One morning in 1916, workers were excavating the foundation for a new auto shop on State Street. In addition to rocks and dirt, their plow hit something a bit unexpected.

As they continued digging and removing mud and debris from the strange objects, they became horrified. It was a complete skeleton and two additional skulls.

“The authorities determined that these were not indigenous burials, as this area had been swamp prior to the development of the city,” Corey Earle ’07, associate director of student programs in the Office of Alumni Affairs, stated in an e-mail. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The brain of Ithaca genius / murderer Edward Rulloff on display in the Uris Hall brain collection.

Over the years, the auto shop where the remains were found was renovated to bear a benign and familiar name: the State Theatre. The names and fate of the bodies still remain unidentified.

These mysterious skeletons mark only the beginning of the State Theatre’s blood-stained past. The first building to occupy the site was Columbian Inn, a public house where Guy Clark murdered his wife Franny with an axe, becoming the first convicted murderer in Western New York in 1831. The crime was so scandalous and shocking that the building had to be torn down and replaced with Carson’s tavern.

However, a new building was not enough to renew the lot’s cursed destiny. A decade later, John Graham, a local dandy, befriended cobbler John Jones over a few drinks. The two departed together but only one returned to bed that night. According to Earle, the next morning, Jones’ mutilated body was found in the Enfield Gorge and Graham was hanged for murder and robbery.

Hidden beneath Ithaca’s facade of a picturesque Collegetown is a haunting history of violence. Before the invasion of hippies and Cornell students, Ithaca bore the nicknames “Sodom”, or “Sin City”, according to The Ithaca Journal. Between 1860 and 1930, Ithaca was populated by “Rhiners” — bootleggers, squatters, prostitutes and other questionable characters who took seasonal work with local railroad companies and canal barges. They lived in extreme poverty, hunting, poaching and relying on one another’s good will to make ends meet, and entertained themselves with gambling, cockfights and moonshine-making. In fact, Inlet Island, the location of the first “Rhiner Festival” celebrated this September, was known as “moonshine island,” according to the event’s website.

The Cornell campus was no exception. In 1894, Cornell’s sophomores welcomed freshmen at the Freshman Banquet with a mob-style beating and filled up the banquet hall with chlorine gas.

“The freshmen surged toward the door leading up to the hall and were attacked from all sides. Faces were punched, hats were smashed, and there was a general melee, in which the officers were tossed about like chaff,” The New York Times reported on Feb. 21, 1894, the day after the tragedy. “A colored woman carried from the hall exhausted has been pronounced dead by the physicians as the result of the chlorine.”

The dark waters of Cayuga Lake are allegedly haunted by the body of a girl murdered by a Cornell student. On Aug. 14, 1919, Donald W. Fether, a 21-year old sophomore at Cornell was arrested and charged with the murder of Hazel Crance, an 18-year old local girl, according to The Times.

Fether was accused by District Attorney Adams of “strangling, choking and beating” Crance and drowning her to death after tying his trousers around her legs.

Perhaps the most well known criminal of the Ithaca area is Edward H. Rulloff. According to a 1993 Crooked Lake Review article by Herbert A. Wisbey, Professor Emeritus of Elmira College, Rulloff was Born near St. John, New Brunswick and traveled to Ithaca for a new start after he finished his jail sentence for embezzling money while working as a store clerk. Although never formally educated, Rulloff was a genius philologist, a self-taught linguist who claimed to master Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian and some Hebrew and Sanskrit. According to The Ithaca Times, he declared himself the “intellectual peer” of Socrates, Kant and Locke. His book, Method of the Languages, claims to have discovered a new theory on the origin of all languages and was presented to the American Philological Association in 1869. His brain, the second largest ever recorded, is on display in the Wilder Brain Collection in the Cornell Psychology Department.

However, Rulloff possessed a sinister side. In 1844, he was accused of murdering his daughter and wife Harriet, according to Richard W. Bailey’s book on Rulloff, entitled Rogue Scholar. Although there was not enough evidence to sentence him to death, “the story, that was generally believed, based on a reported confession, was that Rulloff murdered his wife by giving her chloroform, opening a vein in her throat and bleeding her to death. He then smothered his infant daughter and put the two bodies in a large chest with weights,” and dumped it into Cayuga Lake, Wisbey wrote. Since the bodies were never found, Rulloff was released after a short jail sentence.

For the next several years, Rulloff was accused of a string of murders and robberies in the Tompkins area, including poisoning his niece and sister-in-law, and was finally sentenced to death after shooting two store clerks in Binghamton. One month before his death, Mark Twain wrote a satirical letter to the editor of The New York Times suggesting that a substitute be hanged in Rulloff’s place like how Sidney Carton replaced Charles Darnay in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

“For it is plain that in the person of Rulloff one of the most marvelous intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, ... one scholar said he did not believe that in the matter of subtle analysis, vast knowledge of his peculiar field of research, comprehensive grasp of subject and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering details, any land or any era of modern times had given birth to Rulloff’s intellectual equal,” Twain wrote.

Twain might be assuaged to learn that, today, according to Earle, Rulloff’s legacy lives on as he and his dead wife are said to be haunting the city of Ithaca. On your next trip to his namesake bar in Collegetown, beware. You might be joined by a surprise companion.