Something was chasing Noble Barr. It had been weaving in and out between trees, silently trailing him as he crossed the street to try and lose it. The figure hot on his heels, he picked up his pace and made a mad dash to safety at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house.
According to the Indiana Daily Student article that hit stands Oct. 9, 1911, he ran with “greater speed than any Indiana track athlete ever possessed.” The headline read, “Woman in Black Roams and Scares Students.”
The article, stored in the Herman B Wells Library archives, described the origins of what is now a popular Bloomington ghost story. Barr was among several IU students who, at the time, had reported close encounters with a mysterious individual who prowled around campus, veiled and dressed in black.
“Within the last few nights, several students have had rocks thrown at them by some unknown person,” another IDS article read on Oct. 16 of the same year. It said students believed the rock-throwing perpetrator to be the famed Woman in Black.
Many IU ghost legends like the story of the Woman in Black have since been passed down through the community, not just by the IDS, but also orally. For almost 50 years, the Bloomington Storytellers Guild has aimed to keep the art of oral storytelling alive. It will host its 49th annual Festival of Ghost Stories at 7 p.m. Friday at Bryan Park.
No one alive can confirm the accuracy of the events described in the old IDS edition, so the stories may seem like bits of lore told solely for entertainment. But David Matlack, a professor in the biology department and a professional storyteller since 1992, said ghost stories can teach lessons.
“I think ghost stories serve a purpose,” Matlack said. “They help us deal with our fears.”
Matlack has been with the Bloomington Storytellers Guild for about 10 years.
He described another common ghost story, in which a girl in a yellow dress was murdered by her medical student boyfriend in a jealous rage. Some say she now haunts Read Hall where she was supposedly killed in the ‘60s.
Read Hall is seen around 1959 in Bloomington. Known as Smithwood Hall when this photo was taken, Read Hall was the site of a prolific IU ghost story.
“The boyfriend is this charming med student, but he has a real creepy side, and she did not pick up the signals that this could turn bad,” Matlack said. “I think the lesson there is to teach young people, you know, if there’s something that doesn’t seem right about this relationship, it’s maybe time to get out.”
Some say the girl wore a bloody yellow nightgown, not a dress. Others said the boyfriend hid her body in the boiler room, or that she was left in the tunnels underneath Read. But the core of the story remains the same, decades after the girl was allegedly killed.
“If it’s a ghost story that’s passed down, there’s probably something good about it, and you have to be careful changing them,” Matlack said.
He added that he does not switch the roles of hero and villain while storytelling, keeping the story’s basic meaning and the redemptive truth intact.
Christina Jones, the head of the IU Education Library and storyteller since 2001, is also a member of the Bloomington Storytellers Guild.
“Storytelling is the most human thing we can do,” Jones said. “It’s also a great way to share kind of the human experience, because most of these stories are hundreds or thousands of years old, and the reason they’re still around is they still have something to tell us.”
So, what is the lesson learned from the Woman in Black, a piece of IU legend that has haunted campus since the early '90s? Maybe it’s to remind students to not walk alone at night or to urge them to remain cautious around strangers.
Or maybe, something really did chase Noble Barr down the street on a gloomy October night in 1911. The truth is lost to time.
