I have always been a skeptic.

Once while on a ghost tour in Gettysburg, a friend tried to convince me that her digital camera captured a man’s face when she snapped a picture into the darkness. But the “image” that I saw on the camera’s viewfinder could easily be explained by the half a dozen flashes that went off at the same time as others on the tour tried to capture the same image. I wasn’t buying it.

Knowing about my skepticism, a former digital media professor convinced me to tag along as he and some students went “ghost hunting” in the attic of Selwyn Hall with their infrared cameras. We climbed into the darkness of the attic, which was used as an infirmary for students in the 1800s. With rickety floor boards and no light to see where I was going, I was much more afraid of tripping and falling than of seeing a ghost.

He set up the camera, focused on the middle of the room and invited me to look through the lens. What I saw still causes me to pause.

Balls of transparent light floated across the room. As one professor walked out into the middle of the floor they encircled her, as if to say hello. When she walked out of view of the camera lens they disappeared back into the darkness.

I was told that these balls of light were orbs, which are believed to be the human soul or life force of those who once inhabited a physical body on earth. According to ghoststudy.com, it is said that these spirits have willingly stayed behind because they feel bound to their previous life or previous location.

Do spirits reside in Selwyn Hall and other campus buildings? Some Albrightians say yes.

Shadowlands.net, a web site that lists hauntings by state, reports that Selwyn Hall is said to be home to a girl who committed suicide there. The details of the exact circumstances surrounding her death aren’t very well known, but the lure of her ghost certainly is.

Tracey Gray-Hayes ’93 lived in Selwyn Hall her freshman year. She recalls hearing the story of a student who died by either hanging herself or by running out into the street and getting hit by a car. “I don’t know if it’s true or not,” Gray-Hayes says, “but we tell the story every Halloween, pass it on in e-mails and keep it going.”

Karen Evans, interim director of the Career Development Center, works on the second floor in Selwyn Hall.

In the morning when she comes into work she unlocks all of the doors in the office. One morning, “when I went to open the bathroom door the trash can was right in front of the door. As soon as I touched the door it moved on its own and I thought I heard someone in there, but no one was in there.” Evans says the same thing happened another morning when she went to unlock the conference room. “The trash can was literally right in front of the door. There’s no way that the cleaning people could have done that.”

Evans wasn’t scared though. “I think it’s a ghost just having fun and playing tricks,” she says.

Last semester, students in a digital media course, “Documenting the Paranormal,” spent two nights in Selwyn’s attic in an effort to document paranormal activity. Jessica Stockett ’09 says she and her classmates had heard the same story as Gray-Hayes about a girl who had committed suicide there.

Armed with electromagnetic field readers, a couple of cameras and a laser thermometer, the group of five students made their way into the darkness of the attic. Travis Givler ’09, a skeptic who Stockett says, “is one of those people
with a scientific mind who feels that if he can’t see it or touch it, he doesn’t believe it,” was chosen to sit in the middle of the room in total darkness for 10 minutes with a camera focused on him. All he had with him was a flashlight.

Stockett says, “We saw light up around his face, like the light from a small flashlight. We believed it was the flashlight he had with him at the time, but the hand holding it was down by the ground…so we are not sure what the source of the light was.”

The quiet and darkness of the night seem to bring out quite a bit of “unexplained phenomena” in other campus buildings as well, says Corporal Julio Bermudez of Albright’s Public Safety department. Having worked the night shift for six years, he says he has many stories to tell. “I will not walk through the front doors of the main chapel by myself,” he says emphatically. When he has walked through those doors alone in the past he says the same thing happens every time. “I can feel a presence in the room, and I feel like I’m being watched, even with my flashlight searching everywhere. Then, the place starts making noises, every single time, like doors slowly closing in the distance, benches creaking like people are sitting in them.”

Are the spirits simply trying to have some fun? Catherine Resh ’80 thinks so. Resh currently works in the library, but she used to work in Pushman Cottage, a historic farmhouse acquired by the College in 1924 which now houses the Alumni Relations office. Alone in the cottage one Friday evening, she heard the kitchen door open and close. “I went to the kitchen, but no one was there,” she says. “After that day when I was alone and heard the door open and close I wouldn’t bother going to see who it was. I figured the ‘Pushman Ghost’ was just having some fun.”

Jessica Shue, director of prospect research and stewardship, also worked in Pushman Cottage for several years, and says while she can’t put her finger on it, “there’s something else there. I knew when I was there by myself that I wasn’t there by myself.” One morning, a co-worker who had been on campus the night before asked her why she had left a candle burning in the window all night long.

Shue says she never lit a candle in her office.

Do spirits reside on Albright’s campus? I suppose we’ll never know for certain, although seeing those orbs dance across that camera lens…maybe I’m not such a skeptic after all.

- Jennifer Post Stoudt