Weatherford Hall

During the years 1990-1992 I attended college at Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR. I lived in a dorm called Weatherford Hall, which is a neat old building right next to the Memorial Union. It has two wings and a tower in the center with a big arch on the first floor. The tower is completely separated from the wings by fire walls, so if going to a wing from the tower, you have to go to the basement and then down the hall to a stairwell and walk up (no elevator). It is an interesting building in that most people have difficulty with directional sense when they first enter the building, i.e. you go in, walk around, go to someone's room and then when you go out a door to the outside, you are facing a direction you totally did not expect. The building is weird.

Anyway, I lived on the third floor of the west wing for about two years and had several experiences that made my heart pound. I've always been a night person and would often visit friends who lived in the tower section until the wee hours. On many occasions I found myself climbing the stairs to my third floor room late at night. I would often hear footsteps that I did not believe were my own (sometimes I was barefoot, so it couldn't have been an echo). I would pause to listen to the footsteps, and they would stop. I would then walk up and down the entire staircase to see if anyone was there but I found no one. The stairwell had doors leading into it at each floor, and you could always tell when one opened or closed by the sound and a change in the air, so I knew that it wasn't just someone who left the stairwell.

OK, so that's not really too scary, although I must admit that it sometimes scared the pants off of me. Another interesting thing was that on several occasions when I opened the door to my floor, I would hear a voice whispering my name.

On one occasion a more scary thing happened to a friend of mine. We were up on the fourth floor, which was a men's floor, at a party and she had to go to the bathroom, so she left to go downstairs. About twenty minutes later she still hadn't come back, and I was concerned because she was somewhat drunk, so I went to find her.

I found her on the landing just down the stairs. She had apparently fallen and had broken her arm. When I asked her what happened, she said, "Rebecca and I were walking down the stairs, and she pushed me."

There was no one named Rebecca who lived in Weatherford Hall, and as far as I could determine there hadn't been anyone by that name visiting... So perhaps it could have been a ghost, or maybe my friend was just drunk. I can't say for sure.

There was also another area in Weatherford that scared the hell out of me for no apparent reason. There was a sub-basement below the basement, and in this area there was a room with laundry facilities, and also a darkroom for photography. The hallway was fairly narrow, about four and a half feet across. There was a hole in the wall about 5 1/2 feet up, maybe 1x1 feet and rectangular. It apparently led into another room, but there were no doors. I peeked into it one day and I could see light from outside, perhaps from a little window or something. For some reason this hole in the wall scared me. I refused to do my laundry there, instead using the laundry room in the other wing.

Often when walking down the third floor hallway, when I would pass over this area I would be overwhelmed with terror and break out into goose bumps and shivers. It's strange because I am normally a very pragmatic person.

I guess my feeling is that the building was retaining images of its history, all the people who had lived there over the course of its existence. Perhaps the stairwell footsteps were echoes out of the past.

I have heard that Weatherford has been remodeled and turned into offices, which is sad because it was a great dorm, despite the sometimes odd occurrences.