The Stanford Mausoleum sits in the northwest corner of the campus, within the university's arboretum. It holds the remains of young Leland Jr. and both his parents. The architecture is neoclassical, flanked by sphinxes -- but the sphinx story is better than the architecture. The mausoleum originally featured Greek-style female sphinxes on its front face. The Stanfords found the bare-breasted figures inappropriate and had them moved to the rear, replacing them with Egyptian-style male sphinxes at the main entrance. The censored sphinxes remain on the back to this day, one of those quietly amusing details that rewards visitors willing to walk around the building. Nearby stands the Angel of Grief, a memorial to Jane Stanford's brother Henry Clay Lathrop. The sculpture is a 1908 copy of a 1901 copy of an 1894 original by the American sculptor William Wetmore Story -- a copy of a copy, still moving.

The story of Stanford University is inseparable from the story of the mausoleum. Leland Stanford Sr. was a railroad magnate, a former governor of California, and a U.S. senator. When his son died during a family trip to Florence, Italy, the legend holds that Stanford told his wife: "The children of California shall be our children." Whether or not the quote is precisely true, the sentiment was real. The couple redirected their wealth into founding Leland Stanford Junior University in 1891. The mausoleum, where the family now rests together, is a physical reminder that one of the world's great universities began as an act of mourning. Once per year, usually during reunion weekend in October, the mausoleum is opened to the public as part of Founders' Day, and a wreath is laid in memory of the family.

Every fall, on the last Friday or Saturday of October, Stanford sophomores gather at the mausoleum for a Halloween party known informally as "Maus." The tradition is exactly what it sounds like: a costume party at a tomb, starting at 10 p.m., planned and sponsored by the sophomore class. The party was temporarily cancelled from 2002 to 2005 but revived in 2006, suggesting that the pull of celebrating Halloween among the sphinxes and the founding family's remains is stronger than institutional caution. For a campus that takes pride in its prankster culture -- the same culture that put Mickey Mouse's face on the clock tower -- Maus fits perfectly. It is irreverent but not disrespectful, a student tradition that acknowledges the weight of the site even as it fills the night with music and costumes.

The mausoleum's setting in the Stanford Arboretum gives it a character quite different from the academic buildings elsewhere on campus. Coast live oaks and eucalyptus provide a canopy that feels removed from the red-roofed quads and cycling traffic. The Arizona Cactus Garden, planted by the Stanfords before their son's death, grows nearby -- one of the oldest cultivated features on the entire campus. From the air, the mausoleum is lost among the tree cover, invisible in a way that feels appropriate for a place built to hold private grief. On the ground, it is a quiet spot most days, visited by curious walkers and the occasional tour group, the sphinxes keeping their watch over the family that turned a broken dream into one of the most consequential universities in the world.