The Wake

The ‘U’ campus is full of shady legends: one in five students claims to live in Bob Dylan’s old apartment; a labyrinth of steam tunnels supposedly runs underneath campus; and, of course, rumors of ghosts and haunted houses run through the student body like a streaking frat boy on Thirsty Thursday.

Hadley Anderson believes in ghost stories, though. In fact, she lived with a ghost for a semester. And she swears she’s not crazy.

Anderson, a senior studying French and global studies, first met the ghost last semester. Soon after moving into her Dinkytown apartment in January, she started hearing some strange things.

“I would hear these noises like someone was walking around upstairs,” Anderson said. “But no one else was home.” The two-bedroom apartment, which she shared with another girl, was on the top level of the apartment complex, she said.

Anderson remembered one particularly frightening incident. Home alone one night, she sat up watching TV, her cat on her lap. Suddenly, she said, it sounded like someone was running down the stairs leading to her roommate’s bedroom. The “footsteps” stopped on the landing and the cat leapt from her lap and bolted to the foot of the stairs. Confused and a little creeped-out, she walked to the stairway, calling her roommate’s name, even though she wasn’t home. No one answered and the stairway was empty, but the cat kept looking up towards the landing.

Another night, Anderson came home around midnight. The door was locked and the lights were off. Assuming no one was home, she came inside and soon went to bed. But, just as she turned off the lights and got into bed, she heard a blood-curdling shriek.

“It was echoing through the whole apartment,” she said.

Thinking the cat was making the noise, she jumped out of bed and called for the cat. She searched the apartment’s main floor but couldn’t find the cat anywhere. Then she heard the shriek again and this time it came from inside the apartment, she said.

She grabbed a knife from the kitchen, walked up the stairs and let the door swing open. To her surprise, her roommate was home, sound asleep. The cat was sleeping in bed with her. Anderson walked downstairs and put the knife away, but said she had a hard time falling asleep after the scare. She didn’t hear the noise again. Her roommate, a light sleeper, said she never heard anything that night.

Though she was home alone most of the times she heard the ghost, Anderson says she wasn’t imagining things. After a while, her roommate started calling the phenomenon, “Hadley’s ghost,” because she rarely saw or heard anything.

“Hadley’s ghost” did leave some presents in the upstairs room, though. One day, Anderson found a coin on the stairway landing, the same place she heard the mysterious footsteps. The coin had Arabic and French engravings, she said. Her roommate, who walked the staircase every day, said she had never seen the coin.

Another time, the girls found a plastic spider dangling from a string in the upstairs bedroom. Once again, neither of them knew where it came from. Anderson also remembered seeing a ‘J’ etched into the wall near the landing. The letter, fairly large, suddenly appeared. Neither girl had seen it before.

Though her apartment may sound like a breeding ground for paranormal activity, Anderson said she never felt scared when home alone. Rather, the ghost became a running joke between roommates. She put the “ghost coin” on a shelf in the apartment and would tell visitors, “There’s the ghost’s coin!”

Anderson moved out of the apartment last May but she still believes in ghosts. Her new place isn’t haunted, though…or at least she hasn’t seen anything yet.

In this area of old legends and even older houses, hundreds of ghost stories are just waiting to be unearthed. Talk to your roommates—they might have seen something you missed. Who knows, maybe those flickering lights and strange noises you heard last weekend weren’t simply side effects from the case of Black Label you split with your buddy. Maybe it was a message from beyond the grave, a distant voice from a lost soul who just wanted to hang out and join the party.