Est. 1906 · Second Gila County Courthouse, built 1906-1907 · Three-story downtown landmark roughly eighty feet square · Converted to the Cobre Valley Center for the Arts in 1984 · Home of the Copper Cities Community Players
Globe was the seat of Gila County, and as the mining town grew it built a courthouse to match. The second county courthouse rose in 1906-1907 on Broad Street — a massive three-story structure, about eighty by eighty feet, that anchored the downtown for decades as the center of county government and justice.
The courthouse era brought the full range of a mining county's legal business through the building, from civil matters to criminal trials in a region whose early history included vigilante and mob violence. When county functions eventually moved on, the large building was left vacant.
In 1984 the empty courthouse was given a new life as the Cobre Valley Center for the Arts. The second-floor courtrooms and offices became galleries showing work by local and regional artists, and the upper level was turned into a theater. The Copper Cities Community Players use the space for several productions a year, including spring and fall shows and a seasonal Ghosts of Globe program, keeping the old courthouse in continuous public use.
Sources
- https://cobrevalleyarts.com/
- https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/AZ-01-007-0039-01
- https://copperarea.com/walking-amongst-ghosts-globe/
Listed among haunted Globe sitesSeasonal Ghosts of Globe theatrical program tied to the town's violent history
Globe's downtown carries a heavy reputation, and the old courthouse sits at the center of it. The Cobre Valley Center for the Arts appears in local lists of haunted Globe, and the Copper Cities Community Players lean into that history with a seasonal Ghosts of Globe program — a performance that draws on the town's record of frontier violence, including the vigilante and mob justice that marked the county's early decades.
The building's role as a courthouse, where the consequences of that justice were handed down, is part of why it draws ghost-story attention. But the firmest documented haunted history in the immediate area attaches to the nearby 1910 Gila County jail and sheriff's office rather than to the courthouse itself, and accounts of specific phenomena inside the arts center are limited.
For that reason the location is published as a community arts venue with a haunted reputation and a themed program, while the underlying claim of the courthouse being haunted is held for further corroboration. Visitors come mainly for the galleries, the theater, and the Ghosts of Globe shows rather than for documented sightings.