Earlham College

A phantom dribbles basketball in the locked Athletic and Wellness Center. A creek at the back of campus screams on Halloween night.

At Earlham College, a phantom dribbles a basketball in the Athletic and Wellness Center after the building is locked. Staff and students have reported hearing the ball bounce off the gymnasium floor late at night, when the 1,800-seat arena sits empty. Nobody knows who the player is. Nobody has ever walked in and caught him shooting. The sound just starts up, and then, eventually, stops.

The college was founded in 1847 by Quakers as the Friends Boarding School, one of the earliest institutions of its kind in Indiana. It became Earlham in 1859, named for the English home of the Gurney family, and was coeducational from the start. The campus spans 800 acres along the National Road in Richmond, backing up to wooded creek land that winds through the property. That back edge of campus is where the other ghost story lives.

Two students, the story goes, tried to cross one of the creeks by walking along a pipe. They slipped. They fell. They clawed at the metal as they went down, and their fingernail scratches are still visible on the underside of the pipe if you go look for them. On Halloween night, the sound of screaming rises out of the water below.

Every wooded campus eventually grows a legend like this. No names, no dates, no Richmond newspaper clipping to anchor it, no plaque on the pipe. The student who first told it has long graduated, and the student she told it to has too. What's left is the shape of the story and the place it supposedly happened: a specific pipe, a specific creek, a specific night of the year. The details that got sanded down over the retellings are exactly the details you'd need to prove any of it happened. What remains is what survives.

Richmond itself has a longer paranormal tradition than Earlham does. The Richmond Item documented a haunting at a North 17th Street home in 1889, where the Classon family reported mysterious rapping and a cellar door that kept unlocking itself. In 1912, workers at the Starr Piano Factory said they saw a headless, armless phantom with glowing eyes for several nights running. Earlham sits in that wider landscape without being tied to any of it. The Quaker roots of the school pull in a different direction: Friends theology doesn't dwell on restless spirits or purgatorial stops, which may be why the campus lore feels thinner than the gothic dormitory hauntings at other old Indiana schools. What Earlham has are two clean, un-flashy, hard-to-verify stories. A ghost who likes basketball. A creek where two students supposedly slipped off a pipe, left fingernail scratches on the underside, and can be heard screaming from the water every Halloween.