The Rest of the Campus — Sorin's Presence, Columba Hall, the Tunnels and the Bell

Notre Dame district · lore in print from 1995

The founder's ghost: The campus's second spirit is its founder. Father Edward Sorin, who brought the Congregation of Holy Cross to this ground in November 1842, died on 31 October 1893 — Halloween, as Notre Dame Magazine notes in telling the tales — and the tradition the magazine collects holds, in substance, that he still walks the campus to keep an eye on the place. The sightings attach to the buildings of his life. In the Main Building, the administration building under the Golden Dome, night staff have reported an elderly priest in habit, with the founder's long beard. During the Main Building's renovation, when administrators were temporarily housed in Hayes-Healy Hall, the magazine recounts, night cleaners reported the same figure moving through the corridors — and thought little of it until one noticed the priest had no feet, and others saw him pass through walls. At South Dining Hall, the telling is a worker's: Pam Bendit, a staffer at Reckers, the eatery at the hall's back, told the magazine that washing dishes at 4 o'clock one morning she turned to see a white figure floating near the doors to the dining room, and knew it for Sorin only later, when she saw his portrait hanging above the fireplace in the west wing. The dining hall's stock in the student retellings adds hand-clapping when no one is there, moans, flashes of light, and a radio in the pantry that turned itself on for Bryce Chung — the student who, after consulting the Student Activities Office and the University Archives, built the tales into a one-shot ND Ghost Tour that drew a hundred people to the LaFortune porch one Halloween. The History Museum's podcast carried the founder's lingering presence to its own audience in 2025, in the episode "Hauntings on Campus." All of the above prints as lore, attributed to its tellers.

Columba Hall: The brothers' residence by Saint Mary's Lake keeps the campus's most contested telling. As the student lists retell it, the brothers who live there report the sounds of galloping horses outside the building, and an apparition — in one list's form, a soldier searching for a tribal burial ground the hall is said to stand on — has been seen going up and down the front steps with his horse; students have reported Potawatomi riders passing through the hall itself. The History Museum's 2025 podcast states the claim at its plainest, in substance: Potawatomi warriors at Columba Hall. Against the whole entry stands the documentary geography, in this history's account of the peoples before the city: the campus ground was Miami and Potawatomi country, ceded in the treaties that the Before the City section works from the texts, and the university's founding gift of land came through the bishop from that cession — but no burial ground at the Columba Hall site is documented in any source reached for this section, and Kleen's caution, printed in the Washington Hall entry above, holds that the horseman tradition may have wandered here from Pio Montenegro's white horse at the other hall. The entry therefore stands as two facts and a caution: horses are heard at Columba Hall in the telling; the ground's Potawatomi history is real and documented elsewhere in this history; and the link between them is the tellers' own.

The smaller stock: The magazine's survey adds two more addresses. At Saint Liam Hall, the student health center, stories circulate in substance of kindly nuns making rounds after hours, and during Christmas breaks security guards have responded to mysterious 911 calls reportedly placed from phones in the empty building. At Holy Cross Cemetery, the community's burying ground, the student lists offer atmosphere rather than apparition — a place where the presence of the buried community is strongly felt, in one list's phrasing — and no specific telling attaches to any grave there in the record reached. Both entries stand at that size.

The tunnels: The campus's underground is real, and its legends are documented as legends. Notre Dame is served by a utility tunnel system carrying heat, electricity and phone lines to every building, with exits scattered across the campus; students are prohibited from entering, the 1995 Scholastic reported, because of the danger of electrical shock — the tunnels' manager, Barkes, is the magazine's source for the system's facts. Around that working plant the magazine gathered a body of assorted legends, summarized here: the tunnels figure in student telling as the campus's secret geography, the place every student hears of and none may go. No specific apparition is attached to the tunnels in any carrier reached; their place in the lore is structural — the hidden system beneath the visible campus, onto which a century of students has projected the same unseen life they report in the halls above it. The one tunnel claim in the city's wider lore belongs downtown, at the Morris, and is told in that entry; the History Museum's podcast, in its "Ghosts of the Gilded Age," adds whispers of West Washington tunnels at the size of a phrase, and no more is documented for either.

The bell: The 1995 Scholastic preserved one more piece of the campus's supernatural stock, of a different kind: the Basilica of the Sacred Heart's great bell, named for Saint Anthony — seven thousand pounds, the magazine notes — is said to ring only when a prayer to Saint Anthony will be answered, and its ringer is rumored to be the saint himself. No haunting is claimed; the entry is a legend of the working campus, printed here because the magazine printed it in the same cover story as the ghosts, as part of the same body of tales the university wears. The campus's own verdicts on the whole stock stand at the end of the magazine's account: Father Austgen and his thirty-three-page binder on one side; on the other, the psychology professor George Howard, who, asked whether there are ghosts at Notre Dame, dismissed the idea in substance, likening ghosts to tales of spaceships carrying people away. Both men are the university's own, and both are in its magazine.

Sources:

1. John Nagy, "Haunt thee, Notre Dame?", Notre Dame Magazine — Sorin's walks, the Main Building and Hayes-Healy reports, Pam Bendit's sighting, Chung's tour and his dining-hall radio, the Saint Liam Hall nuns and 911 calls, and Professor Howard's answer. The magazine's tellings are summarized in this entry, not quoted.
2. Scholastic Magazine, "The Dark Side of the Dome" (20 April 1995) — the tunnel system's documented facts and its assorted legends, summarized; the Saint Anthony bell tradition, and the prohibition on entry.
3. Her Campus at Notre Dame, "Halloween Week: Top 6 Haunted Places at Notre Dame" (2019) — the student-list forms of the Columba Hall, South Dining Hall, Main Building and Holy Cross Cemetery entries, summarized.
4. The History Museum, A Bend in Time, Series 5: Spooky South Bend, Episode 3, "Hauntings on Campus" (30 September 2025) — Sorin's presence, Columba Hall's Potawatomi-warrior telling, as the museum's published descriptions state them.
5. This history, Before the City and Notre Dame sections — the cessions and the campus ground; Sorin's arrival in November 1842.