If you fit the standard Northwestern stereotype, chances are you spend a lot of time looking at the ground when you walk around campus. If that’s the case, you’ve probably seen the strange plaque on the ground just north of Kresge, engraved with the inscription: “On this site in 1897, nothing happened.” If you’re a normal human being, you may have done a double take or chuckled a bit to yourself, and more likely then not just kept on walking. Well, not me. I saw that sign, and just had to find out one thing: If nothing happened, why is there a plaque there?

After exhaustive research (read: 10 minutes on Google), I found that Northwestern isn’t the only place where things didn’t happen 110 years ago. Dozens of blogs and travel articles have mentioned seeing the exact same sign, everywhere from Ireland to the Philippines, and none seem to explain why the sign is there. Apparently, most writers fell into the same trap I did, and thought the plaque was genuine, including a mention of the sign in New York that claimed it was “affixed to the brick wall…in the 19th century.” It turns out, the signs are mass-produced (along with matching coat racks!) and easily available online, so anyone with $15 and a lame sense of humor can decorate their homes with this “rustic” “amusing and cute” plaque. (Amazon’s words, not mine).

But that still doesn’t explain why one of the signs wound up on our fair campus. So I asked one of the guys Northwestern pays to know this kind of thing, Associate University Archivist Kevin Leonard. Surprisingly enough, I’m not the first person to ask about it, but Leonard still had no clue about the sign’s origins.

“Anything we could tell you would just be guess work,” Leonard said.

Apparently, the plaque has been there for at least 10 years, but so far nobody has accepted responsibility for placing it there. Leonard said the University thought they had found who put it there, but the suspect has strongly denied it. “It just appeared one day,” Leonard said. “…And nobody’s touched or moved it since.”

Bored? Obsessed with trivia? Want to see how stupid a question I’ll answer? Send queries to ubernerdnbn@gmail.com.