A Drowning Nobody Recorded: Haunted English Building, Illinois

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 22, 2026 · How we verify

Ask around the Main Quad at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and someone will eventually tell you about the haunted English Building, where a female student is said to have drowned in the swimming pool and never quite left. The building is real, the pool was real, and the Illinois campus has repeated the story for generations. What does not exist, so far as the record goes, is any account of the drowning itself. That gap is the most interesting thing about the legend.

The English Building at a Glance

The structure sits on the west side of the Main Quad, between Lincoln Hall and the Henry Administration Building. The original portion was designed by the New York firm McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1905, with expansions in 1913 and 1924. The three-story columned front that faces the Quad belongs to the 1913 addition, not the original design. Since 1956 it has housed the university’s Department of English, which is where the current name comes from.

Dedicated on October 16, 1905, as the Woman’s Building

The building opened under a different name entirely. It was dedicated on October 16, 1905, in a ceremony that doubled as the installation of incoming university president Edmund Janes James. Then called the Woman’s Building, it was arranged as a central mass with two flanking wings. The north wing held the Household Science Department, later renamed Home Economics, with classrooms, test kitchens and a chemical laboratory. The south wing was given over to social spaces for female students and to offices for the Dean of Women.

It was meant as a protected space on a campus that was overwhelmingly male. Men were not initially allowed inside at all, though that policy loosened over time.

The Pool on the First Floor

The detail the ghost story depends on is genuine. The central mass of the building held a pool and locker rooms on the first floor, with a gymnasium and a balcony on the second. That pool stayed in service for decades. In 1942, the Department of Physical Education for Women was pushed out of its own facilities by the Naval Training School for Signalmen and the Navy’s Diesel Engine Operator’s School, and was moved back into the Woman’s Building precisely because the pool and gymnasium were still there. Parts of the Home Economics department were shifted into the former Davenport House on Wright Street to make room.

During those war years, the pool was reserved six mornings a week for training Navy and Army personnel. Female students at the university that the building had been built to serve could only swim in it during afternoons and evenings.

Two Additions, Two Architects

The 1913 expansion, which produced the Neoclassical colonnade everyone photographs, was designed by W. C. Zimmerman. Its funding came out of a lobbying campaign by a group of university women led by Nora Dunlap, wife of state senator Henry M. Dunlap. The 1924 expansion was designed by university professor James M. White, who had supervised construction of the original 1905 building.

Architecturally the building mattered more than its size suggests. The 1905 portion was the first Georgian Revival structure on the University of Illinois campus, and it was the first building erected on the west side of what became the Main Quad, joined by Lincoln Hall in 1911 and the Henry Administration Building in 1912.

From Bevier Hall to the Department of English

In 1947 the Woman’s Building was renamed Bevier Hall for Isabel Bevier, a pioneer in home economics who led the department from 1901 to 1921. The name lasted about a decade. When Home Economics moved to a new Bevier Hall on the east side of campus, the Department of English took the old building over in 1956 and it has carried the English Building name since.

Maintenance has continued. The slate roof was replaced with identical materials in 2019, alongside repairs to the cupola and entablature, new attic insulation, and replacement of certain windows and chimneys. The architectural firm Bailey Edward took a Heritage Award from the Preservation and Conservation Association of Champaign County for the work.

The Drowned Student and What the Record Actually Says

The campus legend holds that the ghost belongs to a female student who drowned in the building’s pool. No date is attached to the story, no name, and no documented incident supports it. It is folklore, repeated by students and passed along through tours and orientation chatter, and it should be read that way.

One widespread companion belief is flatly wrong, and it is worth correcting because it often props up the ghost story. The English Building never served as a residence hall. The first campus residence hall for women was Busey Hall, completed in 1917. Before that, female students lived in sorority houses, boarding houses or private homes. Religious groups moved to fill the gap as early as 1909, when the Episcopalians built Osborne Hall across Wright Street, a church-affiliated residence for thirty women that has been the Chi Omega sorority house since 1919. Nobody slept in the Woman’s Building.

What People Say They Hear in the Building

Reported experiences inside the English Building are modest and consistent with an old academic building that is quiet after hours. Students using the building have described doors opening or closing with no one near them, floors creaking loudly, and the faint voice of a woman with no identifiable source. These are reported experiences, not verified events, and an 1905 structure with three construction phases supplies plenty of ordinary explanations for settling timber and drafts moving through corridors.

Seeing the English Building on the Main Quad

This is a working academic building on an open public campus, which makes it one of the easier haunted locations in Illinois to visit. It stands on the west side of the Main Quad, flanked by Lincoln Hall and the Henry Administration Building, and the colonnaded Quad facade is the obvious view. The rear of the building, visible from Wright Street, still shows the original 1905 Georgian Revival face that the later additions concealed from the Quad side.

There are no ghost tours here and no admission of any kind. It holds classrooms and faculty offices for the Department of English, so treat it as what it is: a place where people are trying to teach and work. Visit during normal campus hours, stay out of occupied classrooms, and do not go looking for the pool after dark.

Address: English Building, Main Quad, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois

See English Building for Yourself

Sources

• Woman's Building / Bevier Hall / English Building (Illinois (official site))
• The Woman's Building (Illinois (official site))
• The James Administration, 1904 to 1920 (Illinois (official site))
• The Woman's Building (Illinois (official site))
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign English Building
• Wikipedia: English Building (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)