Item 1
Source:
This was collected by me (Elise Suarez) in an informal Zoom interview with my friends and fellow IU students: Emilyann (Emily) Long, Cassie Ruch, Allyson McBride, and Harrison Sutton. The interview took place on Sunday, March 21, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. This legend is mainly told by Emily and Cassie, both seniors.
Text:
The Girl in the Yellow Dress of Read Hall
Emily: This legend goes back all the way to the 1960s. You might want to pull your blankets up for this one.
[everyone in the Zoom meeting shows that they have blankets].
Emily: So, I heard, that a man murdered his girlfriend in Read Hall and then stuffed her in the cabinets that were in the basement and so the basement got an entire renovation ‘cause of it. And now it’s haunted.
Allyson: Is that the girl in the yellow dress that’s in Read? I vaguely remember that she was wearing yellow.
Cassie: I think he cut her face off.
Emily: I think that I’ve heard that. [My friend] didn’t remember hearing the part about her being stuffed in the basement.
Cassie: I think he was a medical student. He was a medical student with a girlfriend and he was paranoid that she was cheating on him because she tutored students…and so…yeah Allyson’s right she was wearing a yellow dress. He accused her of being unfaithful, she denied it, but then he like, cut her face off with a scalpel. And kept the face.
Elise: I have never heard anything about her being in the basement, I heard about him keeping her face and putting it in a dresser on the third floor.
Emily: The one I heard, my mom told me. So, it wasn’t like something that I heard from somebody on campus. When she heard I was moving into Read, that is what she told me.
I then asked those who had been in/lived in Read if they ever felt creeped out in there. No one really had, except for me. Everyone was more scared of the cockroaches than they were of the basement itself. Emily and I were the only ones who had lived in Read, and we had heard this legend because of where we lived. Allyson and Cassie did not know the legend until the 2020 Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Association (FESA) Ghost Walk event.
Texture and Context:
This legend was collected from an informal group meeting with mutual friends. There was casual conversation and jokes before and after the telling of this legend. Because of its casual setting, the informants were comfortable sharing this legend and had more time to think of the legend’s specific details. The informant, Emily, had originally heard this legend from her mother, who told it to her upon learning that Emily would be moving into Read Hall her freshman year. Emily’s version was more detailed than the one I was personally familiar with, and some of those missing details can be attributed to the fact that I first heard it in a formal setting from people who were officially affiliated with IU. All of the other participants mentioned not having heard this legend until the 2020 Ghost Walk hosted by the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Association (FESA) here at IU.
The context of this collection was that it occurred over Zoom on a Sunday evening. It could not occur in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, hence why it was conducted over Zoom. Though it was mostly informal and among friends, the Zoom meeting was set up for the main purpose of conducting this interview. All of the following legends were collected from this same interview, so the context will remain the same. I had asked the informants a few hours ahead of time to have some IU ghost stories already in mind, as we were all busy with schoolwork and needed the interview to be done as quickly as possible. Still, it managed to be mostly fun and casual, with us getting off topic a few times to talk about personal matters. In the more immediate context, this was the first legend that was told in this interview, and Emily had come prepared with it ahead of time. Prior to this telling, we were all engaged in casual and unrelated conversation as we waited for everyone to get set up on Zoom.
Interpretation:
This legend demonstrates the core concept of tradition. It is often told to students at New Student Orientation and has been told for several years. Notably, it is most often told to incoming freshmen by older students upon hearing that the freshman will be moving into Read Hall. This encapsulates the tradition of scaring incoming freshmen about their dormitory, heightening the freshmen’s already present fear about starting college and living on their own in a new place with a random roommate. One of my informants, Cassie, mentioned that the legend is “visceral for no reason,” other than to scare freshmen. The imagery of a bloody face hidden somewhere is so graphic and unbelievable that it makes it even more likely that this story is meant just to scare the new residents of Read Hall.
This also demonstrates the concept of genre. While it is obviously a campus legend, it goes even further into a subgenre of legends about a girl being murdered while on a date with a boy, as well as legends about a man “going mad” and committing murder. This legend has some parallels with legends like “The Roommate’s Death.” It also falls in the genre of a supernatural legend, as it is stated in every variant of the legend that the murdered girl is haunting the building for various reasons.