Don't You Just Love College

From: anonymous
Story type: Ghost
Location: A dorm room in eastern PA
Source: Form Submission

This is a chronicle of some of the events in what my roommate and I think is an ongoing haunting. We are sophomores at a mid-sized university, and this year we are living in a double in the only single-gender dorm on campus. Yes, I have changed the name of the hall, but I assure you that such a fiction will not obscure the truth of the tale.

We had heard from other students that this dorm is haunted. Bradd Hall was the first building on campus, and housed the first classes. Rumor has it -- although I have not seen any hard evidence -- that the hall saw duty as a Civil War hospital; I find this hard to believe because the university is many miles from the high-water mark of the southern advance. In any case, all the other descriptions of a haunting in Bradd Hall focus on the ghost of a Civil War soldier. This ghost does not make many visible appearances, but prefers to open and close doors, even when they have been tightly shut and there is no wind.

We moved into the dorm in the early fall very excited; I was looking forward to seeing my first ghost. I returned to school a week earlier than Lynn because I had to attend a choir camp. I was alone in the room during that time and didn't see or experience anything, although my excitement turned into a bit of anxiety when the sun went down on the first night. It wasn't until classes had been in session for a few weeks that we began to notice things happening.

To begin with, we have four lamps in our room -- two on our respective desks, a tall floor lamp, and one in the window. We have on two or three at a time when it gets dark out. We would be sitting at our desks, working, and Lynn would see the lights flicker. Now, this is understandable; in a dorm full of people with electrical appliances, brownouts are normal. But our lights, according to Lynn, would flicker noticeably, for a few seconds, yet I never once noticed. It got to be that we would be sitting, facing each other, and talking, and her eyes would shift to the opposite wall. I would say, "What?" and she would say, "Are you blind? The lights just flickered." I still haven't seen this happen.

In October, the lights stopped flickering, and we started losing things. We would put something down for a moment, and when we wanted it again, it was gone. Little things, like watches or pens. Mostly it was an annoyance; the things usually turned up again (in the oddest places, though). One afternoon, Lynn printed out a copy of a list of phone numbers and lost it five minutes later. She printed out a total of six copies by evening. Two days later, she found the missing five in a neat pile on her bookshelf, across the room from the printer. We began to joke about our ghost.

One evening, I had a choir concert. I ironed the blouse I planned to wear a few hours before the performance. When I finished it, I remembered something I needed to do and had to leave in a hurry. But before I left, I turned off the iron and pulled out the plug, and left it on the board to cool. That night, I arrived back in the room and started to put the iron away. I picked it up and my palm touched the metal part of the iron. It was burning hot, as if it were on the hottest setting. I couldn't imagine how it had gotten hot when it was unplugged...but that imagining came later; at the time, my hand hurt so much I couldn't think. After my friends collectively couldn't produce any first-aid equipment for a burn, I ended up at the infirmary and came out with my whole hand swathed in a bandage. (Later, when the bandage came off, the nurse saw that it was not a big burn. But it certainly did hurt, and blistered like crazy.)

That night, I lay in bed, wondering how I could be so klutzy as to burn my hand on an unplugged iron. Around 1:30 a.m., I looked up into the corner of the room and saw a bright light. It was a white light, not tinted by any color, and the corner of the room it was in was at an awkward corner to the window, so that no light from outside could get into it. It was always the darkest corner...except for that light. It looked a bit like a flashlight beam, and I thought maybe Lynn was playing a trick on me, but when I looked over at her, she was sound asleep. The light stayed on for about five minutes and then faded away.

It has been about three months since we have experienced any ghostly phenomena. What comes next? We aren't sure. Either the ghost has moved on to haunt another room, or it is gathering its ectoplasm for even more astonishing feats. Eerily, as I type this (around three a.m.), a cold breeze has surrounded my feet, but we've never had a draft before and the room is quite warm.

We will be sure to keep you posted when the furniture shifts or the walls drip blood. I love college...