In Brief
The Athenaeum, an 1890s landmark in Indianapolis, doesn't hide its ghosts. The Foundation that runs it calls the place one of the most haunted buildings in Indiana and sells tickets to hunt them. The one staff describe most is a teacher murdered nearby in 1911.
The Full Story
The Athenaeum, a German Renaissance Revival landmark at 401 East Michigan Street in Indianapolis, does something most haunted places don't. It rents you the ghosts. The Foundation that runs the building calls it "one of the most haunted buildings in Indiana" on its own event page and hosts an overnight hunt that gives guests access to 13 or 14 haunted areas, looking, in its words, for "spirits who've been living in our building for over 100 years."
The one they keep coming back to is Dr. Helene Knabe.
The building itself was designed in the 1890s by the firm of Vonnegut and Bohn — Bernard Vonnegut Sr. being the grandfather of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut — and built for a German gymnastic society as Das Deutsche Haus. It was renamed the Athenaeum amid anti-German sentiment during the First World War, and it still runs today, with a gymnasium, a theater, and the oldest restaurant in the city under its roof.
Knabe was a Prussian immigrant who came to Indianapolis in 1896, graduated from the Medical College of Indiana in 1904, and became its first female clinical professor and the state's first female deputy health officer. She served as medical director of the Normal College of the North American Gymnastic Union — the oldest school of physical education in the country, which met inside this very building. Staff say she still walks the halls, calm and purposeful, as if she's heading to a class she's about to teach.
She isn't, because of what happened on October 24, 1911. Knabe was found in her apartment a short distance from the Athenaeum with her head nearly severed from her body. A period newspaper put it exactly that way: "With Her Head Nearly Severed From Body." It was a murder. More than a year later the state indicted two men. After nine days of trial, the judge instructed the jury to acquit them, and no one was ever punished.
The building has its lighter hauntings too. Staff give a third-floor presence the name Henry, the one who flips lights on and off and knocks at doors, and they mostly just work around him. Investigators call a costume-storage space in the rafters, "Grandma's Attic," the most uncomfortable spot in the place. A ghostly couple is reported dancing through the dance hall.
But it's Knabe the Foundation centers, and when the TV crew from Ghost Hunters came in 2019, she was the focus. The woman who taught here, found a short walk away with her throat cut, still arriving for a class that ended more than a century ago.
