| Traditions | |
- Call Hall: Though not officially stipulated by the University, a trip to Call Hall is practically a graduation requirement. The ice cream, like the milk in the dining centers, is provided courtesy of the campus livestock. It’s a claim only a few colleges in the country can make, and it’s no surprise to find that, behind the counter, Purple Pride is a feeling as well as a flavor.
- Family Day: As part of a custom older than most of the surviving alumni, each fall the University designates a weekend for family visitation, and the various campus outfits take it upon themselves to provide entertainment accordingly. The chemistry department puts on a magic show, the Interfraternity and Panhellenic councils organize a children’s carnival, and pretty much everyone except the registrar’s office offers a guided tour. Although the itinerary modulates from year to year, ice cream socials and BBQ lunches are more or less annual fixtures.
- Graduation Bagpipers: Every year, the University hires two bagpipe players to ensure that the commencement ceremony is made as memorable an experience for the ear as for the eye. It’s a tradition that, according to Elizabeth Unger, the dean of continuing education, “adds a degree of sophistication” to the proceedings, and as one might imagine, “helps get people’s attention.”
- Midnight Madness: Conceived in 1999 as a playwriting exercise, Midnight Madness took root and flight at the same time. Now, on the third Thursday of each month, students congregate in the Purple Masque Theater for a night of sketch comedy and exultant hullabaloo. A collection of student-written scripts—all inspired by a theme announced the preceding Monday—are thrown onto the stage at 11:30 p.m., and it’s up to the audience members to bring them to life.
- Open House: Somewhat similar to Family Day, this University-wide event is significantly younger and caters more openly to prospective students.
- Senior Sidewalk: For those graduating with a degree in something promising a respectable salary, purchasing a block along the 17th Street walk is a possibility to consider. By means of a $75 donation, a student earns the right to a 4 x 8 inch block of granite engraved with his name and whatever measure of pride attends such a distinction. The opportunity is not limited to seniors; any student completing a degree is eligible for a block.
- Wabash Cannonball: Probably the only tradition in the world which owes its existence to a group of clarinet players. The Wabash Cannonball is technically a song—legend runs that it was the one piece of pep band music to survive a fire in the Music Department during the ‘60s—but it’s really the accompanying dance that makes it what it is. “Dance” may be something of an overstatement; even the stumblebum for whom the YMCA constitutes a challenge will encounter no difficulty clapping in time with the music and bending in alternation with the people on either side of him. This is, after all, a routine choreographed by clarinet players.
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| Urban Legends | |
- The Night Nurse and the Down-and-Outpatient.
Despite their grisly goings, the spirits that keep the Delta Sigma Phi boys company at 1100 Freemont St.(formerly St. Mary’s Hospital) are relatively well-behaved. The first of the two is a nurse who, when backing a cart into what she believed to be an open elevator, stepped into an empty shaft and plunged to the bottom. The second also fell to his death, in a sense. As elderly patients were being transferred to a different hospital, George Segal slipped off his bed to find himself sandwiched between the bed frame and the wall. Shortly thereafter, an attendant noticed the empty bed but took its vacancy as an indication its occupant had already been moved. George, elderly and frail, died during the night. Reports of the pair’s haunting are pretty standard fare—flickering lights, independent door-locking, and the like.
- The Phantom of the Purple Masque.
Sometime in the 1950s, a KSU football player by the name of Nick, having sustained a serious injury, was carried into the Purple Masque Theater, which served as a dormitory at the time. On top of a cafeteria table, Nick gave up the ghost, but the ghost didn’t give up the building. After the theater department’s takeover in the ‘60s, actors, technicians, and department faculty began witnessing a variety of paranormal phenomena on the premises. Spontaneously discharging fire extinguishers and self-sorting programs are among the more colorful reports. Fugitive silhouettes and randomly playing music are among the more mundane. According to a medium who claimed to contact Nick during a séance, allowing a Dalmatian to run through the theater at midnight will put a halt to the haunting. Students have yet to make good on her advice.
- The Sempiternal Stain.
One of the darker pages of fraternity lore on campus concerns a Theta Xi pledge named Duncan. Said to have met his demise during an initiation ceremony, it’s rumored that he rose suddenly when it came time for him to be paddled and suffered a fatal blow to the head. Though Duncan will turn an occasional doorknob or creak his way up a deserted staircase, his true claim to fame lies in his paddle. After Phi Gamma Delta bought the house from Theta Xi in 1965, it was decided that one of the rooms should be converted into a library. The process of readying the room necessitated taking a couple paddles off the wall, one of which had Duncan’s name on it. The removal went fine, but when it came time to paint, the paddle’s image bled through every coat applied. A decision to go with wood paneling solved the problem temporarily, but when some fraternity mothers undertook a redecoration of the library in 1994 and wallpapered the room, the telltale paddle shape, blood red, soaked straight through.
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