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Most buildings on campus are the stuff of nightmares for students. What’s not scary about never-ending lectures, failed tests, and group projects? But beyond the frightening realities of student life, campus has a few spots that are unnaturally eerie to any Badger. There are the bodies buried near Bascom Hall, of course. But did you know the charred rafters of a 1916 fire remain in Bascom Hall’s attic? To this day, no one knows how the inferno began. (Cue dramatic music.) And speaking of attics, many of us have heard tell of the leftover body parts found behind Science Hall’s trap door in the 1970s. The building’s imposing architecture alone is enough to attract paranormal activity, but in case you have any doubts, the anatomy department also had a cadaver winch in Science Hall to raise the dead to the fourth-floor lab. Don’t think that you’re safe off the main campus, either. The UW Arboretum is home to the Lost City (not the one Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum tried to find in the 2022 rom-com). This failed residential development was abandoned in 1922 by the Lake Forest Company and its financiers after a series of unfortunate events, and a portion of the Arboretum now serves as a graveyard of old house skeletons and concrete foundations. Read about more creepy-crawly places, like the lab dedicated to flesh-eating beetles and the labyrinth of tunnels beneath campus, in On Wisconsin’s “UW Mysteries, Secrets, and Hidden Places.”

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