Lawther Hall – University of Northern Iowa

Sitting quietly on the residential edge of the University of Northern Iowa campus in Cedar Falls, Lawther Hall doesn't announce itself the way a prison or asylum does. It's a brick dormitory, institutional and understated, built in 1940 and named for Anna B. Lawther — the first woman appointed to the Iowa State Board of Education and a figure in the women's suffrage movement. From the outside, it looks like exactly what it is: a mid-century college residence hall with long corridors, small rooms, and a top-floor attic that students haven't had access to in decades. What makes it notable isn't architecture or tragedy. It's a name. Augie.

The building opened for the summer 1940 term, initially housing 293 women. During World War II, the adjacent Bartlett Hall was converted to house a training unit for the U.S. Navy WAVES — Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service — which pushed Bartlett residents into Lawther, sometimes four students to a room designed for two. That wartime compression is the most dramatic chapter in Lawther's documented history. The building was always a women's dormitory. It was never officially used as a military infirmary, though the legend that eventually grew up around it says otherwise. Somewhere between the wartime crowding, the sealed attic floors, and the particular way old dormitories settle at night, a story took shape.

The legend of Augie describes a World War II soldier who died in Lawther Hall when the building was being used as an infirmary — a detail that university archivists have been unable to verify and that conflicts with the building's known history as an exclusively female residence. What is documented is that the upper attic floors of Lawther were closed off in the early 1970s, deemed unsafe and in disrepair, and that students began reporting strange experiences around that time and after. The earliest recorded reference to Augie by name dates to 1977, when someone rearranged the lettering on a hall bulletin board to read: "Augie will return to haunt Bordeaux House." It is unclear whether that was a prank, a genuine report, or the moment a legend crystallized into campus fact.

The building itself contributes to its reputation through atmosphere alone. The sealed upper floors — inaccessible, dusty, and unlit — created the kind of physical mystery that college-aged imaginations tend to populate. For years, a student-run haunted house called Augie's Attic operated in those upper spaces during Halloween season, drawing four hundred to a thousand visitors annually from campus and the surrounding Cedar Falls-Waterloo area. The event ran until the late 1990s, when fire code violations and roof damage ended it. The last Augie's Attic was held in 1997. After that, the attic stayed quiet, and Augie, according to students, moved to other parts of the building.

Reports associated with Lawther Hall are consistent in their details if not in their explanation. Residents describe electronics behaving erratically — televisions switching on unprompted, radios continuing to play after being unplugged, alarm clocks failing without any mechanical defect. Posters found inverted or relocated overnight. Closet lights switched back on after being taped down. A resident assistant reported seeing a man in a striped outfit walking the hall during a period when the building was closed for break, who vanished into a women's restroom. One widely circulated account describes a resident waking in the night to find her television screen illuminated blue, hearing footsteps in the room, feeling her bedsheets pulled from her grip despite her resistance, and seeing the words "Good Night" appear on the screen before the pulling stopped.

Skeptics — and there are reasonable ones — note that residence halls are among the noisiest, most suggestible environments imaginable. Hundreds of people have lived in Lawther Hall over the decades, sharing close quarters and trading stories across generations of students. Pipes, drafts, settling foundations, and shared folklore account for a great deal. The Augie legend itself may have its origins in misidentified history, a bulletin board prank, or simply the appeal of having a named ghost in a building with a sealed attic. These are not unreasonable explanations.

What they don't fully account for is why the accounts from Lawther have remained so specific and so consistent for nearly fifty years, told by students who arrived with no prior knowledge of the legend and left with stories that matched the ones before them. Lawther Hall is not a place defined by documented violence or suffering. It's a place defined by accumulation — of stories, of residents, of years. Whether Augie is the ghost of a soldier, the product of a long-running campus tradition, or something harder to categorize, the building has earned its reputation through simple persistence. Generations of students have lived there, and a notable number of them left convinced that something in Lawther Hall was paying attention.