Indiana State University - Burford Hall

Barfing Barb haunts Burford Hall communal bathrooms. A 1995 resident heard her vomiting and crying but found the bathroom empty.

"I heard a woman vomiting and crying," a Burford Hall resident recalled of a night in January 1995, when she'd come back to her sixth-floor room at Indiana State University around 1 a.m. after getting off work. "I stopped and called out, 'Are you okay?' No answer. I went over by the stalls, and pushed on each door, looking in. No one was in the bathroom besides me."

Her account is the standard Burford Hall ghost encounter, and the pattern has been repeating for more than half a century. The Terre Haute dorm is a women's freshman residence with communal bathrooms on each floor, and the ghost is a student named Barb who legend says died of alcohol poisoning on the bathroom floor after a night of heavy drinking. She wasn't discovered in time. She doesn't do shadow figures or door slams or anything elegant. What she does is throw up. Loudly. Wetly. Interspersed with crying, always in a bathroom that's empty when someone goes in to help.

The folklore earned her the nickname Barfing Barb, and the story has been distinctive enough to attract academic attention. A folklore paper titled "Pain, Pleasure, and the Spectral: The Barfing Ghost of Burford Hall" analyzed the legend through the lens of folklore studies. ISU's own student media at WZIS radio and the Indiana Statesman newspaper have run the story multiple times. Ashley Hood, a Terre Haute paranormal author who wrote Haunted Terre Haute and Haunted Cemeteries of Indiana, has included the dorm on her Tell Tale Tours walking route of the ISU campus since at least 2020.

Beyond the retching sounds, residents have reported screaming in the hallways, objects thrown across rooms by nobody, and knocking on doors with no one in the corridor to do it. Activity spikes late at night, in keeping with the story of a death that happened after a party. Accounts differ on whether the original incident occurred on the fourth or sixth floor, a detail legends lose first in transmission.

In the main lobby hangs a portrait the students call Old Lady Burford. The second legend of the dorm holds that if you stare at the portrait too long, something bad will happen to you. Incoming freshmen dare each other to hold eye contact with it, a harmless campus superstition that couldn't exist on a phone-only campus because it requires a physical painting in a physical lobby. Most campus ghosts are atmospheric, which is a polite way of saying vague. Burford Hall's ghost is graphic. She threw up and cried herself to death in a bathroom, and the sound keeps coming back. The story survives because it works as a warning wrapped in horror. There are worse ways for a legend to earn its keep.