The Haunted Kenyon Tour

The Unsubstantiated Truth

The dance studio used to be Shaffer Pool, which was nicknamed "The Greenhouse" because of its glass roof. The "Greenhouse Ghost" is said to be the ghost of a Kenyon student, or possibly an Air Force cadet during World War II, who died there in a diving accident, which led to the removal of the diving board. One version has him bouncing too high, shattering the roof, breaking his neck and drowning.

During the war, Kenyon did in fact host cadets enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Force Meteorology Program. But there are no records of anybody dying in Shaffer pool. Former dean of students and swimming coach Tom Edwards removed the three-meter diving board in the 1950s, in his first month as coach, but it wasn't because of a fatal diving accident. It was because the deep end was only nine feet deep when it should have been twelve, and there was a dangerous ledge between the deep end and the shallow end. "Kids would come up from a dive, scraped up, with blood streaming down their faces," Edwards recalls.

The Tales

Kenyon custodians and safety officers consider the Shaffer Dance Studio to be the "creepiest place on campus," as one puts it. One night in 1979, when it was still a pool, a student lifeguard locked up the building, turned out the lights, and started up the hill. When he looked back, he saw that the lights were back on and he heard the sound of splashing. When he went back, nobody was there.

Long after the pool had been converted to a dance studio, dancers rehearsing late at night would see wet footprints leading into the locker rooms. Safety officers Carol Brown and Daniel P. Turner '99 once heard the sound of a diving board bouncing, not just once, but three times. Months would go by without any paranormal experiences, and then unexpectedly when Turner crossed the dance floor to lock the far door, the hackles on his neck would go up. He'd hear the sound of someone walking behind him.

"I can't tell you why, but one night, on the way back from locking that door, I just turned around," he says. There on the floor — the floor he'd just traversed — was a newly formed puddle of water. It wasn't raining and hadn't rained for days. Dispensing with protocol, he got on the walkie-talkie and yelled: "Everybody get your ass down to the dance studio! Now!" He could hear the squeals of the tires coming from the north end. Turner stood outside, trembling, not even able to light his own cigarette. Only when he was joined by officer Todd Bell would he go back inside.

"We literally watched the puddle evaporate before our eyes."

The Truth, Part I: Death on the Trestle

This story made national headlines, and made Kenyon notorious. In the autumn of 1905, Stuart Lathrop Pierson was pledging the DKE fraternity. His father, a Kenyon alumnus and a DKE himself, had come up from Cincinnati for his son's initiation. He said good-bye to Stuart around 9 p.m. and waited in the West Wing Bullseye for the initiation ceremony later that night. Meanwhile, Stuart's fraternity brothers took him down to a nearby trestle bridge on the Kokosing (now part of the Kokosing Gap Bike Trail). Confident that no train was scheduled that night, they left him there, with a note pinned to his chest: "This will do for this time, but if we come again it will be worse."

When the fraternity brothers returned for him about an hour later, they discovered Stuart's mangled body, which had been dragged twenty yards from where they'd left him. Still on his chest was the now gruesomely ironic note. An unscheduled train, headed to Mount Vernon for repairs, had come through after all. Not realizing it had hit someone, the train never stopped.

Lurid newspaper stories claimed that Stuart had been tied to the tracks, an assertion denied by everyone involved and refuted by an investigation. The fraternity brothers and College officials surmised that Stuart had fallen asleep. But Kenyon's enrollment plummeted, and rumors persisted for years. There are unanswered questions to this day.

The Tales

Many report seeing a specter in the back West Wing Bullseye, often on the night of Oct. 28, the anniversary of Stuart Pierson's death. It is said that Stuart — now affectionately called "Stewie" — returns to the fourth-floor window, where his father waited, and looks out at the train tracks below.

According to John Hepp '04, who lived in the room during his junior year, "the legend is so powerful that many residents of that room will opt to sleep on a friend's couch or in their girlfriend's room" on the fateful night. But Hepp decided to spend the night there.

Earlier in the evening, he went out. Before leaving, he carefully locked the bullseye window tightly, and then the door, to prevent his friends from playing any sort of trick on him. When he returned to his room at 2 a.m., he found the door still locked. But when he opened it, he saw that the bullseye window was swung wide open. "That rusty lock could never be pried loose, from even the strongest gust of wind," says Hepp. "I chalked it up to Stewie, and shamefully decided to sleep at my girlfriend's apartment on the north end of campus."

On another night, Hepp was falling off to sleep with his girlfriend beside him when he felt an ice-cold hand touch the back of his neck. Thinking his girlfriend wanted his attention, he opened his eyes. But his girlfriend was fast asleep, her warm hands accounted for. He jumped out of bed to turn on the light. In the suddenly bright room, he noticed, next to his closet, a "mini-door" with a recently installed lock that had inexplicably come unhinged. Picking up a flashlight and climbing inside, he found a narrow crawl space, about ten feet long and two feet wide, which led to an opening. There, he says, "My flashlight revealed countless signatures on the walls, pledge books, DKE pins, and other souvenirs from the past."

One inscription stood out, a set of initials and a date: SLP 1905.

The Truth, Part II: Nine Perish in Fire

The tragic story of the Old Kenyon Fire is still painful to retell. The saddest event in the College's history took place on a cold night in February 1949, after the biggest dance of the year. By 4 a.m., the men's dates had gone home and the last revelers had gone to bed in Old Kenyon. But as the security guard on duty that night walked away from the building, he noticed a glow. The top floor of the middle section was on fire. Within minutes, the building was ablaze.

Nine students lost their lives: six, trapped by the fire, were asphyxiated; two perished after leaping from their second-floor windows; and one died in the hospital of severe burns. In a poignant, Titanic-like twist, the boys sang as they waited for death, according to some firsthand accounts. Many of the students lost were Jewish, since, at that time, they weren't invited to join the fraternities housed in the west and east wings. There were rumors that women spending the nights in the rooms had also died but that their deaths were hushed up. However, there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Tales

Years ago, on the anniversary of the fire, it is said that a student went into his room and found a 1949 yearbook flipped open to the page on which the fire victims were listed. And yet he'd seen nobody going in or out of the room. Another student, who was living in a room where one of the victims had been trapped, heard someone pounding on his door, shouting: "Get out!" When he went to the door, no one was there. Still another student claims he was shaken awake one night and heard someone screaming, "Ed, wake up, fire!" One of the boys who died in the fire had lived in that room and was named Edward Brout.

A Peep who was living in Old Kenyon once told professor and Kenyon ghost-story raconteur Tim Shutt about seeing ghostly figures, but the student wondered about something peculiar. On the fourth floor, the figures were visible from only the knees up, whereas on the third floor he saw only suspended feet. He went to the College archives to learn more about the history of the building and discovered that when Old Kenyon was rebuilt, the new floors were built eighteen inches higher than in the original. The ghosts, it seems, continue to live in the building they remember.

When the Collegian invited "paranormal investigator" Lori Schillig to campus in 1999, and took her to Old Kenyon, she "picked up a strong intuitive impression of a person falling or jumping from a window" near rooms 403 and 404. Near a second-floor room, she "received an extremely strong impression of two people somewhere in the room, huddling together near death."

On a sultry July night, safety officers Daniel P. Turner '99 and Renee Joris were called to an uninhabited Old Kenyon because a light was seen on in the West Wing Bullseye. It had been in the nineties that day, and on the fourth floor it felt even hotter (the building does not have air conditioning). They turned the light off and started down the hall. But as they pushed open the fire door that leads from the West Wing to the middle section of Old Kenyon, they were suddenly covered in goose bumps. They saw each other's breath. It was inexplicably freezing.

They hurried down through the building and stepped outside. They didn't say a word to each other until four cigarettes later. Later, a message came over their walkie-talkies telling them that the Bullseye light was back on. Turner said to his partner, "I don't care." Joris replied, "I don't either." They refused to return to the building that night.

The Truth

The Caples ghost stories, which seem incongruous with a contemporary high-rise building, grew out of a real incident in 1979, when a student fell down the elevator shaft. He was last seen at 2:30 a.m., coming home from a party in the New Apartments. Another student, who took the stairs, saw him waiting in the lobby for the elevator. The elevator apparently got trapped between the seventh and eighth floors — some say he was on his way to his girlfriend's room — and it's believed he pried the doors open and tried to jump down to the floor below him, falling to the bottom of the elevator shaft in the process. He was found unconscious the next morning by a security guard, and died in the hospital later that night.

The Tales

As the resident ghost tour guide, Tim Shutt has heard many stories from women who once lived in Caples and who woke up to sense someone sitting on their bed or felt someone lying on top of them, immobilizing them, occasionally accompanied by the smell of alcohol.

But women are not the only ones who have had paranormal experiences in Caples. One of the best-documented incidents took place in the summer of 1995, after the students had left and before the summer conferences had started. It happened in the wee hours of the morning, several hours after the building had been checked and locked down for the night. It was eventually filed in the campus safety office as an "unexplained occurrence."

Safety Officer Daniel P. Turner '99 was working the north end that night. When he came on duty at 11 p.m., he was told by the afternoon shift to "keep an eye on Caples." Lights and showers had been unexpectedly coming on, despite the fact that security had thoroughly checked the building and found no one. Then, going on 5 a.m., Dan Turner got an emergency call from the dispatcher: "All units to Caples!"

The switchboard operator, Jolynn Bryant, had gotten three phone calls in rapid succession from rooms 511, 611, and 711, and each time she heard a woman scream and hang up. The sound was not mechanical, like the screeching of a fax machine, but decidedly human.

Turner was the first officer to arrive and, having been told to wait for the others, he positioned himself where he could watch both entrances. He saw nobody go in or go out. When the additional officers arrived, they went through every room in the building. They even checked the trap door to the roof, which was padlocked. Yet a shower was running on the fifth floor and steam was billowing into the hallway. In the corner rooms on the upper floors, where the calls had originated, the lights were on and every phone was unplugged. They turned off the lights, plugged in the phones, and prepared to leave.

Then another call came in, another scream, from Room 811. When Turner returned to the room, the light was back on. Letting himself in the locked door, he saw that the phone was again unplugged. As he stood there, he heard the whir of the elevator going down. But the Caples elevator stays on the floor it last visited, until someone calls for it. By walkie-talkie, he checked with the other officers. Nobody had pressed the button.

Everybody who has shuffled along the gravelly length of Middle Path knows about the Gates of Hell. But nobody seems to know how the stone pillars at the entrance to the south campus got the name.

The story I've heard falls into the undocumented "it is said" category. It is said that writer Anthony Burgess, who spoke on campus during the late seventies, later appeared on the Phil Donahue Show and told a national audience that Kenyon College was home to the Gates of Hell and the most intense evil energy that he had ever experienced. Hearing about this, the College requested a videotape of the show, but when it arrived there was no mention of evil at Kenyon, or of any hellish gates. Some cite this "excision" as eerily suggestive in itself. Others scoff, raising the obvious question of whether Burgess ever said any such thing at all.

There are other tales. According to one, it was a psychic who identified Gambier as home to the Gates of Hell. Another insists that the evil portal is actually the old gated entrance to the Bishop's House, in the densely wooded lower reaches of Brooklyn Street.

Whatever the case, superstitions have grown up around the gates. Some say that you shouldn't walk between the gates when the bells in the Church of the Holy Spirit are chiming midnight, or you might be transported to Hell itself. Others warn that you shouldn't look into the trees shading Middle Path there. Because of their shape, they're considered "pitchfork trees."

The Truth?

It is said that the ghosts of two people killed in a car accident, a driver and his passenger, haunt the Hill Theater. The accident supposedly took place before the theater was built in 1937, but, according to old maps, there was never a road on that spot.

The Tales

Fred Drogula '92 always heard that thirty or forty years before his time at Kenyon, the cleaning crew was on the Hill stage one summer day, when two students walked in and asked an odd question: "What year is this?" (Some versions have them asking the day or the month.) The custodians answered and then, realizing that the students weren't supposed to be in the building, one custodian followed them into the lobby to make sure they were leaving. Nobody was there.

When Fred was a drama student, he was once working in the theater at 3 a.m. The student lighting designer stood on the stage below while he and another crew member stood on ladders, checking the lights hanging from the grid. As they came to the next instrument, the designer would ask them to "flag the light" — to pass their hand between the lens and the grate that covered the lighting instruments, so that she might see the shadow and figure out where each light was focused.

Fred, finishing up for the night, climbed down the ladder and began to clean up. When the designer called up a final "Flag the light," she and Fred both saw the shadow of a hand pass over the light. Then the other crew member walked in from the wings.

He was already down from the grid. Who had flagged the light?

Campus safety officers routinely find the "ghost light" unscrewed on the Hill stage, and then, although they turn it back on and lock the building on their way out, they find it unscrewed again on their next pass through. In the early hours of the morning, long after the student rehearsals are over, they find the stage curtains open, and then, the next time through, closed. Professor of Drama Tom Turgeon suggests the closed curtains and extinguished lights might have more to do with "carnal experiences than ghostly ones."