Earlham College

A private Quaker liberal arts college founded in 1847 in Richmond, Indiana. The campus features historic buildings dating from the Civil War era and a strong tradition of Quaker values.

Earlham College is a liberal arts institution founded by Quakers in 1847 in Richmond, Indiana, making it one of the oldest colleges in the state. The campus sits along the National Road, the historic route that once connected the eastern seaboard to the western frontier, and its buildings span more than a century and a half of academic history. The combination of its deep Quaker roots, aged buildings, and a campus that backs up to wooded creek land has given rise to a handful of persistent ghost stories that have circulated among students for generations.

The most distinctive haunting is said to reside in the Athletic and Wellness Center, where a phantom is known to play basketball at night. Staff and students have reported hearing the unmistakable sounds of a basketball being dribbled and bouncing off the gymnasium floor during late-night hours when the facility is locked and empty. The identity of the ghostly athlete has never been determined, but the reports have persisted long enough to become part of campus folklore at the Quaker institution, where the 1,800-seat performance gymnasium hosts the college's basketball and volleyball games during the day.

A darker legend involves a location at the back of campus near one of the creeks that wind through the wooded property. According to the account, two students were attempting to cross the water by walking along a pipe when they slipped and fell into the creek below. The story holds that visitors to the spot can still see fingernail scratches on the pipe where the students desperately tried to hold on, and that on Halloween night, sounds of screaming can be heard rising from the water. Whether this account is rooted in an actual historical incident or has grown entirely from campus legend remains unverified, as is common with stories passed through successive classes of students at any institution with this depth of history.

Richmond itself has a long tradition of ghost stories, with accounts dating back to the nineteenth century. The Richmond Item newspaper documented unexplained phenomena throughout the city, including an 1889 haunting on North 17th Street where the Classon family experienced mysterious rapping, pounding, and a cellar door that repeatedly opened despite being locked, and a 1912 sighting at the Starr Piano Factory where workers reported a headless, armless phantom with glowing eyes that appeared over several consecutive nights. Earlham College sits within this broader landscape of a city where the boundary between the historical and the supernatural has always been thin.