Life or death: The anatomy of a campus haunting
It started out as a joke, but it didn’t stay that way for long.
Amber Schoenfeld manages the Quadside Cafe in Utah State University’s library. And she and other employees would agree — so does Bertha.
Bertha is Schoenfeld’s personal ghost. The two were first introduced at the Junction. When Schoenfeld was there early in the morning, oven doors would sometimes pop open unexpectedly. Schoenfeld couldn’t figure out why, so she invented her own explanation: Bertha.
Soon, Bertha was everywhere. Employees caught on and started seeing Bertha around the kitchen. She was there when a loaf of bread accidentally spilled all over the floor. She was there when lights flickered on or off unexpectedly or when paperwork disappeared out of the blue. Soon it was hard to tell whether Bertha was Schoenfeld’s ghost or everyone’s ghost.
Then the calls started coming in.
It wasn’t every day. It wasn’t even very often. But once in a while when Schoenfeld wasn’t around, someone would call asking for her and an employee would take a message. The message was always the same.
“Tell her Bertha called.”
That’s when things got weird for her, Schoenfeld said. At first, Bertha had just been a joke, a way to make light of mistakes like a dropped sandwich or paperwork shuffled into the wrong pile. But Bertha calling her? She couldn’t explain that.
Well, maybe she could. There is one Bertha listed in the USU directory. Schoenfeld said she thought the calls might have been meant for that Bertha, they’d just somehow been misdirected to her phone line.
The problem is that Bertha hasn’t worked for the university for at least five years.
As Schoenfeld soon found out, there is another Bertha in her history, though — her great-grandmother.
By all accounts, Bertha isn’t the only ghost at USU — she’s one of many.
Lisa Gabbert, a folklorist and associate professor of English at USU, said the campus climate is ideal for ghosts and ghost stories. That’s because ghosts are “liminal” figures, meaning they’re sort of in-between — not all the way dead, not all the way alive.
Gabbert related this sense of in-between-ness to the unique situation of most college students.
“A university is a transitional place,” Gabbert said, “a stop on the way to adulthood.”
Lynne McNeill, an assistant professor of English who studies folklore as well, said ghosts who die as students aren’t just stuck as ghosts, they’re stuck as students — forever — which might be the most frightening idea behind any campus ghost story.
“There’s an implicit warning in there to not take college too seriously, to not let yourself get caught up in grades or your social life becoming a life or death matter because there’s something after this,” McNeill said. “Those ghosts serve to remind us that if we take it too seriously, we might end up stuck.”
McNeill said college campuses create a unique environment for the creation and exchange of legends because “liminality attracts liminality.”
“People in liminal situations,” — like college students — “those are the people who tend to have the most ghost stories,” McNeill said.
That was definitely the case with one recent USU graduate student.
It’s no secret that the Ray B. West building is supposed to be haunted, but one student related their first-hand look at just how rumors about the building get started in an email to McNeill.
The student was working late — until about 3 a.m., which isn’t an unusual time for a graduate student to be working, McNeill said — in her fourth-floor Ray B. West office.
The student was headed downstairs to the third floor when she saw “something turn and fly down the hall” as if she had “startled someone who turned to hide.”
It could have been a custodian, the student thought. Or a campus police officer in the midst of a late night security check.
But it was too early for custodians. And police officers tend to be loud.
Naturally, the student decided to investigate. She could see the rough outline of a figure around the corner, but said it didn’t have a definite shape and was light in color — almost white.
When she went around the corner to get a look, no one was there.
So, she turned to go. Then she heard someone talking.
It was a man’s voice, mumbling. The mumbling was accompanied by sounds that could have been moaning or crying, except they sounded “unnatural” for a human.
The student decided to dismiss this as the pipes and turned again to head downstairs. When she got to the second floor, the sounds hadn’t gotten any quieter despite her increased distance from the source.
At that point, the student booked it down the remainder of the stairs and out the door to the parking lot.
“And I don’t blame her,” McNeill said.
According to USU philosophy professor Charlie Huenemann, there’s another way to explain the graduate student’s experience. Sometimes our ideas about ghosts can create a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.
“In scary places, we have in our minds some kind of expectation,” Huenemann said. “Under the right conditions, those wishes become true.”
Not only that, but the human brain is actually programmed to see things that aren’t there.
Henri Dengah, a USU anthropology assistant professor, said ghost stories make sense because ancient humans needed to imagine bumps in the night as explainable by humans or animals — it was necessary for survival.
Put simply, if an ancient human who lived out in the elements tried to dismiss a twig snapping in the night as the wind and it was actually a lion, that person would be dead.
“Our brains are hardwired to think that those natural occurrences are actually caused by agents — perhaps unseen agents,” Dengah said.
So maybe the graduate student was thinking about Ray B. West ghosts when she walked downstairs, and tricked her brain into thinking she saw something otherworldly. Schoenfeld could have imagined Bertha in a similar way.
There are other ways to explain away ghosts, too. Humans remember things differently based on who they’re talking to and what situation they’re in, Huenemann said. Dengah said in some cultures, ghosts are convenient ways to explain things that could be problematic or troublesome.
But there isn’t always an explanation, Gabbert said. And sometimes it’s more fun that way.
“People continue to have experiences that they can’t explain and traditional explanations such as ghosts continue to fill that gap,” Gabbert said.
Mysteries and ghost stories are all about possibility, just like the college experience itself.
“When we share legends with each other, more than we’re trying to creep each other out or scare someone, what we’re doing is we’re debating what’s possible,” McNeill said.
Not every USU student has a ghost story, but part of the shared college experience is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in other ways — whether it’s something scientific like making artificial spider silk or something more personal like pulling three all-nighters in a row.
Whether it comes down to the hardwiring in our brains or a regimen of late nights and energy drinks, ghost stories can make campus life more interesting.
“It’s nicer to live in a world with mystery,” Gabbert said.
@alyssarbrts