Missing since 1985 and long since declared dead, undergraduate Ariel O'Reilly was discovered by the janitors in the basement of Vilas Hall Tuesday. According to their testimonies, the 45-year-old O'Reilly was nearly inapproachable.
"She refuses to talk to us," custodian Ron Detert recalled. "Instead, she just growls and paws at us from afar."
When students arrived for James Baughman's journalism class in the spring of '85, he joked, "Glad to see everyone found the room without becoming trapped in this labyrinth." The professor was unaware that for one student, the joke had become reality. Assuming her absence was just another incident of a freshman forgeting to officially drop the class, Baughman taught the course without concern.
In her hometown of Dixon, Ill., O'Reilly's parents had finally summed up the courage to join a roving band of Midwestern gypsies, and thus never inquired about their daughter's absence.
O'Reilly's presence in Vilas Hall's basement did not go completley unnoticed. Many suspect that she is directly responsible for the sightings of la chubracbra as well as the inspiration behind the strictly enforced "No Goats" rule in Vilas.
"In retrospect, all of the apple cores and human feces we discovered over the years point pretty strongly to a resident," Detert said, "but college kids will be college kids. We shrugged it off."
Now captured, O'Reilly will be thoroughly examined by a team of medical students to to address illnesses resulting from 23 years of sleeping on the dusty floors. She will then occupy a habitat at Vilas Zoo that will replicate the living arrangements she had grown accustomed to.
O'Reilly's discovery sparked further investigation into the disappearence of several other students. Thus far, police have discovered the skeleton of a sophomore who had been looking for the computer labs in old Engineering Hall, as well as the entire Eugenics Department, which has not seen the light of day since being scrapped in the early 1940s.
