The Athenaeum

Dr. Helene Knabe's unsolved 1911 murder lingers at the Athenaeum, where she ran the Normal College medical program. One of several ghosts here.

On October 24, 1911, Dr. Helene Knabe's lab assistant found her dead in her apartment at the Delaware Flats with her throat cut. The police first called it a suicide. There was no weapon in the room and a bloody fingerprint on the bed. The coroner ruled it a homicide. A group of female doctors, furious that the police had shrugged at the murder of one of the most accomplished women in Indianapolis medicine, pooled their money and hired private detectives. It took more than a year to get indictments against Dr. William B. Craig and undertaker Alonzo Ragsdale. After nine days of trial the judge told the jury to acquit them. Knabe's murder is still unsolved.

She was medical director of the Normal College of the North American Gymnastic Union, which held its classes at the Athenaeum. Everyone who works in the building says they still see her there.

The Athenaeum at 401 East Michigan Street is where Dr. Knabe spent much of her teaching life, and it's one of the buildings most often described as Indianapolis's most haunted. Staff have catalogued multiple distinct spirits and clusters of activity across several floors. Knabe is the sad one. Her ghost moves through the halls of the building as if she's on her way to a class she's going to teach, which is the pattern most witnesses describe. A 2019 Ghost Hunters investigation set up data loggers and registered pressure changes in her active areas.

The most active ghost is a younger man called Henry, who lives on the third floor. Henry flips lights. He knocks on closed doors and closes open ones. He turns up at the edge of your vision and isn't there when you turn your head. Staff just acknowledge him and keep working.

Down in the Rathskeller Restaurant, there's Jolly Verner, who apparently likes the crowd. In the ballroom, a ghostly couple dances through tables and chairs as if the furniture isn't there. A facilities manager once watched a man and a woman walk into the locked theater and found the theater empty when he opened the door. Children giggle in various rooms. And there is Grandma's Attic, a storage area up in the rafters for props and costumes, which investigators describe as the hottest spot in the building. Some of them have walked out mid-session. During that same 2019 Ghost Hunters shoot, an exercise bike in the gymnasium powered itself on and displayed the word "Los," which is German for "Go," and an employee reported watching a woman in a white gown appear to levitate in the gym.

Bernard Vonnegut, grandfather of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., designed the building with his partner Arthur Bohn and built it in two phases: the east wing in 1893-1894, the west wing in 1897-1898. It opened as Das Deutsche Haus, the German House, the social and cultural center of Indianapolis's booming German immigrant community, with a ballroom, auditorium, bowling alley, biergarten, gymnasium, and clubrooms for the turnverein athletic movement. German Renaissance Revival outside, Jugendstil art glass inside, stepped gables, a brick tower with a curved mansard roof. Anti-German sentiment during World War I forced the name change to the Athenaeum.

The Normal College of the North American Gymnastic Union, the oldest physical-education school in the country, operated out of the building from 1907 to 1970. The Indiana Repertory Theatre rented the space from 1972 until 1980, when it moved over to the Indiana Theatre a few blocks west. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016.

Vonnegut designed a cultural home for a community that then got erased by a war and rebuilt under a different name. A woman who came here from Prussia to practice medicine she couldn't practice at home got murdered and forgotten. The building has outlived both of those stories, and on the third floor at night, Henry knocks on the doors of rooms nobody's in.