Spring Mill State Park

Founded in 1814 around cave springs that never froze, Spring Mill Village became a bustling industrial hub with gristmills, a sawmill, a wool mill, and a distillery, drawing stagecoach traffic between New Albany and Terre Haute. It declined after the railroad bypassed it in the 1850s, and the state established Spring Mill State Park around the restored village in 1927, with the Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilding much of it in the late 1920s and '30s. The 1817 limestone gristmill still grinds cornmeal today among twenty restored buildings. Visitors report lights and figures in the mill and other buildings after dark, and in the old village cemetery, an unmarked grave said to belong to a man who gambled, lost, and was murdered — his killer never identified. At night, a figure is said to rise from that grave and stand before the grave of the man believed to have killed him.