"I felt so fearful of these people in a place I should have been safe."

It was a year ago when Rachel Dluge and her boyfriend were approached by three men on the trail behind her dorm. They were on their way back late at night from a party.

"They had been drinking, and they started making comments to me about my body," she continued.

Her boyfriend told them to go away, but they only inched closer. They were only feet from the couple when her dorm came into sight ahead.

That's when the men took turns muttering the chilling words which will haunt her for life: "You guys are going down the rape trail? How perfect! Maybe you can get raped down there," she said.

When she and her boyfriend reached the well-lit entrance of the dorm building, the three men turned and walked away. "For a while I was very freaked out to walk alone."

She tells herself the incident was just some guys taking a disturbing joke to far; never knowing for sure what could have happened if her boyfriend wasn't there.

Hundreds of students walk along the trail during the day, but only a few dozen dare to during the night. After all, there are plenty of people, including Rachel, warning everyone to stay off the trail at night, or you could run into a stranger with bad intentions.

That led me to Michigan State University Police Headquarters, where they helped me dig through records to find the truth.

"In my 22 years, there has never been an assault that happened," said Sergeant Florene McGlothian-Taylor.

I found only rape has ever occurred there, and it was back in 1970.

That led me to investigate why there are incidents like Rachel's occurring on the trail, when there is no truth to the larger amount of rapes students assume happened there.

"Educate yourself before you term it the rape trail," said Shari Murgittroyd of the MSU Sexual Assault Program. She says the name "Rape Trail" is enough to inspire students to come up with these cruel jokes.

"It deceives people and the real victims of rape are silenced even more," Murgittroyd continued. Meaning, students begin to picture a typical rape as a stranger in the woods, forcing someone into sex with weapons.

Murgittroyd says she deals with many rape victims, and that is rarely how it happens: "A greater risk we see in college campuses is you're raped by someone that you know," continuing on to say that incidents like Rachel's can end. People just need to stop calling the trail, "The Rape Trail."

Stephanie Glazier from MSU's Center for Poetry recommends calling it "The River Trail" Instead: "It's sort of common-izing sexual violence in not a good way; it's making a joke of it."

The department asked students and faculty to send in poems about sexual violence: "What we're doing is chalking that work up and down the river," continued Glazier.

She says it's a way for walkers to pause, and consider the pain inflicted by a nick-name: "this is just a way of starting a conversation about it."

Rachel agrees: "By saying things and calling it a rape trail...you're making it an unsafe place."

Unsafe for Rachel, and countless other people living in silence.