Fall is in the air, though that’s still no guarantee you won’t be sweating in your Halloween costume. But one thing’s for sure — our listeners are spooked.
The Show asked for ghost stories, and listeners have certainly delivered. All month long, we’ll be sharing your hair-raising tales.
This time we hear from Paul Morris of Tempe, who, despite not believing in ghosts, recounts a chilling experience he had while working one night at Arizona State University's Virginia G. Piper Writers House.
PAUL MORRIS: I’ll begin by cautioning you that I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m just not a believer in the afterlife. What we have when alive is plenty. But we live in a state filled with ghost stories and that’s to be expected when you have gunfighters, gold miners, old hotels and of course old graveyards. Places where you’d expect this, but I found stories of ghosts in unexpected places like our three state universities. Down in Tucson, at the University of Arizona I heard about Maricopa Hall. Students often hear women arguing and screaming in the middle of the night. Of course if you spend time on any campus, you’ll hear people arguing and screaming just about every night of the week.
There’s even a haunted fountain over by Old Main. Throughout the years the fountain, the memorial to 13 students who died in World War I has had a number of mysterious problems. Maintenance crews complain it overflows and sprays or drains for no apparent reason. I had the same problem in my house until I put in new pipes. I do have a name of a good plumber if they need it. Centennial Hall the performing arts theater votes an apparition. A man with a crazy laugh who plays the piano late at night and randomly moves furniture. This actually describes me on some evenings after I’ve had a drink. Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff has its Morton Hall where ghosts makes the lights flicker, poles, blankets, soft beds and pulls down posters, weeping can be heard at night. Remember this is a college, weeping is normal. I myself may or may not have wept over a list of German verbs once or twice in my life.
So here’s my story. I worked on the campus of Arizona State University. At one point, my office was in the Virginia G. Piper Writers House, a small cottage by Old Main. I liked the building. It was the home of the college president’s for some years when we were told it was the first building on campus to have air conditioning. Poet Robert Frost spent the night there after a reading and now the creative writing department uses it for classes and offices. It’s a peaceful place and I sometimes found students asleep on the sofa in the living room.
The house came with an odd story though. The wife of the university president lived here with her family. We heard she became an invalid and lived on the second floor until her death. Over the years, students reported seeing a person dressed in a bathrobe and wearing a hat passing by the second story windows. One semester, I taught a class in the evening that ended at 9 p.m. Afterwards, I’d go upstairs to my office. I’d sometimes work up there for a while enjoying the quiet. One night I was answering emails and then I felt a change in the room suddenly became cold, frigid, something was different dramatically different almost like I’d been startled and was no longer alone.
All the hairs on my arms stood up. Extreme goose bumps then the hairs on my neck stood up. The little hair on my head studded attention. Even hairs on my back raised up. I was in a cold sweat, but I saw nothing in the room. It was a cascade of sensation that wouldn’t stop. It was strange, even frightening. What happened next, I am a sensible person. I got up from my desk without pausing to shut down the computer and left the room. I went down the stairs in a dignified exit of course and out of the building. My hair follicles began to relax, I locked the door and went home. Everything was normal again, I did go back to in that office but never had that same experience again. Others in the building tell their own stories about odd things that happened but when I moved to another building nothing interesting ever happened in my new office, which I kind of liked.
Happy Halloween to you all!
