Variations of these photographs will be jigsaw puzzles this year.
If you know to torture someone with a puzzle this is a good place to start.
This oughta be good for one gross winter day, right?
It will rain here this weekend, and so the rest of the trees will sigh and sneeze their seasonal leaves onto the ground. Already they looked dry and dusty. Autumn has come, and though the forecast promises nice weather after some weekend rain, autumn has also left notice it will soon be gone.
You have to acknowledge that some class flyers are better than others.
And I don’t know Robert Dobler, but it seems like he has a seasonally popular area of research going on here. But, “Objective truth is not our goal,” seems more like a summer offering.
This class also seems interesting.
But this is the one I would want want to audit. Specifically, I like how this text promises the class will examine modern Irish folklore. Most folklore you hear, at least in the western world, seems older. Or your imagination makes it older, anyway. This is framed in a contemporaneous and politically practical way.
One presumes that all folklore started that way, but then time and life happens. Eventually context is subtly altered, or removed altogether, through retelling or adaptation. Maybe some of that was deliberate, perhaps some of it just takes place because some other novel goals could be met by this story. And that’s to say nothing about geographic origin, or oral migration and what that could do to a story’s influence or impact.
I was thinking of that because we were in the building the folklore program calls home, the Classroom and Office Building, or the COB, as the cool residents pressed for time and wholly accepting of acronyms call it. We were in the COB because tonight was the Undergraduate Folklore & Ethnomusicology Student Association’s annual Ghost Walk. Every year we’ve been here I’ve missed out on this, because it always seems to be on a night when I’m in the studio. This year, the FESA folks chose Friday and so decided to take advantage of the opportunity, and a lovely, mild evening on campus.
At the second stop, the stories picked up. They walked us to the front of Owen Hall, named in honor of Richard Owen, the Indiana State Geologist and a professor. Today, Owen Hall houses the College of Arts and Sciences administrative offices, but a natural science building and museum. Apparently, some of the cadavers used there lost limbs in the dumbwaiter system. Also, we learned about a spiteful nursing school prank. Some students decided to scare an unliked classmate by hanging a limb from a light fixture. They expected a scream when she went into the room, but all was quiet. Finally they decided to go check on the kid and found her sitting numbly in a corner, her hair shock white, and she was chewing on the severed limb. Go IU!
At the IMU, you could learn about a ghost guard dog. This story needs a little more detail, but this is a big building and there are lots of stories to compensate. Maintenance staff hear footsteps on the fourth floor and run across cold spots. They catch the echoing sounds of laughter and are sometimes encountered by a bodiless voice whispering their names. In some versions of the story the names are shouted.
In the Tudor Room, which is a nice dining room in the IMU, people report hearing a child giggling and a bouncing ball. The ghost kid apparently likes the tapestries. Once, they were removed for a cleaning and the longer the tapestries were gone, the supernatural events got more … spirited. He also messes with the silverware, which, if true, must aggravate the staff to no end.
In the nearby Federal Room — a formal parlor and dining room done in a colonial style, which features handmade wallpaper displaying tourist impressions of early nineteenth-century America, a wallpaper you can also see in the White House — you can host 72 people for an event. But there will be three other guests. Spooky guests. I’ll quote from a recent book about hauntings.
A pioneer of the art movement at Indiana University and a member of the Art Committees of General and State Federations of Clubs, Mary Burney passed away in 1933, before her portrait was even finished. The story is that Mary was extremely dissatisfied with the way here portrait was being painted by Wayman Adams. She was aware that her portrait was going to join the portraits of others who had performed great achievements at the IMU. She raised quite a stir within the university when she began looking around for a replacement painter. She since passed away before the painting was finished, it’s believed that she continues to haunt the Federal Room, where it’s displayed.
Perhaps the painting was her unfinished business, since it was the one thing we knew she was unhappy about right before her death. Staff who have felt a never-ending presence in this room have declared that doors unlock as they are performing their nightly lock-up, as if someone is following right behind them, unlocking the doors they have just secured. In fact, this ordeal has become some common that staff have been instructed to perform a double-check before leaving for the night.
Poor Mary had suffered devastating losses in her life. Her husband passed away before her, and she had lost her son in a fire sometime later. Over the mantel in the Federal Room hangs her portrait, flanked by two urns — one holding her husband’s ashes and the other holding her son’s. Oddly, in June 2001, one of the two urns went missing. The urn was lost for years, and, just as mysteriously as it disappeared, it reappeared one day on the mantel where it used to be. Visitors have smelled perfume when entering the room, often described as the smell of roses or other flowers that were extremely aged. Others often note the faint smell of smoke, as if a candle has just been blown out, although there are no candles within the room. Could this be Mary’s perfume or the smoke from the fire that killed her son the guests are smelling?
Other versions of the story have just the ashes disappearing. In some tellings, valuables go missing. There was a 2002 story in the campus paper where one of the first campus ghost tours actually visited the room. The guide talks about the two missing urns, another variation.
That story has a great quote, too. “It’s easy to feel comfortable when a big group is in this room, but it’s when you’re alone that you can feel her presence and smell the whiff of her perfume.”
We visited the Dunn Cemetery, where one of the folklore professors takes over for a bit.
“We are all pointed in this direction. Everyone you know is pointed in this direction. Everyone you will meet is pointed in this direction.”
Student next to me: “What direction are we talking about?”
The professor, meanwhile, told us about the first person to be buried in the Dunn Cemetery, a 19th century teenager, who apparently met her untimely fate after an accident with a wagon wheel. (Dunn Cemetery is on campus. This property was sold to the university by the Dunn family in 1855 after a fire on the original campus. The common tale, at least, is that one condition of the sale was that the cemetery would remain undisturbed. In fact, it’s still an active cemetery. Two people have been interred here since we arrived here in 2016.)
The folklore professor tried to plant the seeds of future folklore. This, he said, is what folklorists do as an experiment. His story could use some work, but he notes that if the story catches on, the retellings get better.
This makes me wonder about what ingredients a story needs to get retold. There’s something thematic to study there, too, I’m sure.
We stopped at the Showalter Fountain and heard a few tales about the nearby Lily Library. The last stop was at the arboretum, where shadowy figures are said to whisper to visitors “Get out of my home!”
That could be anything, but there are a lot of shadows in the arboretum. It was here, at the carillon, where we learned of the McNutt Hatchet man. It’s a tale of a student who fell victim to a man during a Christmas break. Honestly sounds like the most conceivably realistic story we’ve heard. There’s a version of this tale where it’s a man with a hatchet, and in the iteration we heard this evening the hatchet man is a serial killer. In every version I’ve heard, the hatchet man was never caught.
That’s the part that seems most reasonable. There are more than a few unsolved murders around. And that’s not folklore.
