char *(null)=" und.haunting

und.haunting

This happened to me back in the fall of 1988.
 
It was my second year of college, and I needed some extra
money, so I was working at the central "Service Desk" in
Wilkerson Hall at the University of North Dakota.  Wilkerson
serves as the dining hall for 5 dorms that contain about
1500 students, so there is a lot of traffic through there.
The thing about Wilkerson was the tunnels that connected each
dorm to the cafeteria (North Dakota is *cold* in the winter).
 
Well, jobs like this are pretty OK, since they are on campus
and you can walk back to your dorm room without putting a
coat on (I lived in West Hall, only a short walk through the
tunnel from the desk).  The one drawback to all of this was
that once a month you had to work the 'graveyard' shift of
12:00am to 4:00am alone.  
 
I was working the 'graveyard' shift one night during fall
finals.  I was kinda glad to be doing it since I could 
easily justify staying up very late and studying.  I got
a few phone calls and a few people needed copies, but other
than that it was very quiet.  It was a cold night, as UND
finals take place in mid-december, and the wind was howling
outside.
 
Around 2:30am, I heard a shout from the direction of the
West Hall tunnel.  Two guys came running out of the tunnel,
shouting for me to call the cops.  When I asked them why,
they told me that they had just seen a girl with no legs
*floating* up the tunnel.
 
I must have looked at them funny (like they were on drugs 
or something) when they said that because one of them said
"No man, come with us.  We'll show you."  Well, I wasn't
worried about them, because I knew them from West Hall.  So,
I locked the window and the three of us walked out into the 
tunnel.
 
When we first entered the tunnel, I got a creepy feeling
that I couldn't shake.  I kept thinking "These guys are just
trying to scare you", but it did not help.  As we walked 
down the tunnel towards an intersection with the West Hall
tunnel, I felt the hair on my arm stand up.  I looked at
my companions and they both had expressions mixed with fear
and curiosity.
 
When we turned the corner, I saw her.  She was about 5'5", 
had short dark hair, and was wearing what looked like a 
nightshirt.  She did not appear to have any legs, and was
semi-transparent.  We watched her for what seemed like a
whole minute, but she did not seem to notice us.  She seemed
lost to me, and very frightened.  After who knows how long,
she simply vanished.
 
Needless to say, we hauled ass back to Wilkerson to talk 
about what had happened.  We all agreed we had seen it, but
had no idea what or who she was.  We decided not to tell
anyone about it, since it would make us look like kooks.  I
quit that job a week later, but not because of the ghost.
 
About a year later, I was going through some old student
newspapers looking for information on a campus student
group when I came across an article about a girl who had
frozen to death on campus in December of 1962.  It seems
that before the tunnels were built(they weren't dug, but 
built and then dirt was built up on them) it was quite 
common for girls from West Hall(it was a female dorm then)
to run from the back door over to Wilkerson.
 
We've all heard stories about people who go out in those
-70 whiteout conditions and freeze to death in no time 
after getting disoriented.  According to the newspaper
account, it had happened to this girl.  She had died only 
60 feet from the dorm, very near the area where my 
companions and I had seen the ghost disappear.  The story
did not say what time she died, but a police report that
I dug up later (good records at the Grand Forks PD) stated
that the last person who saw her alive was her RA and that
was at about 2:00am.
 
I took the newspaper article to the Director of Housing
at UND (I was working for him at the time, and we had a
good rapport).  After he had read it I told him what I had
seen the year before.  He told me that this was the fourth
time that he had heard this story, and in almost all of the
cases, the people were Housing Office employees.  He said
that there really wasn't anything he could do about it, so
he had never reported it any higher in the University.
 
Well, the story spread around a bit, and I did hear about
some guys who went down there with a Ouija board and got
really freaked out, but that is another story.
 
Jared Dahl ----> jdahl@vnet.ibm.com
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