Booshop Scarybury

Since the beginning of time, every young student has pondered the same question: are ghosts real? Despite the questionable legitimacy of these paranormal “phenomena,” little did you know, many Seahawks have had their own frightening experiences with the occult.

The mystery of ghastly activity does not only revolve around students and children. Faculty member Vanessa Eicher shares her experience: “My sophomore year, my boyfriend and I would sneak into Jewell Hall, the oldest building on [William Jewell College] campus, built in 1849.  We were both faculty kids, so we had a clever–but not destructive way–of getting in . . . it was definitely against the rules,” says Eicher, who clearly enjoys breaking federal law. 

“During the Civil War, Jewell Hall had been used as a morgue, and there were lots of rumors about it being haunted. One night, Jeff and I were in the building, and we heard a security guard come in downstairs. We were on the 3rd floor, ran along the hallway noisily, and escaped through a door on the far side of the building,” says Eicher. 

“Later that semester . . . at night, Jeff and I were out on the quad, and we ran into that same security guard. As we got talking about whether Jewell Hall was haunted, he swore it was because one time he walked in late at night when the building was locked, and he heard footsteps running along the third floor . . . so I guess I was a ghost once,” says Eicher, the now thwarted criminal mastermind and Jewell College poltergeist.

Although ghosts are typically associated with paranormal activity, these student experiences have at times involved different apparitions or figures. “One time when I was sick, my parents told me to go to bed and in the middle of night, I hallucinated people climbing through my window and stabbing me because they were angry,” says seventh grader Charlotte Helling. According to Helling, the suspected stabber “hurt me in real life; it actually felt like I was being stabbed.” 

Though many ghost stories are victimless, some students have taken on the task of frightening younger children. “At my old school, we terrorized a bunch of little second graders with a ghost story and made a few of them cry, [but] we did not mean to,” says sophomore William-Aiden Carrasco-Cooper. “I had a bunch of friends that used to joke about the school being haunted, because it was founded in like 1956. One time at some movie night at school we went to the creepy places in the school to look around. The scariest spot in the school was the back closet of the old-school gym that had been there since the school was built, not even our teachers dared to venture in there,” Carrasco-Cooper says with a valiant voice. “The room built a reputation in my friend group because it was creepy. When we were investigating, [it] was cold enough that we could see our breath with our flashlights, and we all kept getting cold flashes. It turned out that the back closet didn’t have heaters because the room was pretty old so we decided to put the case to rest,” says Carrasco-Cooper, the newly confessed Seabury terrorizer-of-young-children. 

Unlike these stories of child terror, some students have had possible contact with ghastly apparitions. Junior Jacob Hammann shares his story: “I went to this cool old 1800’s cabin in the middle of Arkansas quite a while ago with Colin Farha. The cabin was an old-school, classic wooden cabin, and it was around during the Civil War and some battles happened around there as far as I know. When I slept I felt unnaturally cold and felt like I was being watched. I don’t know if it was some guy who fought in the war or just an eerie kind of atmosphere. It was creepy.”

Like any phenomena of such nature, no consensus will be reached about the existence of ghosts any time soon, but that does not mean that there is not room for speculation. “Still to this day I wonder if there are any little demon children, or even 2nd graders living in the haunted storage closet,” Carrasco-Cooper says curiously.