Reader Submission: Haunted Stuyvesant Hall
“I have always believed in ghosts, but I’ve also tempered my belief with a healthy dose of skepticism. I’m not afraid to call bullocks. I have been ghost hunting with friends before, and while they experienced hair raising, pinching, electricity-over-the-skin feelings and even visual manifestations, I experienced nothing (save for my ability to use dowsing rods and pendulums). In short, I could be in a room full of ghosts and not feel a thing. My experience at college was different. It wasn’t anything frightening. It was far more playful and humorous.
I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University (in historic Delaware, OH) in 2001. During my junior year, I lived in Stuyvesant Hall. ‘Stuy’ opened in 1931 and is the oldest operating dorm on campus. Naturally, it comes with some ghost lore.
According to one campus legend, the dorm was once a hospital/ insane asylum. This is completely FALSE. It has only served as a dorm. The other story I heard about Stuy is one that plays out almost exactly like a well-known urban legend. You know, the one where a roommate returns home without turning on any lights. In the morning, she wakes to find her roommate dead and ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’ scrawled in blood on the wall. No students can tolerate the room so the Dean stays in the room overnight to prove them foolish and ends up bricking over the door so no one can ever enter the cursed room again. Blah, blah, blah…
I called bullocks on that. I’d heard that urban legend in middle school. However, in a basement hallway of Stuy, there are a few student rooms, a laundry room, and the boiler room. Right next to the boiler room is a former student room which has been bricked up. You can look through the hole left by the missing doorknob and see the bricks. A funny coincidence, I thought.
The rooms in Stuy are set up with two double-occupancy rooms separated by a shared bathroom. The room on the other side of my bathroom was directly above the sealed room. My room was above the boiler room.
The Ghosts of Stuyvesant Hall & Beyond
The rooms aren’t soundproof by any means, but you can tell the difference between a sound in the room with you and a sound separated by a wall. I would sit at my desk and watch TV with the bunk beds about six inches from the back of my head. After about a month, I began to notice the bed springs creaking as I sat alone in the room. The beds are old and they creak when any pressure is applied to the mattress. You can hear them creaking in neighboring rooms. This creaking was directly behind me. On our bunk beds.
I wasn’t touching the beds in any way. They shouldn’t have made any noise. Yet there I sat with my roommate’s lower bunk creaking like someone was bouncing/ moving around on her mattress. (I’m glad I had the top bunk).
The next day, I didn’t hear it. Nor the next day or the next. I actually felt bad. Whatever it was making itself comfortable on the bottom bunk had gone away. The following day, before my roommate returned from class, I stood in the room and told whatever it was that it could come back as long as it didn’t use the bed as a trampoline. The following day, as I sat at my desk, the creaking mattress made its familiar noise. It continued the creaking until we moved out at the end of the year. I made sure to say goodbye.
Ghost or not, I have no explanation for it. I know the sound wasn’t coming from another room. The girl on the other side of the bathroom wasn’t well acquainted with us so I never knew if she experienced anything. It was just a fun, weird little thing that happened that one year and never happened again in any of the dorms in which I lived. Make of it what you will. It was the only time I experienced anything personally that I couldn’t explain.”
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