The Stentor

Issue date: 10/30/08 Section: Arts and Leisure

Media Credit: Christine Arnold From left to right: Christine Arnold, Anjali Ajaikumar, Leah Scull, and Mark Riesterer work together to contact the dead. [Click to enlarge]

Stentor staffers counted over 100 ghosts in a two-day investigation of allegedly haunted campus buildings. Using a Parker Brothers Ouija board, the team conducted a series of séances in Lois Hall, Durand Hall, the Donnelly and Lee Library, Young Hall, and Harlan Hall, where the resident spirits revealed their numbers.

The team consisted of Stentor Proof Editor Leah Scull, Business Representative Anjali Ajaikumar, Cartoonist Mark Riesterer, and Christine Arnold, who, despite not being on staff, was included because she owns tarot cards and knows how to operate them.

Quinn

The first séance was conducted in Lois Hall at midnight on Sunday, October 26th. The Ouija board was set up, and around it were placed representatives of the four elements: a bowl of salt, for earth, a Chinese fan, for wind, a book-light, for fire, and a bowl of water, for water. Despite the paltry showing of elemental offerings, the team was soon greeted by a spirit who identified herself as "Quinn."

Quinn claimed to have died at the age of four in 1859 of some sort of sickness while asleep in her house. However, perhaps owing to her minimal spelling skills, she could not tell us the specific ailment. When the team asked for her sister's name, she spelled out "SAYRHPV," which we took to be a phonetic spelling of "Sarah," plus the letters P and V.

To find out the feasibility of Quinn's story, I sat down with Arthur Miller, the College's Archivist, who also happens to know everything. According to Miller, there was no building at the site in 1859, though the area did serve as a sort of de facto "town park," and the house directly across Sheridan Road was occupied at the time. Miller pointed out that the girl could have also feasibly been the daughter of a Lake Forest Academy teacher.

Gean Dibut

On Monday at 10:30 pm, the elite squad of psychic adventurers ventured into Durand Hall. There have been many alleged sightings and reports of strange activity on the top floor, so, ignoring the widely published advice against conducting a séance at a spirit's believed location, the board and elements were set up there.

The team eventually made contact with a spirit who identified himself as "Gean Dibut." When asked why he made his home in Durand, he simply replied, "art." Gean claimed to have died at the age of 84; when asked why he died, he replied, to the amazement and admiration of all present, "sex." Pushed further on the point, he made it clear that said intercourse occurred between himself and wife, during an adventurous bout of monogamous, octogenarian hanky-panky in the year 1928, rather than with some flapper floozy as we had originally suspected.

Gean was unclear about whether he had taught or attended Lake Forest, and at varying points claimed to have taught art and to have been a student of art. No record of a Gean Dibut exists, according to College records furnished by Art Miller, though he believes that some of the names could have "fallen through the cracks." Miller also pointed out that Durand was, at the time of Gean's death, an administration building.

Nonetheless, Gean may choose to float around Durand because he can admire current art pieces.

Cozette

The next stop on our spectral safari was the Donnelly and Lee Library, where we set out to uncover the mystery of the haunted elevator. According to a thesis written by Heather Halle in 2005 (a detailed survey of Lake Forest College hauntings creatively titled Lake Forest College Hauntings), the Library is "the location for one of the most persistent reports of haunting at the College."

The primary ghost story associated with the Library is that of Emily Hutcheson, the five-year-old daughter of an English professor. During the initial construction of the library in 1964, Emily "fell down the open elevator shaft to her death in water at the bottom," according to Halle. To be clear, this story is a confirmed fact, and at one point, there was a memorial plaque dedicated to Emily in the staff area of the basement.

Since her death, numerous stories have swirled about sightings of a little girl in the vicinity of the elevator, especially the film library and viewing rooms on the second floor, as well as unconfirmed stories about flying books. According to Miller, the elevator itself has a history of unexplained malfunctions, and these have continued to occur even after the elevator was rebuilt during the extensive renovations in 2003 and 2004.

To try and contact Emily, we set up in the government document archives in the basement, right next to the elevator. We quickly came into contact with a spirit claiming that her name was "Cozette," who died as a child in 1928, a popular year, apparently, for dying. Cozette claims to have died in a house near the Library; while she revealed the extremely disturbing circumstances of her death, she asked that we not print the details, leading to perhaps the first case in journalistic history of a non-living entity asking to speak off the record. Out of my sense of journalistic integrity, and because I don't want an angry ghosts flinging DVDs at me every time I visit the Library, I have chosen to honor her request.

Of course, it was Emily we were trying to reach, and so we began to enquire about other ghosts in the Library. Cozette told us that there are a total of seven spirits living in the Library, four of them children. It was here that we asked specifically whether one of the spirits lived in the elevator; Cozette said "yes," and confirmed it when we asked again. It was at this point that the team could clearly hear the elevator's machinery coming online (keep in mind that this occurred around 11:15, and that only staff have access to the elevator).

We assumed that it was merely a Library staffer and continued with our séance. We asked how the spirit in the elevator had died, and Cozette spelled out "climb." It was at this point that the elevator doors opened. The elevator was empty, save for a Xeroxed piece of paper sitting less than inch from the door. We quickly grabbed it before the elevator doors closed.

The paper itself is unremarkable, and could have easily been placed by Library staff trying to spook us; that being said, the timing of its appearance was absolutely uncanny. It is a copy of a page from Business Week's February 29th, 1988 edition, though it is extremely darkened, and there is an odd outline of two stick figures (one child-sized and one adult-sized) scratched into it.

We asked if Cozette was friends with the spirit in the elevator. She said yes, and then she said "Good bye." That was good enough for us, and we quickly left.

Fay

The next séance was conducted in the fifth floor hallway of Young Hall at 11:40 PM. We encountered a spirit named Fay, who claimed to have died at the age of 19 in the 1920s. Fay was a second-year math student when she died, and as a result, enjoyed playing puzzle games with us, as math-folk are prone to do.

When we asked the cause of her death, she kept repeating the letters M and A; an astute member of the séance team pointed out that perhaps Fay was saying "Mama," and asked if she was pregnant. She was, and it was complications from the pregnancy that killed her.

The team then asked Fay whether there were any other ghosts in Young; she said that there was one, and that he was angry. We asked how he died, and Fay said by suicide; we also asked why he was angry, and Fay once again said "MAMA." Young Hall has mommy issues, apparently. Fay indicated that the other spirit was angry at his mother, and while she was unwilling to reveal his name, she did spell out "YAMALONAO." While this initially looked nonsensical, I, as a student of Russian history and a user of Google, later figured out that this was a possible reference to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, a huge but sparsely populated division of Russia. Was the spirit from there? Maybe. Or maybe not.

Samuel R.

The final séance was conducted at 12:15 AM in the basement of Harlan Hall. There we met Samuel R., a Canadian who claims to have died in 1945 in the Philippines during a battle with the Japanese. When asked how he died, he replied, "GUN." When pressed for further details, he said, "HEAD."

"Who did it?" asked Mark the Cartoonist, trying to elicit whether it was the Japanese who had shot Sam. However, Sam surprised us all when he spelled out, "PETER." The team exchanged astonished profanities with one another, and then asked whether it had been friendly fire; it had, and while Sam is still pretty mad at Peter, he said that he'll definitely forgive him one day.

Mark then asked Sam whether he was happy in his present condition. Sam said that "yes," he was happy being a ghost, and when we asked him whether he was alone in the dorm, he replied with a resounding "no."

In fact, Sam said that there are 98 ghosts in Harlan, many of them World War II casualties like himself. This is historically feasible, given that many officers-in-training lived in Harlan and Blackstone during the 1940s, including a group from Harlan that was nearly wiped out in the Pacific theater.

When we asked Sam whether he had any message for everyone, he spelled out "CHRIST." We asked whether he meant Christ Christ; he responded by spelling out Christ again several times, to which Mark said, "Okay, we get it." The Christ-spelling ceased.

Sam the evangelizer also told us that he was buried in Calgary, and that he had a living sister named Ester. We made the mistake of asking whether he wanted us to deliver a message to her. He did, and predictably, it was "CHRIST."

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