My first year of university, in 2002, I was placed in a residence that was built in the early 1900's and was first used as a nunnery before being used to house students. It's a beautiful old building, built with Roman-style squares and stained glass windows. It still had most of its original architecture and the rooms were now just put to different use.
My first creepy encounter was on my very first day. I used one of the bathrooms to try on my first year uniform. I immediately felt uncomfortable and knew that I had to get out of that room, although nothing had happened to cause this feeling. The first two weeks were punctuated with similar incidents. One day, as I was leaving my room, I heard hurried footsteps behind me and felt someone bump into me. I turned around to see who it was, only to find the entire square abandoned. Later that same week I came from the bathroom and saw a woman peeking from around a corner. She had long black hair and had a small build and I haven't seen her before. She was also wearing a long white nightgown, the kind girls today wouldn't be caught dead in. I wrote all of this off to lack of sleep because of initiation.
After our initiation, however, the seniors told us the legend. The building was linked to another one on campus by an underground tunnel. The other building was a monastery and the tunnel was only supposed to be used in emergencies. One of the nuns fell in love with one of the monks and they used to meet in the tunnel at night. The nun found out that she was pregnant. This knowledge, along with the guilt of having broken her vows, drove her to suicide. She hung herself in a confessional. The monk was so overwhelmed at her death that he committed suicide in the underground tunnel.
All varsity residences have their ghosts, right? Well, to those of you who are skeptic I offer the following as evidence. The bathroom where I had my first encounter was once the confessional where the nun had hung herself. The place where I heard the footsteps was in the area where she herself had lived. The place where I saw the woman in white was where the closed off entrance to the underground tunnel is still to be found.
I only lived there for a year, but as the year wore on, the worse the incidents became. There was often a knocking coming from out of my closet (while there's nothing on the other side of it), the feeling of being watched, more footsteps, electronic going crazy, strange whispers and even stranger dreams. It happened more than once that I was violently shaken awake at night, even though I was alone in a locked room. One night I was even "tucked-in" by the monk. The other girls would report seeing a little girl in the bathroom, or at least feeling someone else there. Some accounts were worse than others. Some girls claimed never to experience anything at all.
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