A mid-19th century IU building where cadavers were stored on the third floor and transported by dumbwaiter — a mechanical history that gave rise to ghost legends still attached to its walls.
308 N Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405
Research updated June 2026
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Public exterior access free; interior access varies by university schedule
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Est. 1884 · IU Old Crescent Historic Building · 19th-Century Natural Sciences Department · Richard Owen — Civil War POW Camp Commandant
Owen Hall stands among the Old Crescent, the cluster of buildings that formed Indiana University's original campus core in the 19th century. The building was named for Richard Owen, a professor who taught natural sciences at IU in the 1860s and who had served as a commandant of Camp Morton, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Indianapolis during the Civil War.
For much of its early history, the building housed the natural sciences department. Faculty and students used the third floor as a storage and preparation space for cadavers used in scientific study — a common arrangement for 19th-century universities that lacked dedicated anatomy facilities. A dumbwaiter installed in the building transported cadavers between floors. According to the Indiana Daily Student's 2026 account, the machinery was not without incident: severed limbs resulting from the dumbwaiter's operation became the seed of long-running ghost legends.
The building is included as a named stop on IU Folklore's annual Ghost Walk, which each autumn draws students and community members through the campus to sites associated with documented strange occurrences and historical tragedy. Owen Hall's age and its unusual functional history have kept it in circulation in local ghost-story traditions for well over a century.
Sources
The dumbwaiter used to move cadavers between floors of Owen Hall is at the center of the building's ghost tradition. According to accounts repeated in the Indiana Daily Student, incidents with the machinery resulted in severed limbs — details that passed into student folklore and have circulated for generations. Cold spots and reports of floating objects inside the building are the most commonly cited paranormal phenomena.
IU Folklore's Ghost Walk includes Owen Hall as a stop, giving the site institutional standing within the university's own tradition of documenting and presenting campus ghost stories. The building's position within the Old Crescent — the oldest surviving part of campus — lends its legends additional weight, as the structures predate most living memory and their institutional histories are partially obscured by time.
Owen Hall is part of IU's Old Crescent, a cluster of the university's oldest buildings. Visitors can view the exterior and explore the campus context of this 19th-century structure where the natural sciences department once stored cadavers on the third floor.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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