Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Yvonne hurried across campus to Grayson Hall, late again for her psychology class.

Having just ten minutes to get from one side of the campus to the other she cut through Thompson Woods and then over Walnut Knoll but she was still going to be late. Most of the maple and oak trees that the woods and knoll were famous for had been reduced to leafless skeletons.

The five-story Grayson Hall, located just beyond Walnut Knoll was the oldest on campus; its gothic-like appearance with its spires and clock tower was one of the universities original buildings. No matter where one went on the campus, its tower was always visible.

It was the kind of building that fueled one’s imagination and spawned numerous stories, legends, and rumors.

It was also haunted.

Rumors of its poltergeist activity dated back to the 1940’s when a coed was found murdered inside. The killer was never apprehended and some believed the ghost of the student would walk the halls until justice had been served.

Others say, it was the ghost of the builder whose daughter had died in a freak accident when she fell from the clock tower. Stories abounded of windows and doors slamming shut, power going out, and strange noises in the basement where the woman’s mutilated body was discovered.

All of these stories could be proven though; windows and doors did slam shut because of the wind which also, when it blew through the building, sounded like crying sometimes. As for the numerous power outages, like everything else about the old building, these outages could have been caused by old power lines or a transformer that just needed to be replaced.

Two days before Halloween, on the anniversary of the death of the coed, there was the Grayson Hall Ghost Party-popular with students, but not with the administration that didn’t think making light of the murder was in the best interests of the school. Nonetheless, it was held every year and Yvonne was looking forward to the party this evening.