Indiana State University - Burford Hall

At Burford Hall, a residence hall at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, students keep hearing the same thing late at night: the unmistakable sound of someone violently throwing up in an empty bathroom. They open the door to silence. Look under the stalls, and there are no feet. And then, behind them, the sound starts again.

The legend goes back more than fifty years, and it is specific. In the older version, archived in ISU's Folklore Archives, the ghost ran a fixed three-act routine. "She would let out a hideous laugh, vomit in the john, then flush it graciously," one telling has it. The floor changes depending on who's telling it, most often the fourth, by the Coke machine near the basins. On that floor, residents pushed furniture against their locked doors at night, the story goes, and found them mysteriously unlocked by morning. A version in Ronald Baker's 1982 collection of Hoosier folk legends puts it on the second floor before Christmas break, the barfing and laughing and moaning running on every floor for two weeks straight. "But no one ever saw anyone," it ends.

A 1992 resident assistant left a first-person account. He heard the barfing around 2:30 in the morning, opened the restroom door, and it stopped. "I looked underneath the stalls and did not see any feet there," he wrote. As he left, it started again. "I never saw anyone in the restroom."

The legend is distinctive enough that an ISU folklorist, Jeannie B. Thomas, published an academic study of it in 1991, "The Barfing Ghost of Burford Hall," tracing the tellings across decades. The barf-and-Burford pun, she noted, probably helped the story stick.

Today's campus tours give the ghost a name and a death: "Barb," a student who supposedly died of alcohol poisoning on a bathroom floor. But that named-and-dated version belongs to the tour era. The older archived legend records no name, no death by drinking — just an unexplained ghost being sick in the dark.

There's a second story here, too. A portrait hangs in the lobby of Charlotte Burford, the real dean the hall was named for, who served from 1910 to 1946. Stare at it too long, freshmen are warned, and something bad happens to you. One archived telling claims she killed herself in the building, in room 217. The plaque beneath her picture, recording her actual decades of service as Dean of Women, says otherwise, and Thomas noted the legend conveniently ignored it.

The hall is still occupied. It got a $7.1 million renovation and reopened in 2006 as a co-ed freshman building, and the students living there now are mostly too young to have heard the old archive versions. They've heard the new one. The barfing, the alarm clocks switched off, the screaming down the hall, the knock with no one behind it. Fifty years on, in a building that's been gutted and rebuilt around her, people in Burford Hall keep reporting her in the dark.