Mabel Tainter Memorial Building

The Mabel Tainter Memorial Building is a gift from grief. Mabel Tainter, the only daughter of the Menomonie lumber magnate Captain Andrew Tainter and his wife Bertha, died in 1886 at the age of 19. She had loved music and the arts, and the couple, encouraged by their Unitarian minister Henry Doty Maxson, decided to give the town a building for the benefit of the living. Construction began in April 1889 and cost about $125,000; the building was dedicated on 3 July 1890, and the public library opened inside it in January 1891. It is usually credited to the architect Harvey Ellis, though later research suggests that Edgar E. Joralemon, of the Minneapolis firm of L. S. Buffington, was more likely the designer.

The result is a small masterpiece of Richardsonian Romanesque with Moorish touches, containing a theatre, library, reading room and a pipe organ by Steere and Turner with 1,597 pipes, still the original instrument. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and is run today by the Mabel Tainter Center for the Arts, a nonprofit that stages concerts, plays and comedy shows. Recent work added an entrance, elevator and modern systems while keeping its Victorian character.

Its ghost story is a quiet one. Local lore, written down mainly on student-produced pages and in tourism writing, says that staff and visitors have seen a woman in white on the upper floors and on the stairs to the restrooms, where she is said to pause before a mirror. Employees also speak of sound equipment being interfered with and unexplained lights in the library and storage rooms. The woman is usually identified as Mabel herself, drawn back to a building that honours her love of music, or alternatively as her mother, Bertha, who may have found comfort in the building during her grief. A noteworthy detail is that nobody is recorded as having died inside it.

The center does not hide its folklore: in 2019 it hosted ParaNomiCon, a paranormal convention with investigations in the theatre and speakers from the world of television ghost-hunting. A Volume One preview described the building as one that seems designed to suggest a haunting. None of this has produced evidence, and the sources for the stories themselves are anonymous.

A woman in white seen on the second floor and the stairs, mirror-gazing figures, tampered sound equipment, and unexplained lights in the library and storage areas, reported by unnamed employees.

The upper floors and stairway to the restrooms, the library and the storage rooms.

The theatre leans into its legend with paranormal events such as ParaNomiCon, and it has a following among ghost enthusiasts in western Wisconsin.