Maia Honl – Opinion Columnist

Do you believe ghosts are real? It might seem like a stupid question, but it’s one that people use as an icebreaker. With this question, you’re able to tell many things about a person. By saying yes you show that you are open to the unknown, but if you say that you don’t then you appear to follow fact and truth over anything else. I’ve always believed that ghosts are real, and holy crap did they scare me. I grew up watching The Dead Files, reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and having my mom tell me her own experiences with ghosts and spirits. I refuse to ever touch an Ouija board, and will never do one of those ghosts summoning “games” that you find online. I had a stone-solid belief in the paranormal and supernatural, I never had a ghost experience. That is, I never had a ghost experience until I went to the bathroom during my work-study last week.
Confused? I was too when it happened. It was 8:30 in the morning, for crying out loud. I was practically sleepwalking to my shift that day. I work at the STEAMery, and was standing around waiting for people to show up. Nothing was happening, so I took a moment to step away and go to the restroom that’s right next to the coffee creamers and stirrers. Nobody else is in the bathroom at the time, which isn’t unusual. I do my business, leave my stall and wash my hands for twenty seconds.
Then out of nowhere,
B O O M. Two of the stall doors slam shut against their frames before bouncing off and going still within three seconds. Again, no one was in the bathroom to have closed those doors. Nobody had come in, no wind blew through, nothing could have made those doors close as hard as they did. I considered for a split second that maybe the door attached to the stall I came from had caused them to slam, but my door wasn’t swinging anymore by the time I started to wash my hands. Soon, my startled brain started to piece together that A.) Nobody caused those doors to move, neither did any wind. That led to B.) The doors moved on their own, probably because of a ghost. I decided to skip waiting for the paper towel dispenser and wiped my hands off on my jeans while totally not sprint-walking to the door.
I had heard that Gustavus has ghost stories. Aside from the story of the cow in Old Main that we all know about from orientation, there are rumored to be many ghosts that haunt the campus. There’s the old woman who is seen in the Rundstrom chapel, flowing from pew to pew. The Dive and new CIE has a wandering swimmer that is dripping wet and confused. It’s believed that he is still looking for the locker rooms that haven’t been there for decades. There is the spirit of a Native American who rides horseback through the library, which isn’t terribly hard to believe considering that Gustavus is built on the land of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the People of the Seven Council Fires.
But out of all of these stories, I have never heard of Nobel being haunted. Maybe there is a spirit that came from the older music building that moved into Nobel after the renovations were complete. Maybe the spirit is from Nobel but is only recently making itself known due to being disrupted by the renovations. I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer, but I do know that I will probably start saying “I’ll be right out, sorry” whenever I go into that bathroom because it’d feel rude not to do so when you know you’re entering, uninvited, into someone else’s space.