SOAP FACTORY Site — Minneapolis, Minnesota Status: Operating · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/soap-factory-minneapolis-minnesota/ The 1883 soap works—where the art space reportedly kept the dead. Soap Factory is a site in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The 1883 soap works—where the art space reportedly kept the dead. Its accounts name only a collective — the workers. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 2 legends, 1 documented fact and 1 named or described presence — documented record and retelling kept side by side. The site is open to visitors. When the art collective No Name Exhibitions took over the old warehouse at 514 Second Street Southeast in 1988, the first job was janitorial on an industrial scale: pressure-hosing a six-inch layer of congealed animal fat off the manufacturing floor. The building had spent half a century melting horses and farm animals into soap, and the floor kept the record even where the documents didn't. The building itself went up in the early 1880s — the file says 1883 — a heavy-timber warehouse on the rail lines along St. Anthony Main, one of the oldest unconverted industrial spaces left in Minneapolis. In the 1930s the National Purity Soap and Chemical Company bought it and turned rendering into commerce: fat boiled for soap, cow intestines processed into sausage casings. Earlier tenants had included an artificial-limb operation, which the file notes is exactly the kind of predecessor a haunted building should have. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD Renamed the Soap Factory, the 50,000-square-foot building spent the next three decades as the city's third-largest contemporary art space, after the Walker and the Weisman. The boiler, the freight elevator, and the coal chutes stayed in place; the basement stayed what basements of renderers tend to be: furnace rooms on a crematorium scale, disused shafts, and a floor that personnel crossed, per staff quoted in the Minnesota Daily, only when absolutely necessary. In 2007 the organization turned the basement's reputation into a fundraiser — the Haunted Basement, an annual October production that sent visitors down in groups of four and gave them the safeword 'Uncle' for an exit and a commemorative mugshot. The Haunted Basement ran for over a decade and drew tens of thousands — twenty actors working up to a hundred twenty hours each October, by one count — and it was, by design, theater. What kept it interesting was the persistent claim that the basement required no theater at all. WHAT WITNESSES FILE Staff and volunteers had been reluctant about the basement since before the first prop was built — the Minnesota Daily recorded the unease in 2006. Paranormal groups, including Grand Avenue Paranormal Society and the Twin Cities Paranormal Society, ran multiple investigations and delivered EVP recordings and spirit-box sessions that the Haunted Basement's own director conceded were 'some creepy stuff' — while remaining agnostic about what it proved. The recurring claims are the usual industrial inventory: unexplained footsteps, temperature drops, lights cutting out during set construction, voices in the boiler rooms and elevator shafts. Investigators Greg and Nicole of the Twin Cities Paranormal Society ran three separate sessions in 2015 and 2016 alone, mostly in the basement, which remains the floor the reports prefer. The file names the collective the workers — the rendering crews, presumably, though the building's century of occupants gives the reports a larger payroll to draw on. Nothing is verified; everything is filed. It remains the rare haunted-building story where the business model and the belief system ran on the same basement. WHAT REMAINS The organization folded in 2019 after a failed capital campaign; the Haunted Basement, spun off as its own operation, carried on elsewhere. The fat layer is gone; the basement, by every account, remembers it anyway. The file keeps the distinction the building always insisted on: the Haunted Basement was entertainment, and the basement was something the entertainment borrowed. What the record keeps is simpler: a building that survived rendering fat, art-world ambition, and annual terror, and a basement that remains the file's preferred address for whatever the reports are reporting. FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified · [Local folklore] apparition: Reported figures in the building. The reports at Soap Factory are the site's second history — unofficial, unverified, and stubbornly retold. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. Sources including 'Soap Factory' keep the claim in circulation. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting. source: Soap Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_Factory) · [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The workers are reportedly seen. Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Minnesota carries the report the way old places do — as part of its identity. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. A ghost with a name outlasts a ghost without one; the reports keep it employed. source: Soap Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_Factory) HISTORY — 1 documented facts · [1883] The 1883 factory is documented. A documented history gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that spine. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The record appears in 'Soap Factory'. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest. The account stays in the file — reported, retold, unresolved. SOURCES — 1 cited · Soap Factory — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_Factory — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/