Dormitory Ghost

I attended school at a university in SW Ohio, and my college boyfriend and I lived in the same dorm for a year. I'll call him Bentley. He was a Resident Assistant, and they moved into the dorm several days before the other students. (There were 6 RAs total in the building, 3 on the women's side, 3 on the men's.) A few other students also moved in early for other reasons, including me. There were maybe 12-15 students total in the dorm that week, instead of the hundreds who would move in the following week.

One night, the majority of folks staying in the dorm ended up congregating in Bentley's room, about 8 people. He was the basement Resident Assistant on the men's side. Directly above his room was the first floor RA's room, then directly above that was the top floor RA's room. Neither of the other two male RAs were in the room with us, having their own pursuits.

A dorm that's nearly empty is eerie by night, all those dark untenanted rooms behind corridors of closed doors... So naturally, we started telling ghost stories. People began huddling together or moving so their backs were against the wall -- you know how that deliciousness goes.

About 2 am, the door to the room above us slammed. Everyone jumped a foot, and one girl screamed a little. My boyfriend said, 'Calm down, that's just Andy coming home [first floor RA], he was hanging out with his girlfriend tonight.' Everyone relaxed.

We kept talking, then began to notice that Andy was being fairly noisy: opening and closing his drawers hard, rolling his closet door with some force. (It was one of those old-school heavy wooden doors that rolls along a metal track, and had an instantly recognizable sound.) We speculated that maybe he and his girlfriend had had a fight, which was almost funny because they were pretty much the two sweetest people on earth and it was hard to picture him mad. The noises soon subsided, so he must have gone to bed. We eventually dispersed to our own rooms for the night.

Next day...

Bentley, to Andy: Dude, you scared the s--- out of us last night.

Andy [laughing]: Yeah? How'd I do that?

Bentley: We were telling ghost stories in my room right when you came home and made all that noise!

Andy [suddenly unsmiling]: What noise?

You guessed it. He hadn't come home at all that night. He'd slept at his girlfriend's place. Whaaat! So off we ran to talk to Doug, the top floor RA. He was in his room that night, reading, and although he thought he was still awake at 2 am, he hadn't heard a thing. The RAs didn't have access to each other's rooms, so he couldn't have gotten into Andy's room even if he tried. (Andy said he had definitely left his room locked and it was locked when he came home.)

We conducted a sound experiment, having Doug go up to his top floor room, slam the door, open and close the dresser drawers loudly, roll the closet door hard, while we listened from my boyfriend's basement room. Again, this was still a quiet empty dorm, even in daylight. But we could hear his noises only very faintly and only because we were listening for them, even when he was being loud on purpose. It was not what we had heard, and he couldn't have been the source.

No one else had moved into rooms anywhere near the RAs' rooms, and the empty rooms were all locked, so it couldn't have been someone in an adjacent room, either. The noise had definitely come from Andy's room directly overhead, including the unmistakable sounds from *inside* the room at the closet/dresser area.

We know Andy wasn't pulling a fast one on us. He was a very serious, very kind person, and would have been quick to reassure those of us who were spooked if in fact he had come home. One girl was frightened about it for quite a while, and begged to be told it was a prank. But Andy's bewilderment was obviously genuine, and also he tried not to show it much, but the story made him (understandably) uneasy about his room.

That was the first of several incidents which we inevitably characterized as the [_______] Hall Ghost. My boyfriend was a very skeptical and grounded person, about as far as you can get from a group-hysteria type, but he witnessed all kinds of strange things, as well as listening to the stories the residents told him, and he swears to this day that dorm was haunted. We didn't experience anomalous phenomena in any of the other dorms we lived in during college, only that one.