When Things Go Bump In the Night…and It’s NOT Sex.

As summer bleeds into autumn, and the school- work comes piling in, we are rapidly approaching Halloween – the first excuse to throw a huge party since Welcome Week.

Sure, Halloween might be, as Cady Heron puts it, “the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it,” but it’s also the basis for urban legends on college campuses across the country.

You might have outgrown ghost stories in high school, but many college students seriously believe the legends and lore that shroud their school, and swear that they have experienced a haunting somewhere on campus.

Hollow Hill, one of the internet’s oldest and most respected paranormal info centers, claims that college campuses are actually prime locations for hauntings and poltergeists. According to the site, “Poltergeist events most often occur when there is someone between ages eight and 25 nearby.” With tens of thousands of students falling into the 18-22 age bracket, this certainly fits the mold.

Furthermore, the site points out that colleges are imprinted with emotional scenes. Thus, colleges are ideal settings for what paranormal investigators call “residual energy hauntings.” Whether or not you believe in ghost stories, look around your dorm. What events have transpired in your very room that you don’t even know about? If walls could talk, what history would they spout about the people who lived there before you?

Speaking of emotional scenes, Hollow Hill lists tragic histories as another reason for a haunting. Many schools leave their tragic tales out of their guidebooks: suicides, fatal accidents, maybe even a supposed murder. Hollow Hill states that spirits of people who died early and tragically always regret the past, and are more apt to return to familiar sites and take up residency. Additionally, many universities are set in towns and cities with their own ghost stories. New England schools, for example, tend to be older and have many historic buildings on campus. New England is also America’s hauntings hub, being home to such events as the Salem Witch Trials and various battles between early settlers and Native Americans, which usually spawn dozens of tales themselves.

Hollow Hill provides an extensive list of haunted colleges in New England, including:

Yale University, where a ghost supposedly plays organ music in Woolsey Hall.

Harvard University’s Thayer Hall, which was originally a textile mill, is supposedly visited by ghosts in Victorian clothing. (Editor’s Note: Victorian clothing? The bad fashion alone is enough to scare anyone.)

Colby College, where a male ghost appears in Colgate Hall, and a female spirit walks the halls of Best dormitory.

University of Vermont, which has reports of hauntings in Converse Hall and Bittersweet House.

Whether or not students are skeptics or believers, many universities across the country host lectures given by ghost hunters like Lorraine Warren, a paranormal investigator and clairvoyant, who worked on the Amityville Horror case and has appeared on Road Rules with her late husband, Ed, also a paranormal investigator.

The Warrens’ website features a list of clues that a house or room is haunted. If you’ve been hearing noises or seeing unusual occurrences around campus, you might want to check it out. And if your college hosts an evening with Lorraine Warren, who now tours with her son-in-law Tony Spera, it’s definitely worth checking out, no matter what your beliefs.

[Photo courtesy of neatorama.com]