I do not expect you to believe the following stories. I’d be insane to think today’s WSU students would accept any of these old-fashioned tales of terror. I’m not crazy; however, I must tell you plainly of a series of mere campus events.

Their details have made me uneasy, unsettled, and in some cases, terrified. Perhaps you will find them little more than boring gibberish, and with your keen mind can explain them away as simple causes and effects.

Bryan Hall is one of the eeriest buildings on campus. Looming high above Library Road, the glowing clock face casts an unnatural red light that seeps into passing fogs. Owls are said to roost within the pillar of crimson brick named after the third president of our university. Enoch Albert Bryan, a fan of ghostly tales, died a week after Halloween. Appropriately, his shade is said to haunt the building named for him.

“I saw a person in academic robes walk past me,” said Richard F. Taflinger, a professor of communication who spent a night in Bryan Hall during a theater production. “The room was pitch black, but I could see him clearly. He had a blue glow.”

Most reports of Enoch’s ghostly appearances found on the informal WSU history website “Our Story” came from the ‘60s and ‘70s, including accounts of his favorite chair rocking steadily by itself, chimes ringing for no reason and something playing the pipe organ without removing the organ’s heavy cover. Although the soul of Enoch appears to have found peace in recent years, the eyes of his portrait in Bryan Hall still follow anyone who walks by.

Also known as “The House of Seventeen Gables,” Stevens Hall is the oldest operating residence hall west of the Mississippi, and over a century of use has left the building with at least one ghost story for every gable.

Stevens Hall developed a tradition of hosting tea parties, dances, and story readings during the early 1900s. For many years, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” was read aloud on Halloween night. Today, students might not find short fictions very frightening, but in an age when all electric lights were shut off at 10:30 p.m. and Poe’s story of cat mutilation was performed in candlelight, it was more than enough.

Eventually the story bled into reality, with people claiming to have witnessed a huge black feline stalking the residence hall. According to the “Our Story” campus legends page, a black cat appeared outside the door of the Stevens Hall’s house mother one Halloween, but most considered it a prank by the men’s hall. Later that evening, when the women of Stevens went to see the house mother for the story reading, she was found dead of what a doctor apparently called “natural causes.”

Stevens Hall was also the scene of a still-unsolved murder from 1971. A young woman who lived down the street went missing over summer break, and her body was found three months later wrapped in carpet next to the highway near Lewiston, Idaho.

It wasn’t until later that custodians found a blood-soaked wall and a large hole cut in the carpet of Stevens Hall. For years after the murder, several residents of the basement rooms said they saw locked doors swing open and heard strange noises and unearthly screams, according to the book ‘Haunted Washington’ by Adam Woog.

Yet even in the face of allegedly supernatural disturbances, the students of our school have proven courageous. Old Ferry Hall, the first residence hall built at the school, burned down five years after construction, according to the library’s online history of WSU buildings.

A white formless shape was seen a few nights in a row outside of the building during the middle of the winter. A young man, who was certainly unafraid of any ghost, answered the call of action and charged the ghost with a loaded revolver. He fired several times and successfully busted the phantasm, which never appeared again.

In recent years, ResLife has coordinated a haunted orientation tour of the libraries with Lara Cummings, an agriculture and instruction librarian at WSU. The tour ranged from deep in the basement Dewey section to the height of the fourth floor and covered many of the legends and mysteries of WSU. Although she never witnessed any paranormal activity, Cummings has been unnerved on the tour.

While relating the story of the Stevens Hall murder during a trip to the library sub-basements, Cummings noticed one of the girls on the tour who seemed to see someone down an abandoned hallway.

“She screamed, I screamed, the whole group screamed, and we all ran the other way,” said Cummings.

I beseech you, tread lightly as you walk our halls. You never know what might be walled up on the other side.