Indiana Medical History Museum

The oldest surviving pathological facility in the United States, built in 1896 as the pathological department of Central State Hospital. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the museum preserves autopsy amphitheaters and laboratories.

The Indiana Medical History Museum occupies the oldest surviving pathology laboratory in the United States, a 19-room brick building constructed in 1895 and opened in 1896 as the Pathological Department of Central State Hospital. Designed by architect Adolf Scherrer for hospital superintendent Dr. George F. Edenharter, the two-story building was considered state-of-the-art when completed, featuring a 150-seat teaching amphitheater, an autopsy room with a specialized corpse-draining table that could be wheeled before audiences of students and doctors, bacteriological and chemical research laboratories, a histology room, a photography studio, and the hospital's morgue. Starting in 1900, Indiana University School of Medicine held neurology and psychiatry classes in the amphitheater, continuing until 1956. Roughly 1,450 autopsies were performed in the building through 1948, with additional procedures continuing for another two decades.

The most significant and unsettling legacy of the building is its Anatomical Museum, where preserved human brains collected during autopsies in the 1930s and 1940s sit in jars of formalin, each identified only by a clinical case number and brief description of the patient's condition -- idiocy, epilepsy, head injury, neurosyphilis. The most important research conducted here was by Dr. Walter Bruetsch in the 1920s and 1930s, who studied neurosyphilis, then one of the leading causes of mental illness, and pioneered malaria fever treatment for paresis that cured 160 patients within two years. The museum was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1969 after most of Central State Hospital's other buildings were demolished, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. In 2015, the Rehumanizing the IMHM Specimen Collection project began documenting the life stories of the people whose brains had been reduced to numbered jars, with findings featured in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2019.

Tour visitors to the museum consistently report paranormal activity in the building. Disembodied voices are heard in empty rooms, described as murmuring conversations that stop abruptly when visitors enter. Unexplained groaning and moaning sounds come from adjacent rooms when no one is present, particularly unsettling given the building's history of autopsies and brain harvesting. Cold spots are encountered in the autopsy amphitheater, where temperatures reportedly drop several degrees without explanation as visitors sit in the original wooden chairs that once held medical students watching dissections of the mentally ill. The museum officially does not endorse paranormal claims and does not offer ghost tours, maintaining its focus as a medical history institution. However, this has not stopped paranormal investigators from documenting activity on the broader Central State campus. The adjacent Old Power House generates reports of a screaming woman in the basement, shadows moving between cement posts, and the old boiler activating on its own. The patient cemetery nearby, where hundreds rest in unmarked graves marked only by numbered red plaques, produces consistent reports of orbs in photographs during every investigation conducted there. The museum now maintains over 15,000 artifacts and a medicinal plant garden established in 2003, serving as both a shrine to early psychiatric medicine and an inadvertent monument to the thousands of patients who suffered and died within Central State's walls.