In honor of Halloween…

I have already written about my preschool-age son and his spooky/intriguing ability to talk about death and spirits in a manner unexpected for someone of his age here .

The two unexplainable experiences in my life both happened in old houses on college campuses:

My older brother graduated from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  As many people know, Athens is a hotbed of unusual activity, and not all of it is generated by living beings in the town. In the early 1990s, my brother lived in a large old house on Congress Street with eight other male college students. The house was just as one might imagine it would be with nine messy and busy guys living there: fixtures duct-taped to the wall, dishes and papers everywhere, never-cleaned bathrooms, beer in the refrigerator, and so on.

This particular house had a finished third story, which served as the bedroom for two of the students and was the source of the unusual activity. Both of the men who slept there had woken to the apparition of a small boy peering at them. It so unnerved them that they purchased and hung on the wall a huge black nylon flag with a scary silkscreened skeleton/ghoul face on it in hopes that it would scare the boy away. No such luck, though, and the neighbors continued to ask my brother and his roommates who the boy looking out the third story window was.

I visited once that year for “Little Sibs Weekend” when I was 17, as did my 10-year-old younger brother. Being college guys, my older brother and his friends were drinking beer and listening to music on a Friday night. In fact, they were hanging out on the third floor, since it was a fairly wide-open room with a great stereo system and could accommodate the 15-20 people who were there. At some point, my older brother whispered to me to take our little brother down to the first floor to play video games, as one of the roommates was “bringing out the bong,” and we obviously didn’t want my little brother to know about drugs or witness pot smoking.  I took him downstairs, and we must have played video games for at least 30 minutes. Eventually, I became irritated and wanted to go back up there and discreetly check to see if the coast was clear.  

The passage up to the third floor was a door from the second floor hallway. Like many old doors, this one could be locked from the inside (the stairs-to-the-3^rd-floor side) by a twisting a small elongated knob, causing a bolt to slide out from the edge of the door into the frame. The door opened inward to a small landing at the foot of a flight of stairs that went straight up to the third floor and were enclosed on both sides by walls. When my little brother and I came back up from playing video games, we found the door in the second floor hallway was locked (ostensibly to keep us from coming up during “bong time”). I knocked and knocked for several minutes, but the music was too loud for anyone on the third floor to hear my knocking down in the stairwell. Finally, I heard the lock bolt slide, saw the door knob turn, and the door opened inward all the way. However, there was NO ONE in the stairwell or on the stairs. NO ONE.  Everyone was still up on the third floor, and it would have been impossible for someone to unlock and open that door and then run back up without my little brother and me easily seeing them.  

I like to think that little boy was giving us a hand.

When I was a college student at Ohio State, I spent a year living in a big, stately old sorority house on Fifteenth Avenue. The house was formal and lovely, as you would imagine a sorority house would be. In fact, it was once used in a television advertisement because of its classic look. However, something about the building was unsettling to me. I was the sorority president, and I lived in town during the summers, so I was charged with collecting mail delivered through the mail slot on the side door. I used to unlock the door, run in and grab the mail off the floor, run out and lock up as quickly as possible. I wouldn’t have dreamed of wandering the house alone.

That feeling persisted even when I moved into the house in the fall. I had my own room on the third floor as a “perk” of presidency. My bedroom was in the original part of the house, to which two large additions had been added over the years. Two other bedrooms were located in the same wing of the third floor as mine, each one housing two women (great friends of mine, incidentally). Every night when I went to sleep, I thought to myself, “Please don’t let me ever see anything.” Fortunately, I never saw anything per se, although perhaps “something” saw me.

I had a bad week that fall. On three separate days, I lost my car/house keys, a scholarship check, and then my “Dates & Data” (a planner and calendar full of my assignments and due dates). I am incredibly organized, so I couldn’t believe my misfortune. I searched literally everywhere for several days. Finally, lying on my bed one day and complaining to my mom, she said, “Just check under your bed and in your desk again and wherever else you can think of, and then get new keys, ask for a new scholarship check, and so on.” I sighed and dragged myself out of bed and peered underneath it again. There before me was a neat little stack exactly positioned in the middle of the empty space under my bed: “Dates & Data” with scholarship check perfectly aligned on top of it and my keys at the very top of the pile. I almost fainted! I always kept my door locked and no one else had a key, so it would have been nearly impossible for someone to “screw with me.”

Throughout that year, I would learn of other odd experiences, all confined to a few rooms in the original part of the house. In the room next to me, my friend blew out a candle and locked her door before going to class only to return later and find the door still locked but a different candle was burning in the holder. No one had been in the room in the interim.  One bedroom down, a friend heard what she assumed was her roommate coming home late at night, opening the bedroom door, crossing the room and climbing up the stairs to the top bunk, only to wake up in the morning many hours later when her roommate truly did come home to find an empty top bunk with sheets still made. The sorority house treasurer once lost “the books” for the house and searched everywhere only to find the books beneath hats and scarves inside of a plastic storage bin in the closet of a locked, unused bedroom on the third floor. Creepiest of all, the housemother and another woman in the sorority independently and very bashfully told me they had experienced someone sitting down on their beds and even saw the beds depressed by the weight of an unseen person. The housemother moved out at the end of the year.

The sorority no longer has a chapter at Ohio State, and the building now houses a fraternity. Apparently, the men there still experience unexplainable phenomena.