OSU BelowIn the steam tunnels beneath the Corvallis campus, myths and reality collide.

If you’ve heard anything about the steam tunnels that wind beneath Oregon State’s campus, it may be that Satanic cults practice rituals down there. Or that a murdered professor’s body is down there, or that a professor lives down there. Or that Ted Bundy — who did in fact tragically abduct and murder an OSU student named Roberta Kathleen Parks in 1974 — hid a victim’s body down there. By no means an exhaustive catalog of the tunnels’ mythology, these stories cling to the interiors of the tunnel network like stalactites in caves: stubbornly holding fast and, bit by bit, growing more elaborate.

A year ago, though, sophomore Cassidy Vafi knew none of this. A mere six inches beneath the sidewalk traversing Jefferson Way, she and some two dozen students in senior instructor Anna Fidler’s 2D Core Studio art class filed down the dim, humid tunnels, their path illuminated by flashlight and iPhone. At the head of the pack was Les Walton, Oregon State’s Energy Center manager, who was leading the tour through this subterranean warren below campus. They were so close to the surface that they still had cell service, and yet it was as though they had entered a different world. They passed through a corridor where the relatively cooler temperatures produced shimmering pearls of condensation on the ceiling. “It felt like a really big adventure,” Vafi says.

They resurfaced, elated, about a mile from where they’d started. Vafi got curious: “I know that they’re there for a practical reason, but they seem so mysterious,” she says. “I was curious if there were any crazy stories.”

LEFT: Students paint a mural in the tunnel entrance behind the Energy Center. RIGHT: Decades of student graffiti marks the walls. BOTTOM: Descending to passages below. Mural photo by Blake Brown

Officially, the job of the steam tunnels — which traverse roughly two and a half miles around campus and are as old, in parts, as the university campus itself — is to deliver heat to residence hall radiators, athletics complex pools, laundry, research labs and greenhouses. Inside the tunnels, 18-inch pipes clad in wool insulation carry supersaturated steam at seven psi and roughly 360 degrees Fahrenheit from the Energy Center, at the corner of 35th Street and Jefferson Way, to the far reaches of campus. Telecommunications cables wend along walls of hand-poured concrete bricks, and massive nodes conveying 2,000 volts of electricity jut out from the wall in places.

Unofficially, the tunnels have been the subject of student fascination for generations. So when Fidler reached out to Walton about touring the Energy Center and adjacent tunnels for art inspiration, Walton had an idea: What if her students designed a mural to paint inside the tunnels?

Fidler’s class offers an introduction to the basic principles of art: line, color, texture, value. Each term, she designs a project in which students create a site-specific pattern for, or inspired by, locations across the university — previous projects have included wallpaper in the Memorial Union and tiles for the Dixon pool. “I’m hoping that they just kind of cemented that they’re part of this place,” Walton says. “A piece of them will always be here.”

It’s a cool secret that there’s a big piece of our art underground.

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Fidler and Walton structured the project as a competition; the students who designed the winning proposals would go on to spend the final weeks of the spring term painting the concrete interior of the tunnels’ entrance next to the Energy Center. (Fidler plans to repeat the contest in her class this spring.)

 “The first thing I said to my group was, ‘I kind of want to win it,’” says Dylan Altemus, ’27, whose sketch, alongside Vafi’s, did in fact prevail. They spent hours at a time — including some spooky late nights — bringing their mural to life. “It’s a cool secret,” Vafi says, “that there’s a big piece of our art underground.”

In doing so, they were also in dialogue with previous generations of students who had inscribed themselves, implicitly or explicitly, into the university’s foundations.

In 1992, Derek Schott, then a member of OSU’s campus security, logged into the Unix mainframe in the basement of the old computer science building and posted on a Usenet forum: “Here at Oregon State University we used to have a problem with people entering the steam tunnels under the campus,” he wrote. “Recently there is evidence that people might once again be entering them. … My question is, does anyone have any experience with this? Do these tunnels exist at most universities, and if so, what goes on down there?”

He followed up a few days later, after exploring the tunnels with some peers in campus security and the state police. “Didn’t find any bodies, but it was quite interesting,” he wrote.

Warning signs about high voltage are regular sights.

“I’m not kidding: We were so hot we thought we were going to die,” Schott recalls now. “When you go down there with other people, you get creeped out,” he continues. “We were all jabbing at each other, trying to scare each other.” During the handful of expeditions he undertook, Schott found anti-Vietnam War protest graffiti dating back to the 1970s, and inverted pentagrams etched into the walls.

From a certain perspective, telling and retelling scary stories about the tunnels might perform a similar function. “There’s something about the nature of urban legends and the nature of humans telling stories — the stories that get under your skin. Did it happen?” says Mollie Munoz, a former reporter for the Daily Barometer who wrote for the paper about the campus’s underground places. “You’re also getting to participate in something bigger than yourself. You’re getting connected to your space.”

Not long after her art class’s expedition into the tunnel in the spring, Vafi heard the Ted Bundy story. She repeats it nearly bashfully: “I have, like, no reason to believe that this is true,” Vafi says. But then, while preparing for a group presentation in a course the next winter, Altemus did, too.

Though the tunnels seem far from familiar places, all it takes is an open hatch to bring you back to campus above.

Maybe what matters isn’t whether the story is true, but instead a shared shiver of fear, and the sense of awe at the mysteries that might be lurking inches beneath our feet.

Have your own great story from OSU’s steam tunnels? Tell us about it.