There is a building adjacent to Confer/Vickner. It is a good sized building: several stories high, two-thousand square feet, by my estimations. It is stone, probably made during the Stone Age. It has an odd attribute of going unnoticed. Yet many of us, like me, have had a class or two there in the past. The building, though, is locked and has sheets of paper that say it is closed on every entrance door. Thus, I felt that it was my duty to conduct a thorough investigation as to the current and future status of this building.

Like any good investigator, I did a brief informational survey. They call it SSC, which stands for Anderson Social Science Center. So what happened to SSC? After the Economics, Communication Studies, History, Sociology and Psychology departments all moved to the new Beck Academic Hall, and many of these were the previous occupants of SSC, the building is now defunct. They say there are plans to move the education and nursing programs there in the future, after renovation. But I am skeptical. So here was where my investigation began.

As any intelligent investigator would do, I speculated from the wheelie-chair in front of my computer. My first reflections brought me to examine the possibility of the building not being so empty after all. On a hunch that there is a Nothing Department, I Googled a few things and found there to be a Department of Nothing movie that, on IMDB, got 9.5 out of 10 stars. It is about a young boy and his granny’s stories. There is nothing that quite matches, I thought, the wisdom of a granny’s stories. They are so pure and candid. I began to think of my own granny’s stories. I was heart-warmed. But then I realized I was off task. Could it be, I thought next, that SSC is now home to the Poltergeist Studies Department? This time I went to the Gustavus home page. I typed it in. Response: your search did not match any results. From these thorough investigations, I concluded that SSC is probably unused by any Gustavus department.

Next, I decided to visit the location of the building first-hand and do a little on-scene investigation. I knew that SSC had to be more than a place where drunken couples coming back from the Dive would break into and grope each other. As I peered inside the windows, I couldn’t really see very well, since it was dark (maybe not the best time to perform an investigation). However, on the windowsill I saw several fruit flies buzzing around. I live in College View, and fruit flies proliferate in the time it takes to go to the bathroom there. The scientific definition of the fruit fly is a fly that likes fruit. This was all very interesting.

Making my way away from SSC, I saw a patch of thick dark brown hair. But I breezed it away. My mind took me to other options, always seeking new possibilities, like any good investigator. It is obvious that an abandoned building, i.e. SSC, could possibly attract squatters. Squatters, from my understanding, are people that like to squat, particularly in abandoned buildings. Quickly, back in my swivel chair, I found on the Internet that according to author Robert Neuwirth, about one out of every six people on the planet are squatters and, consequently, like to squat. If the student body at Gustavus is 2,448, then logic tells me that 408 students are squatting in SSC.

But then I thought of the patch of hair, and I thought of the fruit flies, I thought of squatting and it was as though I had an epiphany. Bigfoot! Bigfoot is squatting in SSC. Monkeys like fruit, apes are related to monkeys, Bigfoot is related to apes, which explains the presence of the fruit fly.

And so, like a great investigator, I put a stamp on the investigation. People should be curious about the big, empty building that stands next to Con/Vic, and I am here to tell you: Bigfoot is squatting there.