It's Been A Long Time
Hello Knights,
So it has been 4 years since I last updated this blog but I decided this morning to search "Saint Michael's Ghost Stories" and my blog was 4th or 5th in the search results and it made me very happy! I decided to give the old blog a scroll and discovered this story left in the comments section of an older post of Joyce Hall.
Blogger, "Howdo" of the Class of 1979 wrote on 11/7/2011:
I am a 1979 grad of SMC and lived all 4 years on the 4th floor of Joyce at the far end of the hall (401 & 403, I believe). I stayed at school one weekend over a holiday when nearly everyone else had gone home. There was only one other guy on my floor in a room at the opposite end of the hall.
I was woken in the middle of the night by the loud sound of running footsteps - multiple sets of footsteps - over my head in the attic, which would stop, veer off in another direction, and then rush back. I seem to recall accompanying laughter, although I might not have heard that till later. It sounded more like kids running around than adults.
1) There weren't enough SMCer's to be running around, let alone kids.
2) I'd never heard the sound before despite at couple of years at St. Mike's with numerous all-nighters.
3)I'd once entered the attic to see if there was a rumored antenna I could tap into with a cable. There was but there were also endless knee-high beams that would have made dragging a cable to my end of the attic a chore - and which would have prevented anyone from running around.
I eventually worked up the courage to shout upwards "Cut that out" and the sound stopped instantaneously, far faster than it would have taken a group of running people to hear and react to my shout. It was more like a soundtrack being turned off. After a while, it started again, not tentatively or stealthily like people trying not to get caught again, but exactly like before. I eventually shouted again and again they instantly stopped - for a while. At this point, I left the room with a vague intent to head downward away from that sound. As soon as I looked down the hall, I saw the other guy Bob staring down the hall in my direction like he'd seen a ghost. I think we could only utter a dozen obscenities before we regained enough speech to confirm he was as scared as me.
I couldn't believe it when he said he was going to try to find out what was up there. He inched the hatch open with a broom handle and you could hear almost a laughing kind of chanting that was vaguely Latinish, which creeped us out further. It was also ice cold, since this was some mid-winter holiday weekend. Bob shouted up something like "Whoever the _______ is up there better stop or we're calling Security right now." I'm certain that we didn't get a response and I think the chanting continued but I can't remember what suddenly spooked Bob to drop the broomhandle and jump to the floor away from the hatch, with me a step ahead.
We did tell the rest of the floor when they returned and got the kind of ribbing you would expect, although a few friends told me that they instantly believed me as they saw my face as I told the story. The next daylight (what a difference daylight makes) a bunch of us went up and found what I now know to be a pentagram with surrounding candles.
I do know that neither Bob nor I had ever heard about mysterious things in the Joyce attic. Neither of us was afraid of the dark. As I first fell asleep that night, I'd forgotten that the dorm was almost empty. Neither of us made a big deal of it afterward, either. We may only have told our hallmates because it was the kind of story that just makes you look like a fearful loser to people who don't know you. That one night was the only time I experienced it in 4 years and no one else we knew ever experienced it. Nobody ever confirmed what we experienced by saying, "Hey, that happened to a couple of other guys 3 years ago.....".
Though I've told friends about it, today (at age 54) was actually the first time I ever thought to Google "Saint Michaels College paranormal" and read that others have experienced almost exactly the same thing. It provided a momentary chill but at least reassured me that Bob and I weren't paranoid wackos at the time.
That was a pretty amazing first hand account! Please if you stumble upon this blog and have strange, unexplainable stories about Saint Michael's Collge, please share them! I as well as fellow Knights would love to hear them! Leave them in the comments section and I will try to check back and post anything I get!
Happy Hauntings!
Labels: Attic, Haunting, Joyce Hall, laughter, Pentagram, running
posted by Michael @ 9:21 AM
1 Comments:
Hi there. My name is Dan and I graduated St. Mike's in 2008. My freshman year ('04-'05), I lived on the 4th floor of Joyce. A number of us that lived on that floor that year experienced inexplicable, possibly paranormal, events. The ones I witnessed firsthand mostly involve the attic. The building creaked and cracked like you would expect an old building to do. However, one night in the Winter (I believe around Feb/March), my friend Zach knocked on our door. My roommate Phil and I answered, and he told us to come outside and see if we heard what he was hearing. We listened for a few seconds, and started to hear a dragging noises and thuds going up and down the hallway. We checked the hatch, as it could have been maintenance, but it was locked (would have LOVED to be there in the 1970's, when the locks weren't on the attic door). For between 15-30mins we could hear and literally follow the sounds up and down our hall. This was likely not an animal, as it was a deliberate pacing over a sustained amount of time.
Other strange things happened on our floor as well. The most mundane one was that Phil and I would come back to the room sometimes to the television being on. At first we thought maybe it was forgetfulness on our part, but then we realized that many times, it'd be on stations the two of us would never watch. Our friends had plenty of stories too. Most of us on the floor were pretty close friends that year. As such, we would exchange stories, since none of us wanted to think we were crazy. One friend reported waking up to being surrounded by an invisible being, but sheets and such were moving on there own. Another reported strange events in the girls bathroom (the end of Joyce facing toward the academic quad). She claimed that while she was in the bathroom, all of the showers turned on simultaneously, only then to be shut off just as sudden as they had turned on. When recounting that to us, it was apparent that she was not lying to us, and legitimately freaked out. It's fun to look back on, since it was the first time other people I was with had also experienced inexplicable events like that.
Just a note: none of us to my knowledge knew of the haunting stories of Joyce Hall until after things started happening and we began looking it up.
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