Weird Wednesday: University Students Discover Ancient Crypt Below Basement Laundry Room

Thinking back to college and the late nights you spent doing homework in your dorm’s laundry room, while waiting for your clothes to dry, I highly doubt you think of that space fondly. For University of Wisconsin-Stout students, however, the laundry room in the basement of their dorm was a place they were dying to explore.

No, they didn’t want to look behind the machines for pennies amidst the lint and misfit socks—they wanted to go below ground. After one student discovered an ancient gold chalice in the basement restroom, people started to speculate that it belonged to the mysterious James W. Stout, founder of the university. Stout, whom the university is named after, was said to have lived between the 1600’s-1900’s. Little is known about him since most information on him has been lost over time.

The unique bathroom find led to a campus-wide search for more clues about the founder. After months of coming up short of anything insightful, it was announced that a crypt, speculated to have been Stout’s, was discovered below the laundry room in North Hall’s basement.

The crypt has yet to be thoroughly explored, but many hieroglyphics mark the walls. Linguists have been hard at work to translate and interpret these, finding that many seem to explain the university’s history.

North Hall’s laundry room isn’t the end of archaeological exploration to at UW-Stout. Plans are in the works to explore other parts of campus in search of more ancient findings, perhaps giving more insight on its founder. Who would have thought that a campus-wide archaeological expedition would start in a basement?