Chancellor Windthrope originated the rule that the university's football field should never be left in the dark back in the late 1800's and it's been kept lit ever since. It used to be a series of torches, then gas lanterns and now we have floodlights so intense you can see them from the very outskirts of town.
It absolutely ruins the night sky - it's always dawn in one corner and the university refuses to shut them down stating that old rule as if it was an enforceable common law rather than the mad whims of a dead old man. Apparently half the place's funds are tied into that rule and breaking it forfeits the entire grounds or something but that's just a rumour.
We found out what old Windthrope was protecting us from when a power cut finally severed the floodlight's connection to both the main and backup generators. For once we had a calm night sky until the ground started shaking and the air filled with the sounds of thousands of people begging and screaming.
A plague pit. They built the damned uni on top of a plague pit that had never been visited by a priest, never officially noted down and by the bones that were found in the morning, half the people in there had been buried alive! It's no wonder they caused such a fuss when it gets dark.
They killed seventy six people that night, mostly students but a few staff were dragged back to the pit where their broken bones and bloodied clothes were found among the others. Nowadays the plague can be cured with a simple course of antibiotics that kick it within a fortnight, thank god for it too - anyone the restless dead touched caught the damned thing near instantly.
The rest of the town was put on watch and given the warning symptoms just in case while the uni got to work installing more and more backup generators to ensure it never happened again. Nobody's willing to go too near the field now though, not with the way the ground creaks and the air seems to whisper with the voices of a thousand agony-struck souls.
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