In Brief
At Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, students saw lights flickering inside the new Stout Meetinghouse after dark and called it a ghost. The ghost was a hungry undergraduate cooking his dinner by flashlight.
The Full Story
The best-documented ghost at Earlham College, in Richmond, Indiana, turned up in the early 1950s, right after the Stout Meetinghouse went up in the southwest corner of campus. Students started reporting strange lights flickering inside the new building at night, and word spread among them that the new building was haunted.
It wasn't. The lights belonged to Prosper Prime Van Meulebrouck III, class of 1955, a student who liked to cook his own meals in the meetinghouse by flashlight after dark. Two things gave him away. There was the smell of cooking, drifting out of a building that was supposed to be empty. And there were the books in the private library of Elton Trueblood, the Quaker theologian who taught at the college, which kept turning up rearranged on their shelves. Someone was in there reading them. Van Meulebrouck went on to become a professor of philosophy himself.
It's a very Quaker kind of haunting, the spirit explained away by a hungry undergraduate reading theology between meals. Earlham was founded by Indiana Quakers in 1847, as a boarding school for the children of Friends, and Friends practice doesn't dwell much on restless spirits or purgatory. That may be part of why the campus lore reads thinner here than the gothic-dormitory hauntings at older Indiana colleges. What ghosts Earlham does keep are the quieter kind, and harder to pin down.
There is a phantom said to live in the Athletics and Wellness Center, the building that opened in the fall of 1999 with its Druley Gymnasium and Trueblood Fieldhouse. The story is just that someone is in there at night. The ghost, people say, likes to "play basketball" in the empty courts after hours. No one will tell you who he is, or when he started, or how he died. There is no name attached to him and no event behind him. He is only ever a resident, dribbling somewhere in the dark of a building younger than most of the people telling the story.
The other one lives out back, where a creek runs behind campus. The way it's told, two students once tried to cross by walking along a pipe, slipped, and fell into the water below. On Halloween night, the story goes, you can find their fingernail scratches on the pipe where they grabbed for it, and hear screaming from the creek underneath. No record names the students, the year, or the creek. The scratches are only ever found in the telling.
