For one memorable year of what I call a career, I taught at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. One in a series of near misses, this came close to becoming a full-time job. Apart from a couple of rather humorless colleagues, the department was welcoming and an enjoyable place to be. I even got to know the dean, now elsewhere, and planned on working on a project with him. It was a memorable year in many respects. One was its inherent strangeness. I was living away from home while teaching there, and saw some odd things on my drives through the Wisconsin countryside. It also happened to be at Oshkosh that I first discovered H. P. Lovecraft, so the weirdness was, in a word, enhanced.
Students like to tell ghost stories. A recent article by Jocelyne LeBlanc on Mysterious Universe caught my eye because it tells of students in Oshkosh that live in a haunted dorm. These kinds of stories are ubiquitous and Oshkosh is in no way singular here. Students, whose brains haven’t yet ossified, are often open to new experiences. Most of them, however, don’t possess the research skills to get behind the origins of some such tales. Sometimes there’s an explanation. Other times there’s not. At Grove City College, when I was there, students told of a haunted playing field. It was the site, it was said, of a former gymnasium. What made it haunted was the death of a basketball player who’d smashed through a glass gymnasium door during a game and bled out before help could arrive. It sounds improbable and I never had time to research it.
We all, I suspect, have a longing for the supernatural. We want to believe that there’s more to this world than physics and earning money. And strange things do happen. I never saw any ghosts in Oshkosh, but the things I did see helped to make up for that particular lack. Edinburgh, where I studied for my doctorate, is widely rumored to be among the most haunted cities in the world. Although I saw no ghosts there, people flock to the ghost tours. In fact, one stopped right below our first apartment’s window every night during the tourist season. By the time we moved out we had every word memorized. The haunted dorm story is a revered tradition. Thinking about it makes me wish I could afford to be a student again.
