Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (54 page)

A little bit later on, say about a half hour later, the two girls in the room started wondering about the other girl ’cause she hadn’t come back yet. So they went out on the landing and they heard something moving around downstairs. So they called down and nobody answered, the person or whatever it was moving around was still heard.

They were afraid to go downstairs, so they locked themselves in their room and waited for morning. They actually waited about an hour, when they decided to try it again. They were going to open the door when they heard a noise outside—like a scratching, so they got scared and didn’t open the door. The scratching was like somebody dragging somebody down the steps. They were afraid to leave the room ’cause someone was out in the hall.

They stayed in their room till early the next morning until the mailman came around, and they hailed the mailman out the window. He came in, and [they told him] during the night, they had heard a scratching on their door. The mailman came in the front door and went up the stairs, and told the girls to stay in their room, that everything was all right but that they were to stay in their rooms.

But the girls didn’t listen to him ’cause he had said it was all right, so they came out into the hall. When they opened the door, they saw their girlfriend on the floor with a hatchet in her head.

I
heard this in 1983 told at West Georgia College, Carrollton, Georgia. It was supposed to have happened on the University of Illinois campus. This is the way it was told.

This girl got off work and went back to the dorm where she lived. It was late and she and her roommate had an agreement that if either one had brought a guy back to the room, she would put a rubber band on the doorknob. Well, sure enough, the girl gets to her room and there is a rubber band on the doorknob.

The girl had had a tough night and wasn’t in the best of moods. She wasn’t about to hang around in the hallway half the night, so she unlocks the door and goes in. Well, she gets in the room and hears all this heavy breathing and rustling around on her roommate’s side of the room. The girl doesn’t turn on the lights and being as quiet as possible slips out of her clothes, gets in bed and falls asleep.

The next morning the girl wakes up and it’s light outside. She yawns and sits up and looks over on her roommate’s side of the room. Sprawled on the bed is her roommate, gutted and torn apart. There’s blood all over the wall and floor. The girl gets up and starts to dash out of the room. She reaches the door and stops in her tracks. There, printed neatly on the door in blood is, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the lights?”

The first version of this popular campus legend of the 1960s comes from Linda Dégh’s article “The Roommate’s Death and Related Dormitory Stories in Formation,” in
Indiana Folklore,
vol. 2, 1969; it was told by an Indiana University student who heard it in her dormitory in 1964, during her freshman year. I have added paragraphing to Dégh’s verbatim text. The broken taboo—“[he] told the girls to stay in their room”—and the male rescuer are typical of the earlier versions of the legend. The second example incorporating the handwriting-on-the-wall motif is more typical of versions told since the 1980s; this text was sent to me in 1992 by Todd Webb of Jonesboro, Georgia. In a variation on the wall-writing theme the message may be written in lipstick, reminiscent of the “AIDS Mary” legend. Students all across the country continue to tell this legend, often as a warning to freshmen by upperclass students or by resident advisers in the dormitories.

“Switched Campus Buildings”

I
heard this story when I was a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It involves the University Chapel there, a small, squat, grey stone building which contrasts with the general red brick Georgian/classical design of virtually every other building on the central grounds.

The story goes that the architect of the chapel was also the architect of the chapel at Cornell University in New York. Somehow, his designs for these chapels were switched, so that Cornell received a red brick Georgian chapel while Virginia received its current chapel. I have never been able to ask anyone who has been to Cornell whether they have such a chapel or not.

D
ear Professor Folklore: I graduated from Calif. State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in 1978. I heard a story that the architect who designed the red-brick dorm building had earlier designed prisons.

I quoted a variation of the chapel story with a switch between Virginia and Notre Dame in
The Baby Train;
the above version was sent to me in 1989 by Daniel M. Covino of Rye Brook, New York. Numerous stories circulate on other campuses alleging that building plans were switched between institutions, usually those with radically different architectural styles or those in distant parts of the country that have completely opposite climates. The prisonlike nature of so many college living units prompts stories such as the second example above, which I quote from a postcard sent in 1995 by Richard T. Wylie of Torrance, California. Another common campus-architecture legend follows.

“Sinking Libraries”

W
hen I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University from 1977 to 1981, there was a story circulating on campus that the University Library was gradually sinking. The building had been constructed on a section of campus known as the “lakefill,” which, as its name implies, was at one time under the waters of Lake Michigan.

As I remember it, the architects had neglected to include the weight of the books when making their necessary calculations. As a result, the library was sinking by a quarter of an inch each year. For all I know this may actually be true.

W
hen I was a freshman in the early ’80s at the University of Pittsburgh I heard about the Sliding Engineering Building. It seems that the engineers, when designing the foundations for this large building, had neglected to take into account some instability of the soil upon which it was built. This, coupled with the building’s location at the top of a sloping street, resulted in a tendency for it to slide down the hill.

The only way to prevent it from sliding was to keep the building light enough, and the only way to accomplish this was to limit the amount of laboratory equipment in the basement labs. So it was only the judicious restraint of the experimenting professors that kept the building from sliding down to rest against the residence halls at the bottom of the slope, and then from sliding on through an elementary school immediately below them.

Northwestern University seems to have the most famous “sinking library” in the United States, judging from all the letters and articles I have received about it. Jenny Cline of Maynard, Massachusetts, sent me the above example in 1990. Another notorious sinking library is at Syracuse University. Essentially the same legend—sometimes without a mention of unstable subsoil—is told on many American college and university campuses, possibly encouraged by the students’ noting that the shelves of the library are never completely full; some books are always checked out. The sliding-building story from Pittsburgh came to me from John F. Myers of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1993. Off campus there are similar legends about new buildings either leaning off-vertical or steadily sinking into the ground; the most common sinking buildings seem to be new shopping malls.

“The Acrobatic Professor”

Y
our campus stories prompted my husband to recall some about a chemistry professor at Mississippi State named Seeley, a terror to all the agriculture students.

Once students asked when they would have an exam. He replied, “The day you see me come into the classroom through the transom.”

The next day he brought a ladder with him, set it next to the door, climbed in through the transom and gave them an exam.

When he retired, a cartoon of his head sticking through a transom was supposedly published in the campus newspaper.

I
was surprised to learn while reading
The Mexican Pet
that a story I had taken as truth was probably an urban legend. As a freshman at Texas A&M University in 1968, I was told by older students that my introductory calculus professor had once answered the usual first-week question about pop quizzes by saying that the class could expect one when he entered the room via the back window.

He was a slight man with physical impairments that made it difficult for him to walk, so there was some nervous laughter at this announcement, especially since the class met in a second-floor classroom. There was no balcony off the room, but only a small ledge outside the rather large windows.

One day near the middle of the semester, the story went, the class was about to dismiss itself after waiting the then-standard fifteen minutes for the professor to arrive, when a window at the back of the room opened, and in crawled the professor. He stood up and distributed a stack of pop quizzes to the astonished class.

Marie H. Lewis of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sent me her husband’s recollection of the Professor Seeley story in 1991. This was probably the same Mississippi State University professor who was alluded to without name or field in the October 1961 edition of
Reader’s Digest.
I have heard similar stories about a German professor at the University of North Carolina, a mathematician at Union College in Schenectady, New York, a history professor at Tennessee Technological University, and—best known of all the acrobatic professors—about Professor Guy Y. (“Guy Wire”) Williams, who taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1906 until his death in 1968. Campus folklore claimed that Williams had once been a circus acrobat, but an official history of the University only mentions that he was “a skilled gymnast and acrobat,” without specifically describing the transom feat. Three published photos of Williams show him mixing chemicals, twirling a lariat, and “startling his class with an impromptu handstand on the corner of his desk.” But there is no mention of climbing through a transom, nor are pop quizzes described. Transoms would be characteristic of only the very oldest classroom buildings; the variation of the story from Texas A&M with the professor simply entering through a window was sent to me in 1990 by John T. Yantis of Texas.

“The Telltale Report”

I
t was in 1886 that “discretionary supervision” of attendance at scholastic exercises, as the Dean discreetly termed it, was adopted [at Harvard]…. “Discretionary supervision” meant in practice that upperclassmen could cut classes at will; and term-time trips to New York, Montreal, and Bermuda became all too common. The Faculty remained in blissful ignorance of this new definition of liberty until it was called to their attention by a careless student and his irate father. The lad had left Cambridge for the more genial climate of Havana, writing a series of post-dated letters, which his chum was supposed to mail to his parents at proper intervals. Unfortunately, his “goody” [housekeeper] placed the lot in the mail; the alarmed father came to Cambridge, and no officer of the University had the remotest idea where the son might be. Shortly after, the Overseers offered the Faculty the choice between holding a daily morning roll-call and checking attendance in classes. They chose the latter.

From Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1936 book
Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936,
pp. 368–69. While the imposition and discontinuation of “discretionary supervision” at Harvard can be historically verified, the anecdote about the anonymous “lad’s” postdated letters giving him away because of slipups by his “chum” and his “goody” sounds apocryphal. This story did not survive on the liberated campuses of the twentieth century, but a similar account of telltale reports written in advance and mailed by a landlady as a group, or in the wrong sequence, became a standard theme in twentieth-century folklore of Mormon missionaries who are required to file weekly activity reports and to stay on the job during their church-assigned two-year missions. Every Mormon missionary has heard the cautionary tale about the missionaries who strayed—to a World Series game, the Olympics, Disneyland, skiing, etc.—and were caught when those telltale reports arrived in the mail.