sensation of being watched in specific rooms. It's become something staff mention when they show new hires around.

The weirdest single account came from a paranormal investigation team the History Center allowed in. One investigator watched a dog outside, at street level, cross Sixth Street and walk straight through the exterior wall of the building to come inside. The investigator's account was specific enough that it's stayed on the list of things the History Center staff bring up when people ask.

The part of the tour where this comes up is usually the main staircase, the same one the cleaner was standing on when the crying girl vanished. The guide will point at the railing. Staff walk that staircase every morning. Some of them nod at it as they go.