Post by Joanna on Dec 16, 2014 18:51:31 GMT -5
Ghosts Walk at Many Colleges and Universities
The NYU (New York University) application essay reads: “NYU is global, urban, inspired, smart, connected and bold. What can NYU offer you, and what can you offer NYU?” Whatever you might offer NYU, NYU offers you a place in the elite of haunted campuses, along with a very good scare above and beyond its annual tuition rate of $45,000.
Founded in 1831, NYU has more than 20,000 souls buried beneath its main campus. The land comprising Washington Square Park, NYU’s Greenwich Village location, was once a potter’s field, a graveyard for the indigent. It also served as a mass grave for the thousands who died in the Yellow Fever epidemic of the 1820s. The Old University building (above), one of the first constructed on the campus, is widely rumored to be haunted by a young artist who committed suicide in one of its turrets. The former Asch Building, now known as the Brown Building, was where, on March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire occurred – killing 146 garment workers, mostly young girls. The deaths happened on the ninth floor and today, the ninth floor, which is occupied by the Center for Developmental Genetics, some have heard rustling noises, shrieks of desperation, and, on occasion, people have smelled smoke.
NYU’s Provincetown Playhouse on McDougall Street is where Eugene O’Neill got his start on the road to becoming a Nobel Prize winning dramatist. O’Neill’s road ended with his passing on the fourth floor of the Sheldon Hotel, which is now Boston University’s Sheldon Hall. Current residents claim the elevator often stops on the fourth floor for no reason, lights are dimmer there than on any other floor and students often hear knocks on their doors, but when they open them, no one is there.
At Cornell, Hiram Corson, a popular professor of English (1870-1903), claimed to be able to communicate with various deceased authors and poets, including Walt Whitman, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Browning. One might say he added a whole new dimension to the Dead Poet’s Society.
Many say Cornell is rife with ghosts: there is a malicious spirit haunting the shelves of Olin Library; Jennie McGraw, on occasion, visits the clock tower; ghosts in tuxedos have been encountered by the staff of Willard Straight Hall; the ghost of Alice Statler, whose name is on the Hotel School Auditorium, is said to have physically grabbed a Statler employee; and a group of students and their dog, all of whom died in a 1967 fire in the Ecology House, often make their presence known by footsteps, strange lights and an occasional phantom bark.
The University of Virginia currently reports that two ghosts haunt the Alderman library. One is Dr. Bennett Wood Green – a Confederate surgeon who willed his book collection to the library and now haunts it. Students report hearing phantom footsteps and some have seen a strange presence near the collection after midnight. The second ghost, a physician who made house calls on the Garnett family of Fredericksburg, haunts the Garnett collection.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, Macky Auditorium (above) is infamous for being haunted by the spirit of a student named Elaura Jaquette, who was raped and murdered in the building in the 1960s. Room 304, Macky Auditorium’s westernmost tower, is where her body was found and since that night, lights have turned on and off by themselves, disembodied voices echo through the halls and sounds of singing, organ music and screams have been reported.
CSU (California State University) Channel Islands was built on the site of the former Camarillo State Hospital (1936-1997), in which more than a thousand patients died. Investigators of the paranormal have found the grounds active with supernatural visitations. Doors lock themselves, lights flicker and strange cries emanate from nowhere.
Cal State Fullerton also has its share of ghosts. In the Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity house at the corner of State College and Yorba Linda Boulevard, the ghost of Wendy Osborn, who was allegedly killed in the ravine abutting the house, turns water taps on and off, flickers the lights, opens cabinets and jumps on beds. Moreover, in 1976, in the basement of the Pollak Library South, a janitor went on a five-minute shooting spree killing seven. Today, doors slam in the basement restroom and paper towels magically dispense and flutter into the trash.
Though the University of Pennsylvania lacks the phantom visitations that some of these institutions report, it does have the Penn Ghost Project. Here the study of ghosts and parapsychology is a serious enterprise. Jeff McDaniel, a professor of religious studies and a member on the project asserts: “Even if ghosts are not a physical reality, they’re a sociological reality.”
Source: Ralph Becker, The Grunion Gazette, December 13, 2014.
