Eve

There are thousands of stories about haunted college campuses, especially at small New England colleges where there’s nothing better to do than try to scare the incoming freshmen with ghost stories. My college had its own collection of lore, much of it exaggerated over the years I'm sure, but I would like to tell you about my experience with a ghost named Eve.

According to the legend, Eve was a student back in the teens when the school was still a female seminary (now a co- ed college). Eve lived in room 420 of the Everett dorm. She was murdered by her boyfriend who was visiting one night, apparently because she did not feel as strongly for him as he did for her; he raped her and then killed her. Those are the facts, verified by college records. As with many stories of this kind, there are variations. The most gruesome ending of the story I've heard was that she was found hanging from the bell tower atop the Everett dorm, another version said she was stabbed and she died in the hallway outside room 420 while crawling for help. One thing I know for sure though is that room 420 is haunted and no one has lived in it for decades.

Room 420 is in the middle of a long hallway on the top floor of Everett, there is a padlock on it and the room number is painted over. Naturally this arouses suspicion among students because it’s an unusual place for a "storage room". I did not live in Everett, but many of my friends did and they would occasionally report odd occurrences such as the showers and faucets turning off and on, or the sound of what can only be described as "someone rollerblading" back and forth in the crawl space above (not enough room for anyone to walk upright, let alone rollerblade), and odd tapping sounds, to name a few (there are many other stories I've heard from residents, but since I did not witness any of them I will not include them). Many people, of course, simply refused to believe that there could possibly be a ghost in Everett.

The cleaning ladies were always willing to talk about their experiences with Eve! One claimed that Eve was very helpful and would open the elevator door for her when her hands were full (it was a service elevator and required a key to operate) or would turn lights off and on when she would enter or leave a room.

I spent a summer working at the college on the buildings and grounds crew along with a couple dozen other students working in various departments. We all stayed in the houses that surround the campus, the dorms themselves were empty. The campus was so empty it felt like a completely different world, and yes, it was freaky to walk around there at night (something no one would even think twice about doing when school was in session, but with everyone gone the place was just plain eerie and I would not walk around there alone after dark).

A couple of months into the summer my housemates and I were bored to tears being stuck in the middle of small town USA , so we?made our own fun. By the end of the summer we knew how to break into every building on campus! (It wasn't that hard actually, and we were never malicious, just bored). After discussing the ghosts on campus with the cleaning ladies one day, my friend D. and I decided to take a trip up to the 4th floor of Everett to see if we could spot Eve. (Neither of us had ever seen a ghost before, but we were true believers and we were ready!) We had a few guys with us, tagging along, they probably thought they were going to get some "action" when they agreed to go up there with us.

We trekked up to the 4th floor, everything was dark of course. D. was already scared, they guys were already scoffing, I was leading the way. I was probably the only one taking this seriously. We walked half way down the hall to room 420. We weren't about to take the breaking and entering thing to the next level by busting the padlock, so we sat in a semi-circle around the door and thought "ok, now what?" A couple of the guys had not heard the full story of Eve or the weird things that took place on that floor, so D. suggested that I tell the story.

I was uncomfortable with this since it was dark and spooky in the old dorm, and well, you just don't know who’s listening. So, I made sure to say things like "as the story goes" and "this is the way I heard it" trying not to make it sound like it’s the absolute truth. As I'm telling the story, a couple of the guys were saying "yeah, right" and "whatever". I didn't want to sound like a kook, so I didn't put any drama or flare into the story. Upon completing the tale, I look around at the faces of the people sitting around me, I was only being able to see the glimmer of whites of their wide eyes and vague outlines of their bodies, I'm trying to assess how much they believed my story, when from the end of the very long hall, deep in the shadows, we heard someone say "oooooooooo".

We didn't know what to do, so we did what anyone would do in that situation, we RAN.

When we got back to our cozy, well lit house, we discussed what had just happened. To me the noise sounded like someone sarcastically saying "ooo, what a scary story", (If I were Eve listening in on the stories of my haunting, I would want to put in my 2 cents too!) D. said she thought it was more of just a mournful wail. And the guys, being the "realists" tried to say that it was someone outside saying "woo hoo!" (which of course it wasn't, there was nobody on campus, and definitely no reason to cheer, besides, how would we hear it way up on the 4th floor with the windows closed? This was a huge dorm, by the way, and we had broken in through the basement, we were nowhere near an open window) If they really believed it was anything other than a ghost, why were they the first ones out the door? Sure, now that they were back in the "safe" house they acted all big, but they ran out of there faster than I've ever seen anyone run in my life!

I have no idea if it really was Eve, I don't know if it was even a ghost, but it was spooky. If anything good has come out of this experience, I hope that it made those guys think that there’s probably such a thing as ghosts.