English Building

The story

The English Building stands on the Main Quad of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It did not begin as a home for literature. It opened in 1905 as the Woman's Building, designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, as a center for the university's women students. The building was later also known as Bevier Hall.

It grew in several stages. Funds for an expansion were voted in 1911; the grand columned front that faces the Quad dates from the resulting 1913 addition, and a further wing followed in 1924. The style mixes Beaux-Arts and Georgian Revival. Inside, the gymnasium section included a real swimming pool, a women's swimming tank photographed around 1909. On the top floor was a small apartment, which archivists have identified as a teaching flat where household science students practiced running a home.

Departments moved over the decades, and since 1956 the building has housed the university's Department of English, which gave it its current name. The old pool was eventually filled in and turned into an atrium, which survives at the heart of the building today.

The legend

The English Building has a well-known campus ghost story, and one that has been thoroughly debunked. The story says that a female student died there back when the building was supposedly a women's dormitory, and that she has never left.

How she died depends on who is telling it. In the most common version she drowned in the basement pool, either by accident or by suicide, driven by failing grades or an unwanted pregnancy. Other versions have her taking her own life after a failed romance, or being murdered in her room. The most elaborate telling, from a campus tour website in 2001, gives her a name, "Christine Moreno," and describes her being stabbed in her top-floor bed and discovered by her roommate beside a message written in blood. Students disagree even about her temperament: in some accounts she torments harsh professors, in others she helps with homework.

Reported phenomena include lights flicking on and off, doors swinging open and slamming shut, cold spots, loudly creaking floors, wailing, and a faint woman's voice with no visible source. Some people say a figure walks the halls or looks out from a third-floor window. The legend was circulating by 2001, and the student newspaper, the Daily Illini, has returned to it in Halloween features over the years. We found no professional investigation or television program, though students have made amateur ghost-hunting videos, which Illinois Alumni called inconclusive.

The historical record does not support the story. In a 2013 feature, Illinois Alumni magazine could find no first-hand account of a sighting, and university archivist Chris Prom told the magazine: "I have never seen any evidence that someone drowned in that pool." A 2023 article by the University of Illinois Archives went further. It found no evidence that the building was ever used to house students; the university did not open a residence hall for women until Busey Hall in 1917. The top-floor "apartment" was a household science teaching space, not a dorm room. No student named Christine Moreno appears in university records between 1899 and 1981, and nothing in the files records a drowning in the pool. Even the alumni magazine's 2013 claim that the building served as a residence hall from 1905 to 1937 is contradicted by the archives.

The English Building ghost is best understood as student folklore: a story built on a few real details, a pool and a small apartment in a building made for women, and polished by generations of retelling.

What remains today

The building remains in daily use for teaching and offices, home to the Department of English. Its columned 1913 front still faces the Main Quad, and the atrium inside occupies the space where the women's swimming tank once was. It is a working academic building rather than a museum.

Visiting

The English Building is part of an active university campus, and its Quad-facing exterior can be admired from the open lawn. Remember that people are studying and working inside; do not wander into offices or classrooms, and respect any building access rules the university sets.

No ghost tour of the building has been confirmed. For a deeper look at the story behind the legend, the University of Illinois Archives' 2023 article on the building's early life is the best reference, and a walk around the Main Quad puts the English Building in the context of the campus's early twentieth-century architecture.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : English Building — Wikimedia Commons
2. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Peoria, IL 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
3. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Urbana, IL 1906 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1906 · Public domain (USGS)
4. "A Ghostly Past – The Early Life of the English Building" (Sammi Merritt, 5 Apr 2023) — University of Illinois Archives — University of Illinois Archives
5. "Urban(a) Legends" (Mary Timmins, 26 Sept 2013) — *Illinois Alumni* magazine, University of Illinois Alumni Association — *Illinois Alumni* magazine, University of Illinois Alumni Association
6. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.