Twenty-some years ago I began college at the local satellite campus of a big state university. I transferred halfway through my education to a different school and different major with the intention of never returning to this state university again. Imagine my own shock when, in 2017, I found myself working in the library of that same state university satellite campus.
Now, I don’t like to name the places I’m referencing, so we’ll just shorthand this campus to SU (state university) and if you follow the clues in this piece, or Google the well documented history I’m about to cite, you can probably guess precisely where I’m talking about. Or maybe not. But if you do figure it out, please be respectful that this is a school and not a haunted house open for your amusement.
SU began life as the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, a finishing school from the era when such an education was quite prestigious. The school’s campus design was Cabincore before it was cool, full of rolling wooded hills, cabins, springhouses, and a few larger stone buildings for classes and dormitories. When I was a student at SU, much of the aesthetic was preserved in the interior spaces of the college grounds, while more modern buildings were hidden behind trees along the outer rim of the campus. I took three semesters of Italian in a converted springhouse alongside a pond full of ducks, geese, and turtles. It was quaint.
In my two and half years as a student, I never heard a single ghost story. Also, I rarely spent any time in the library (except to break up with boyfriends, but that’s another story). If I had been a better student and gone to the library more often (I know, I know) I may have heard some of the legends about the campus, or maybe even met one of its resident ghosts.
The Spectral Aviatrix
Abby Sutherland didn’t establish the Ogontz School, but she was responsible for moving it to the campus that is SU today. She expanded the education services at Ogontz, but she maintained the school’s primary focus on teaching girls how to become fine ladies. She kept the school going until the 1950s, when finishing schools were becoming a relic of bygone sensibilities, and also when the school ran out of money. The campus was sold to SU, and the Ogontz School was itself finished.
Many fine ladies and suitable wives were generated at Ogontz, but their most notable (almost) alumni quit in the middle of her education to become a famously independent woman: Amelia Earhart. (When I worked in the library, I spent some time in the school’s archives which included many of Earhart’s personal affects from her time as a student, including a piece of wood cut into the shape of a rifle that she used during the school’s military marching drills. Different times).
Earhart was purportedly very restless at Ogontz. She left the school to pursue a career in nursing, which she would eventually quit after she discovered piloting. Like many SU students after her, she just couldn’t settle on a major. During her time in the school, she lived in the dormitory building known today on SU’s campus as the Sutherland Building. According to a legend rife with romanticism she would frequently climb onto the building’s roof during the night and stargaze.
This legend lives at the heart of the most commonly cited ghost story on SU’s campus. For years, people working on the top floor of the Sutherland Building have reported hearing heavy footsteps walking along the roof. I probably wouldn’t have believed these reports if I hadn’t also heard firsthand accounts from a few professors (maybe they were adjuncts?) whose offices were in the quasi-attic space of Sutherland. The story was always the same, the clear sounds of footsteps above them on an empty roof. Could it really be Amelia Earhart? Or giant squirrels? Does it really matter when the story is this good?
Pranked in the Stacks
The SU library where I worked is in the mid-century Woodland Building, directly across the campus from the Sutherland Building. Our space wasn’t original to the Ogontz School, but it did contain an extensive archive from Ogontz along with the personal book collections of Abby Sutherland. According to many of my coworkers, the archives and books weren’t the only remnants of Abby Sutherland’s in the library. In fact, more than a few of them believe we inherited none other than Abby herself, in the form of a sometimes mischievous, sometimes disgruntled spirit. Incidents of unusual sounds and shapes moving through the stacks, as well as objects moved or missing when no person could be responsible, led to the belief that Abby was still overseeing the collections and memories of her school.
The library is three floors, a main floor for circulation and reference, a bottom floor full of books, study rooms, and the Ogontz School archives, and the top floor that is primarily long rows of bookcases and small cubbies for silent study. All three of these floors are only accessible by a single staircase (the building was built just barely pre-ADA) and the top and bottom floors had an added doorway at their respective landings. At the end of the night, when closing down the bottom floor where the Ogontz archives were housed, it was polite to say, “Goodnight Abby,” before shutting off the lights.
I never met, heard, or felt the presence of a ghost at SU. The best story I can muster is discovering the lights of the archives room on a few times when they should’ve been off, and occasionally finding them off when they should’ve been on. Nothing special and probably explainable.
But a good friend and SU coworker, whom I’ll call A.T. here, assures me that it was only happenstance that I never encountered a ghost in the library. In fact, she’s encountered more than enough of them to believe they’re real.
She tells me about the incident that creeped her out the most. She was working on a weekend, when the students rarely used the library. It was the beginning of the day and she walked downstairs to the bottom floor. As she was opening the door from the landing she could clearly hear a man’s deep voice speaking from the other side. When she fully opened the door the sound stopped. She stepped into the large empty space, and quickly realized she was the only person down there. Too surprised at hearing the sound, she didn’t immediately focus on the man’s words, and she doesn’t know what he said. But it seems the words were not meant for her, and that more likely she was interrupting an invisible conversation.
Ok, ok, I tell her, maybe it was pipes or something explainable with the right amount of investigation. No, she insists to me that it was a man talking. She is certain of what she heard. Sensing my skepticism, she tells me another tale that I have no possible explanation for.
A.T. was shelving on the top floor, again on a weekend when our less than studious undergraduates were anywhere but the library. Alone in the silent stacks, she slid a book onto an overstuffed shelf. She pushed the book in, felt a bit of resistance, and then heard the entire shelf on the opposite side of the bookcase crash to the ground. All folks who have worked in libraries have done this accidently at least once, and we can all tell you that the sound of just one book hitting the floor is quite loud and unsettling. An entire shelf falling in a quiet library is briefly deafening, and so, so unpleasant. Luckily, she was the only person on the floor and her embarrassment wasn’t exposed. She calmly walked to the end of the stacks, rounded to other side of the shelves where she was working, and saw nothing on the ground. The shelf that had most certainly fallen was as it should be, neat and undisturbed, and still on the bookcase.
I have no explanation for that. And with my concession that this was indeed weird, A.T. tells me that it happened more than once. Every time it played the same way. She would hear the shelf fall, rush around the bookcase, and there would be nothing on the ground. And always when she was shelving alone.
Abby Sutherland, Amelia Earhart, and maybe one deep-voiced dude, all having nothing better to do in the afterlife than to prank unsuspecting library assistants. Eternity well spent.
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