Bascom Hill

The core of UW-Madison's campus, which served as a settler cemetery from 1837 to 1846. Workers found two sets of human remains during the 1922 excavation for the Lincoln statue.

Bascom Hill, the iconic heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, sits on land sacred to the Ho-Chunk people long before Europeans arrived. The hill was home to a conical Native American burial mound created 900 to 2,500 years ago, one of what may have been more than 1,500 effigy mounds across Madison, or Teejop as the Ho-Chunk called the land of four lakes. That mound was leveled when Bascom Hall was constructed in 1857, an act of cultural erasure that set the stage for centuries of restless energy. Before the university claimed the hilltop, white settlers used it as Madison's first cemetery from 1837 until approximately 1846, when the dead were supposedly disinterred and moved to make way for the growing campus.

Not all of the dead were moved. In 1918, workers excavating to relocate the Abraham Lincoln statue to its current position atop the hill uncovered the lower sections of two coffins, discovering leg bones, iron nails, and a shirt button. The Wisconsin Historical Society confirmed these were the remains of two of Madison's earliest settlers: William Nelson, who died of typhoid fever in 1837 and is believed to be the first white man to die in Madison, and Samuel Warren of Middlesex, England, who was struck and killed by lightning on the hill in 1838. Another early burial, Tabitha Bird, a boarding house owner, had been successfully relocated to Sun Prairie Cemetery years earlier along with several others including her son, but Warren and Nelson had been overlooked. Their remains were left in place, and today two small brass plaques reading "W. N." and "S. W." are embedded in the esplanade walkway southwest of the Lincoln statue, though most people who walk past them daily are unaware of their presence.

The ghostly figures of an older and younger man have been reported walking near the Lincoln statue, widely believed to be Warren and Nelson. A figure described as being from a different time, wearing a bowler hat and dated period clothing, has been seen walking up and down the steps of Bascom Hall. Inside the building itself, whispers attributed to Warren and Nelson, or perhaps long-departed construction workers, have been heard echoing through the halls. There are even rumors that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln himself occasionally walks the hill. The lights in the sound booth of Bascom Hall go on and off by themselves, with witnesses unable to explain the activity.

Psychic-medium Ian MacAllister, working with the Mad City Paranormal research group, conducted investigations on Bascom Hill and made several striking discoveries. In South Hall, a former all-women's dormitory from the late 1800s that sits on the hill, MacAllister detected the presences of women in period clothing. Audio recordings captured the voice of a woman whispering the name of a group member. In the grassy area between North and South Hall, MacAllister sensed the presence of a Confederate soldier, a finding that initially puzzled him until he learned that nearby Camp Randall had served as a Civil War prisoner-of-war camp where an estimated 140 Confederate soldiers died of disease and exposure between 1862 and 1865.

Mad City Ghost Walks, founded by Mike Huberty, now includes Bascom Hill as a regular stop on its two-hour, two-mile walking tour of Madison's haunted history. The tour departs from the Wisconsin Masonic Center at 301 Wisconsin Avenue and makes six stops with around a dozen stories, covering everything from true crime to haunted hotels. Tour guide Kjersti Beth from Mad City Ghost Walks notes that strange things continue to happen across campus. The UW-Madison campus is believed to contain more Native American burial mounds than any other American university, with 38 documented effigy mounds remaining. Between the ancient Ho-Chunk burial ground beneath Bascom Hall, the forgotten settler graves on the hillside, and the Confederate dead of Camp Randall, the campus sits on layers of human loss stretching back millennia.