Bascom Hill

Two settlers from the 1830s are literally buried under the walkway on Bascom Hill at UW-Madison, their graves marked only by tiny brass plaques most students never notice. Visitors see two ghostly figures near the Lincoln statue, and paranormal investigators picked up a Confederate soldier's presence near Camp Randall, where 140 POWs died during the Civil War.

Two brass plaques reading "W. N." and "S. W." sit embedded in the esplanade walkway southwest of the Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill. Thousands of UW-Madison students walk past them every day without knowing they're stepping over graves.

William Nelson died of typhoid fever in 1837, believed to be the first white man to die in Madison. Samuel Warren, from Middlesex, England, was struck and killed by lightning on the hill in 1838. Both were buried in what served as Madison's first cemetery before the university claimed the hilltop. When the dead were disinterred around 1846 to make way for the growing campus, Warren and Nelson got left behind. Workers rediscovered their remains in 1918 while excavating to move the Abraham Lincoln statue to its current position, finding the lower sections of two coffins with leg bones, iron nails, and a shirt button still inside. The university left them where they lay.

The hill they're buried on has deeper roots than any settler cemetery. The Ho-Chunk people called this land Teejop, the place of four lakes, and Bascom Hill held a conical burial mound created somewhere between 900 and 2,500 years ago. That mound was leveled when Bascom Hall went up in 1857. The UW-Madison campus now contains 38 documented effigy mounds, more than any other American university.

People see two men walking near the Lincoln statue, an older figure and a younger one, widely believed to be Warren and Nelson. A man in a bowler hat and period clothing has been spotted going up and down the steps of Bascom Hall. Inside the building, whispers echo through empty corridors. The lights in the sound booth flip on and off with no explanation, and no one has been able to figure out why.

Psychic-medium Ian MacAllister investigated the hill with the Mad City Paranormal research group and turned up something unexpected. In South Hall, a former all-women's dormitory from the late 1800s, he detected presences of women in period clothing. Audio recordings captured a woman whispering the name of one of the group members. Between North and South Hall, MacAllister sensed a Confederate soldier, which confused him until he learned that nearby Camp Randall had served as a Civil War prisoner-of-war camp. An estimated 140 Confederate soldiers died there 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 walking tour of Madison's haunted history. Tour guide Kjersti Beth says strange things keep happening across campus. Between the ancient Ho-Chunk burial ground beneath Bascom Hall, the forgotten settler graves on the hillside, and the Confederate dead at Camp Randall a few blocks away, the campus sits on layers of human loss stretching back millennia.