Read time: 5 min.

Just after I hit publish on a post mapping the tunnels below Ball State University’s Old Quad as they existed around 1950, a friend messaged me with something even better: a newer map showing an expanded underground network as it appeared in 1982. Naturally, I dropped everything and started mapping again! Here’s what I found. 

I graduated from Burris Laboratory School, just steps from the Old Quad. I even spent a semester at Ball State University. The underground tunnels that connected the campus were never really a secret to me, but I hadn’t thought about them in years until I found myself flipping through a stack of old Sanborn maps.

If you’ve never seen one, Sanborn maps are incredibly detailed, block-by-block fire maps created for insurance purposes. For history obsessives like me, they’re pure gold! In this case, the ones I found from 1950 and 1956 unexpectedly showed tunnels radiating around Ball Gym and the building we now call the West Quad. 

What I found were fascinating pieces of local history that confirmed many of the rumors I’d heard! I took copious screenshots, mapped out what I found, posted about them, then waited until someone with more experience could expand on my dataset. Sure enough, it happened.

The map I received from my friend was from a page of the December 17, 1982, edition of the Ball State Daily News. It featured a description of the tunnels themselves (seven-to eight feet wide and seven feet high), the oldest and newest (West Quad to the Administration Building and West Quad to Cooper Science, respectively), and the infrastructure they contained- steam pipes, communications cables, air conditioning, and electrical components. That was all well and good, but the top of the article dropped the real prize: a schematic showing the tunnels snaking into newer campus buildings. Jackpot! The tunnels weren’t just a curiosity anymore for me; they were a full-blown underground network to pore over.

Unfortunately, I found a problem: the map was tilted at an awkward three-quarter angle with a skewed perspective that was hard to picture. I wound up dragging the screenshot into Photoshop to wrestle it back into shape. My workmanlike fix helped, but it created a new problem: once everything was straightened out, the building names warped into an unreadable blur. 

I know Ball State University’s campus well enough to recognize most of the footprints on sight. Still, though, I wasn’t about to trust my memory alone: I spent the next few minutes painstakingly labeling every single structure, one by one, just to be safe. If I were going to map hidden tunnels under the entire campus as it existed in 1982, I wanted it to be as correct as possible.

Eventually, I got there. With the 1982 diagram layered over my earlier 1950s work, I went into full detective mode. I traced every line twice, sometimes three times, then hopped over to Google Street View to hunt for proof in the real world. Things like metal hatch covers tucked into sidewalks, mysterious grates along building foundations, and little brick tunnel vent benches all encouraged the accuracy of my map. Each one felt like a breadcrumb: every time I spotted one in just the right place, it was like the campus itself was whispering that I was on the right track.

Slowly, the map stopped feeling theoretical and became real- especially as double-checked public notices for bids and drove through campus to confirm my findings. When it finally came together, I leaned back and realized what I was looking at: not just a few service corridors, but nearly 14,000 linear feet of passageways -nearly three miles of tunnels- all hiding in plain sight beneath Ball State!

As a Burris kid and former Cardinal, I thought I knew Ball State’s campus by heart. As it turns out, I’d been running to class and cutting across the Old Quad completely unaware of an entire shadow campus humming below my feet! Stuff like that is what keeps me digging through old maps. There’s always something else down there, like another layer, another story, or another piece of the past. It’s waiting for someone curious or stubborn enough to try and map it.

Images from the Ball State Digital Media Repository are copyrighted and are reproduced here without specific permission from the copyright holder. They are included solely for purposes of illustration, commentary, and historical reference. Their use is believed to fall under “fair use” as described in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.