UND Haunting
This happened to meback 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" inWilkerson Hall at the University of North Dakota. Wilkersonserves as the dining hall for 5 dorms that contain about 1500students, so there is a lot of traffic through there. The thingabout Wilkerson was the tunnels that connected each dorm to thecafeteria (North Dakota is *cold* in the winter).
Well, jobs like this are pretty OK, since they are on campus andyou can walk back to your dorm room without putting a coat on (Ilived in West Hall, only a short walk through the tunnel from thedesk). The one drawback to all of this was that once a month youhad 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 justifystaying up very late and studying. I got a few phone calls and afew 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 WestHall tunnel. Two guys came running out of the tunnel, shoutingfor me to call the cops. When I asked them why, they told me thatthey had just seen a girl with no legs *floating* up the tunnel.
I must have looked at them funny (like they were on drugs orsomething) when they said that because one of them said "Noman, come with us. We'll show you." Well, I wasn't worriedabout them, because I knew them from West Hall. So, I locked thewindow and the three of us walked out into the tunnel.
When we first entered the tunnel, I got a creepy feeling that Icouldn't shake. I kept thinking "These guys are just tryingto scare you", but it did not help. As we walked down thetunnel towards an intersection with the West Hall tunnel, I feltthe hair on my arm stand up. I looked at my companions and theyboth 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 anightshirt. She did not appear to have any legs, and was semi-transparent.We watched her for what seemed like a whole minute, but she didnot 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 aboutwhat had happened. We all agreed we had seen it, but had no ideawhat 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 weeklater, but not because of the ghost.
About a year later, I was going through some old studentnewspapers looking for information on a campus student group whenI came across an article about a girl who had frozen to death oncampus in December of 1962. It seems that before the tunnels werebuilt(they weren't dug, but built and then dirt was built up onthem) it was quite common for girls from West Hall(it was afemale dorm then) to run from the back door over to Wilkerson.
We've all heard stories about people who go out in those -70whiteout conditions and freeze to death in no time after gettingdisoriented. According to the newspaper account, it had happenedto this girl. She had died only 60 feet from the dorm, very nearthe area where my companions and I had seen the ghost disappear.The story did not say what time she died, but a police reportthat I dug up later (good records at the Grand Forks PD) statedthat the last person who saw her alive was her RA and that was atabout 2:00am.
I took the newspaper article to the Director of Housing at UND (Iwas 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 thisstory, and in almost all of the cases, the people were HousingOffice employees. He said that there really wasn't anything hecould do about it, so he had never reported it any higher in theUniversity.
Well, the story spread around a bit, and I did hear about someguys who went down there with a Ouija board and got reallyfreaked out, but that is another story.