A regular setting that I have been using is the underground tunnel network at my university. Part of this is an homage to the tunnel systems suggested in Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model.” (see below with emphasis added)
“You call the Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I’ll wage my four-times-great-grandmother could have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony—I wish someone had laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!” “I can shew you a house he lived in, and I can shew you another one he was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn’t dare put into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World. Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other’s houses, and the burying-ground, and the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute above ground—things went on every day that they couldn’t reach, and voices laughed at night that they couldn’t place!”
H. P. Lovecraft “Pickman’s Model”
So secret tunnels are creepy and outside the bounds of social control. But my interest is also just that I’ve heard about the tunnels for years, yet never actually seen evidence of their existence. When I first interviewed I was told that the network was vast, covering much of the city and consisting of “more than 100 miles.”
Students likewise “know” about the tunnels and my own mother alleges to have used them in the 1970s during girls state. She described them as “creepy” and “unsettling.” Perhaps, this is why I frequently see students wandering the campus sidewalks in -40 weather.
The Haunting
One explanation, might be that a vast tunnel system exists, but it has been closed off due to dark forces that have come to control the tunnel system. The haunting of the tunnels is occasionally whispered about and was even written up as a click-bait article. Which attributes the haunting to a student who froze to death in the 1960s and describes the phenomena as
Among the tunnels underneath the West Hall…is a spirit that has been known to roam the corridors for decades. This ghost has been described as a girl, sometimes seen floating down the tunnel without any legs, and many times known to cause mischief in the dorms above it.
The article offers a photo of West Hall, but also provides another image to depict the tunnel system, although it is worth noting that the photo actually is a pedestrian underpass and not a photo of the tunnel system.
The Urban Legend
A second possible explanation is that the existence of an underground tunnel system (haunted or otherwise) is simply an urban legend. Indeed it wouldn’t be the only example of secret tunnels in Grand Forks. Allegedly there was a bootleger’s tunnel connecting the old Whitey’s restaurant to the Red River, and people have sought for years to unearth the entrance. I presume it was tunnels like these that Lovecraft was referring to in The Horror at Redhook:
Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations, for the canal to his house was but one of several subterranean channels and tunnels in the neighbourhood. There was a tunnel from this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible things were discovered.
H. P. Lovecraft “The Horror at Red Hook”
Likewise, at universities across the country stories are told about underground tunnel systems. Sometimes the tunnels are used by students to escape curfew (or just to avoid the cold). In other places, the tunnels are for administration to escape student riots. In 2019 the campus newspaper at the University of South Dakota (where I did my undergraduate studies) ran a story about the campus tunnel system in Vermillion. Their explanation was perhaps the least sensational: heating system access that was maintained as a network connecting fallout shelters in the event of a nuclear holocaust.
The Flood…
A final explanation, one that is corroborated by local historians, is that the tunnel system was originally created to provide access to the network of pipes that connected to the university’s centralized heating system. On cold days, the “steam plant” belches clouds of white into the air. A tunnel system is common element (allegedly) of centralized heating systems. The network of tunnels was open to students and faculty, which explains my mother’s memories of prowling the underground catacombs with her high school friends.
In 1997, when the Red River flooded and destroyed the city, the tunnels were likewise befouled. Facilities closed off public access to the tunnels. A former student shared an illicit glimpse into the tunnel system:
My freshman year I remember being on the lower level of Merrifield Hall and seeing a door open. It was a long tunnel with the pipes on the walls going towards the [Chester] Fritz Library.
I also reached out to the Facilities Department to see if they could provide documentation of just how expansive the network is and what roll the tunnels played in the University’s Cold War Civil Defense Plan. Thus far, it has been radio silence.