Santa Clara University

At Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, students say there's a flute player on campus you can hear but never find. On still nights the melody drifts across the grounds — wispy, unplaced — and when anyone goes looking for the source, there's no one there. No name, no building, no record of a musician. Just the playing.

He's not even the strangest item on the list.

Over in McLaughlin-Walsh Hall, the residence dorm has a second story most students never hear. Not the marble-rolling boy everyone repeats — a young girl named Marie, said to wander the halls after dark. What sets her apart is where she turns up: the Housing Office files. A student worker there, Daniel Long, says she's been logged more than once. "(She) has been reported by multiple people to the Housing Office over the last few years," he put it.

Then there are the bones. When the Harrington Learning Commons was built — the library opened in March 2008 — construction crews pulled dozens of cattle skeletons out of the ground. The land has a past most people walking to study have forgotten: Santa Clara spent a century as a tanning town, the Eberhard Tannery here one of the largest in the world before it came down in 1953. The cattle came up where the books now sit.

A rumor used to ride alongside all this — that the lawn in front of Mayer Theatre covers Ohlone burial mounds. The student paper checked. It's unfounded.

Santa Clara's lore comes with its own skeptic, and she isn't an outsider. She's the university's own archives coordinator, Sheila Conway, who spends her time pulling students back to the record. "My position is to try to get people to understand the facts instead of perpetuating rumors," she said, "but the facts aren't always as fun as the stories."

The flute, though. No one's explained the flute.