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             Return to Table of Contents In stories about dead Indians, the landscape’s transformation is sudden, unanticipated. Breaking into current space and time, Indian ghosts deliver compelling messages. Some stories of spectral Indians are entwined with rumors of college campuses having been built above Indian burial grounds. Standing on the burial grounds of their ancestors, ghosts show students a sacred dimension that demands to be acknowledged, while exposing the callousness of the entrepreneurs who built the campus.
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PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK ISSUES | FOLKLORE IN ARCHIVES | FOLK ARTISTS SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH  American college campuses abound with rumors and legends of Indian spirits. In my recent fieldwork, I have gathered information about stories of hauntings, as well as students’ personal accounts of ghost sightings, from campuses across the country. This article focuses on three college campuses: the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, and the State University of New York at Binghamton. These universities have relatively few Native American students, and yet local landscape features and campus buildings with Indian names constantly reinforce an Indian presence. Rumors of Indian ghosts and legends about desecrated burial grounds help students—particularly freshmen away from home for the first time—to be sensitive to their new environments, while giving them a critical perspective on past injustices.
Rayna Green’s “The Only Good Indian” (1973) taught folklorists how deeply the image of the good, dead Indian permeates American thought. My fieldwork of the past five years confirms that on some American college campuses, “dead Indians” come to life in students’ rumors and legends. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon writes of “that which makes its mark by being there and not there at the same time” (1996, 6). This essay will examine campus stories about Indian ghosts whose presence signals their people’s absence. By analyzing rumors and legends about Indian ghosts, I want to probe the meaning of their spectrality, seeing how a campus landscape changes when a scene from the past unexpectedly breaks through. In stories about dead Indians, the landscape’s transformation is sudden, unanticipated. Breaking into current space and time, Indian ghosts deliver compelling messages. Some stories of spectral Indians are entwined with rumors of college campuses having been built above Indian burial grounds. Standing on the burial grounds of their ancestors, ghosts show students a sacred dimension that demands to be acknowledged, while exposing the callousness of the entrepreneurs who built the campus.... Most of the students from whom I have collected legends about Indian ghosts have been college freshmen: travelers from their homes to a new place where legends and rumors offer an important kind of learning. With a heightened sensitivity to both oral and visual cues, freshmen pay careful attention to representations of their new environment.... Although they have studied American history in high school, entering freshmen are usually unfamiliar with the process of spectralization that Renee Bergland describes in her book The National Uncanny (2000). Looking at a wide range of speeches and literary works, Bergland demonstrates how the dominance of mainstream American culture has forced Indians to become ghosts.... Having gathered information from several campuses with stories of Indian ghosts, I would like to discuss three of them: the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, and the State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University). These universities all have a relatively small number of Native American students: none more than one percent. Each of these campuses has landscape features that bring an Indian presence to mind. Most dramatically, effigy mounds, cemeteries, and ancient campsites fill at least twenty-two archaeological sites at the University of Wisconsin at Madison....On the university campus, a story is told about a mound being removed for the construction of Bascom Hall; dust from another mound was used to fill in the hollows of State Street. Sacred water is another important landscape feature. Students go to seek blessings at an Indian “wishing spring” on the shore of Lake Mendota, and a “spirit spring” at the University of Wisconsin arboretum is famous for its medicinal virtues (Brown 1938; Krouth 1997). At Louisiana State University, ancient Indian mounds on the northwest corner of the campus once served as the focal point of rituals. Archaeologists do not think these mounds are burial sites, but Brian Bordelon, writing in the magazine campus Gumbo, called the mounds “the most mystical site on L.S.U.’s campus … the ominous-looking trees on the mounds are haunted by the ghosts of the Indians from ages past” (1991).... ...Ever since I arrived in 1977, I have heard rumors that Binghamton [University] is one of the country’s most haunted places because of the joining of two rivers where Indian settlements had once flourished.... ...when members of our university’s pagan studies group decided they needed to contact the area’s spirits, I watched the students spell out the name of an Indian chief who told them they must stop the pollution of the Susquehanna River....Binghamton University has many buildings with Indian names, which create an onomastic landscape. Impressionable new students assigned to the residential area College-in-the-Woods drive with their families up to the doors of Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, or Seneca halls; they eat their first dinners in the Iroquois Commons. These names are relics of spectralization, reminding students of a presence that has become minimal....
In the spring of 2003, one of my students told me that Binghamton University used to be an Indian burial ground; several others collected narratives about Indian ghosts. Trying to figure out where the burial ground story had originated, I discovered that several teaching assistants in a large anthropology class were telling students that their residence halls stood above Indian graves.... ...as rumors about an Indian burial ground were spreading across campus, Binghamton’s Public Archaeology Facility was working on returning human remains from an Indian burial ground in Nichols, New York, dislodged during highway construction, to the Haudenosaunee committee of the Iroquois Confederacy. Since the remains were still on campus, it might be said that the Binghamton University campus was—temporarily—a repository for Indian bones. Did students know about the bones or about the grave desecration a half mile away? It seems unlikely that they did. Nevertheless, they energetically spread the tale of an Indian burial ground on campus, calling fellow students’ attention to historical injustices. Some of the same students who circulated these rumors told stories of Indian ghosts. One, collected from a nineteen-year-old white female in April 2003, took the form of a memorate (personal account): One time I was walking from Johnson Hall from a friend’s place back to my place in Digman. And it was really late, almost 3:00 a.m., and my friend said that he would walk me back to my hall, so while we were walking there was a lot of mist and fog in the air. It was my freshman year and my first two weeks at Bing, and the fog was really thick, unusually thick. While me and my friend were walking, I look to my left towards the volleyball court and I see two Native Americans, dressed in their traditional clothes standing there for a minute and then suddenly they ran into the thick fog. I got so scared I clung onto my friend’s arm and told him what I saw and he didn’t believe a word I said. But the scary part is, the next semester in my anthropology class, my professor told me that the campus was built over Iroquois land and many Natives were buried under Dickinson and Newing. I mean it could’ve been people messing around, but why would they do something like that?Several parts of this story immediately catch my attention: the mist and fog, which, as in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, signal a shift to another mode of life in the same location; the late hour, when unusual things are more likely to happen; and the traditional dress, which shows respect for the old ways. Like many other legend-tellers, this narrator authenticates her experience by explaining the corroborating information from her teacher after describing her surprising experience. Her friend, interestingly enough, sees nothing. But the most important aspect of this story seems to be its function as an initiatory experience. This nineteen-year-old student sees Indian ghosts during her “first two weeks at Bing,” while she is making the first adjustment to living away from home. Looking at a small part of the campus landscape—a volleyball court on a patch of sand—she sees evidence of a vanished way of life.... When such legends about Indians are told in tandem with rumors, they give students a view of past injustices. For freshmen in particular, rumors about desecrated burial grounds evoke questions about how the buildings and roadways of their campus landscape were constructed.... ...Having become specters with long memories and a strong sense of compassion, they communicate without speaking; their presence says more than words could say. Indian ghosts remind us of the positive presence of Indian ancestors: a presence that insists upon our recognizing a painful past. The excerpts and photographs above are from “Spectral Indians, Desecrated Burial Grounds” by Libby Tucker, published in Voices Vol. 31, Spring-Summer 2005. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now. HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP |
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