Ghostly sightings keep staff, students on the lookout

Ghostly sightings keep staff, students on the lookout
March 24, 2009
By Jordon Shinn
The Daily O'Collegian

The moon is full but small, enveloped in jagged blue clouds lurking across the night sky.

A chill wind blows from the east as midnight tolls from the library’s bell tower, resounding solemnly down shadowed streets.

Campus looks dead, but some say it’s more alive than it seems.

Security staffers said they hear women whispering on the upper floors of the Edmon Low Library but see no one. Guards said they have followed a man in a baseball cap and a woman with bushy black hair more than once without success.

“I’ve seen a lady on the fourth floor who just got out of sight,” said Anthony Parson, library security supervisor.

He said the woman had black “really crazy, curly messed-up hair,” was about 5-foot-7-inches, 180 pounds and “probably in her 50s.”

“I tried to locate her,” he said. “She never did exit the building.”

Parson said he and two police officers searched the building after closing last semester.

“I suspected we had people spending the night in here,” Parson said.

He said one of the officers spotted the mysterious lady again — this time on the fifth floor near the west elevator, but she disappeared.

“What he’d described was the exact same lady I’d seen,” Parson said.

The library is not the only possibly haunted building on campus. Old Central, Cordell Hall, the Bartlett Center and others are all said to have otherworldly residents. But with so many rumors, it’s hard to discern fact from illusion.

One Internet rumor describes the ghost of a woman who hanged herself in the Bartlett Center back when it was a women’s dormitory in the early 1900s.

Training Lt. Leon Jones, a bicycle police officer on campus, said he was patrolling campus winter break in the late ’90s.

Jones said his partner noticed a single track of footsteps in the snow leading to a front door of the Bartlett Center, slightly ajar around 3 a.m. The Bartlett Center, like the other buildings on campus, should have been locked up for the holidays.

Jones said he and his partner checked every room.

“We did a thorough search of the place,” he said. “We were probably in there for a good two hours.”
When they got to the third floor, Jones said they heard a “loud scream and a giggle coming from the fourth floor.”

Jones said they hurried up the stairs, but the floor was empty.

He said he believes it was a ghost.

“I didn’t see anything, but that’s what I believe it was,” he said.

Students also are experiencing unexplainable activity off campus.

Brittany Foster, an athletic training senior, suspected a ghost was in her house when her dog came to live with her.

“She would act like she is staring at something that’s not there,” Foster said.

She said she started getting feelings when she noticed her dog acting weird.

“Not uncomfortable feelings, but feelings like someone else was there,” she said.

Foster heard about a ghost hunter and decided to have him investigate.

Charlie Konemann, a senior agriculturist in the entomology department, is the co-founder of the Oklahoma Society for Paranormal Investigations.

Konemann said he hasn’t investigated campus before, but has performed eight investigations in the last two years with his team, including Foster’s house in Stillwater. They have recorded disembodied footsteps, voices and abnormally high electromagnetic frequencies.

“We’re not out to prove there’s ghosts,” he said. “People call us to come take a look and tell them what’s going on in their house. Paranormal — it simply means it’s above normal. Something’s going on that you can’t explain.”

Foster said she is skeptical about the results.

“It makes sense that he didn’t find anything with that one experience with the videos and the cameras set up,” Foster said.

Although Foster said she hoped OSPI would bring closure to the mystery, she said she is fine not knowing.

She said if there is a ghost, then she doesn’t mind.

“It’s not a bad ghost. It’s not a ghost I’m scared of. Most movies are about scary ghosts. This is not a scary ghost.”
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