Sometimes, or maybe a lot of the time, Orono can feel like a small town off in the middle of nowhere; a place where not much happens. It may be surprising to some that there is a legend on the University of Maine campus— a legend of secret tunnels running underground.
It is certainly interesting to think about an area of campus which none of us are able to access. Even if for maintenance reasons, it makes one wonder what it looks like under there, what it’s like to be underneath a spot on campus which one frequents.
“I think perhaps the first way to address this question is to think about what we know about the ground itself, its characteristics,” Jeffrey Benjamin, a professor of contemporary anthropology at the university, had to say. An unfortunate burst to the skeptic/conspiracy bubble is that the ground here does not exactly lend itself to being dug up in large swathes.
“Some contractors were digging a trench to install a new electrical system on campus, and you might recall that they were chiseling away at that all day long. It was a lot of work.” The logistics of a project like campus-wide tunnels would require a big incentive, but Benjamin does not see one here.
As we know the steam pipes travel all across campus, heating 90% of it through the Steam Plant. This would mean that at least as many buildings would have to have tunnels leading from them to the underground network for maintenance purposes.
So, the myth seems sadly unrealistic, but interestingly, this kind of conspiracy is not unique to UMaine.
“I think it’s interesting that every college campus I’ve been on has this myth (sometimes a reality) of tunnels,” Benjamin said, adding a funny anecdote. “When I was an undergraduate at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, we all met on the first day of class and students were asked if they had any questions. One student raised his hand and said a single word: ‘Tunnels.’ People giggled, nobody understood what he was talking about, but then he elaborated: ‘I have heard that there are tunnels connecting the buildings on campus. Is this true?’ That was his nickname for the next four years — Tunnels.” And even though Benjamin’s unlucky classmate was teased for his curiosity, the question is not unfounded.
While the specific number is unknown, a considerable number of colleges in the United States have underground tunnels. Duke, Yale and Benjamin’s own Columbia.
“Columbia University, on the other hand, really did have tunnels, and these have been verified by students’ accessing them and exploring them, but the subterranean built environment under New York City is just as extensive as that above ground,” Benjamin added. That seems to be a big part of the reason that schools are more likely to be in highly populated areas like cities which are more prone to having existing underground infrastructure.
Even if the myth is untrue for our campus, what does it say that we gravitate towards mysteries about places we become so familiar with? What makes people want to believe even if unlikely?
“We spend our days at the University in busy daily activity, and the ultimate goal is discourse, keeping discourse alive and bringing things into the light of day. But for this reason I think we also need to maintain space for things unknown and things that we will never know; mysteries to inspire us,” Benjamin concluded. Very well said. Especially as an undergraduate learning from years and generations of established knowledge, it can feel like everything has been discovered or defined. Sometimes though, the places close to us, where the experts are not looking, show us that there is always something we do not already know.
