Indiana University Bloomington

IU runs its own folklore archive and a campus Ghost Walk. The cast includes the 1911 Woman in Black, Agnes at Dunn Cemetery, and Owen Hall's arm.

Indiana University Bloomington has its own ghost archive. Not a metaphor, an actual archive: the Linda Dégh Collection at IU Libraries, assembled by a folklore professor who spent decades collecting supernatural stories from 90 of Indiana's 92 counties. Dégh died in 2014 at 96. The ghosts she catalogued are still around.

The oldest one on campus is the Woman in Black. The Indiana Daily Student ran the first story on October 9, 1911, under the headline "Woman in Black Roams and Scares Students," describing a veiled figure on Third Street at night and a student who fled her, per the article, "with greater speed than any Indiana track athlete ever possessed." A week later, on October 16, a follow-up noted that "within the last few nights, several students have had rocks thrown at them by some unknown person." The veil has never dropped in over a century of sightings. She's the closest thing IU has to a founding ghost.

Dunn Cemetery sits near the Indiana Memorial Union, which is an odd thing to say about a student union building. The cemetery is older than the university that grew up around it, and it's the territory of a ghost named Agnes. The legend says Agnes is a member of the Dunn family who tended soldiers' graves in life, and who rises at midnight to keep going, grave to grave, when the students have gone home. The proximity of the cemetery may be why the Memorial Union itself has a small ecosystem of its own ghosts: maintenance workers have reported shadowy figures in mirrors and soft voices that sound like chanting. Reports also include a ghost dog, which is a level of specificity that either dignifies the whole story or undermines it, depending on how you feel about ghost dogs.

The Tudor Room restaurant in the IMU has a painting called "Halloween" by O.O. Haig, showing a boy with a jack-o-lantern. Staff have reported coming in to find the tables deliberately disarranged and floral arrangements moved overnight. They blame the painting. They have done so, reliably, for years.

Owen Hall is where IU's ghost story stops being cute. In the university's early years, the third floor of Owen housed cadavers for medical study. They were moved up from the first floor on a dumbwaiter, which periodically severed limbs when bodies caught in the machinery. Campus lore holds that a prank involving a stolen severed arm, balanced on a ceiling light in a dorm room, ended with a female student found gnawing on the arm while rocking back and forth, driven out of her mind by what she'd found. It's a legend too grim to be pure invention and too clean to be pure history. Probably something like it happened. Probably not that exact version.

Briscoe Hall's ghost is a student who died elevator surfing in the 1970s. He fell down the shaft. Now the elevator opens and moves between floors without anyone pressing buttons, which is either a ghost or a 1970s elevator, and Briscoe residents have had decades to pick a side.

Room 104 of the old Kappa Delta Rho house at 1503 East Third Street is another story people bring up: a woman saw a disfigured figure with an ax, a pickaxe later turned up in the room, and nobody has cleanly explained the gap between those two events.

Since 2001, the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology has hosted an annual campus Ghost Walk. Students guide the tour. The starting point is usually Richard Dorson, the "father of American folklore" and former director of IU's Folklore Institute, who apparently didn't leave the discipline he built even after he died.