I don’t know how else to begin this blog post besides simply saying what it is about, so here it goes: I held a séance in Warner Center.
Don’t worry, you read that right. First allow me to provide some context:
Last year, in October, I wrote an article for the Oberlin Review about campus ghost stories and folklore. As you might be able to tell from my bio and previous blog posts, I’ve always been a fan of the spooky and macabre, so this article wasn’t new territory for me. What especially had interested me though was the wealth of information available on Oberlin ghost stories. My friend Camille, whom I had interviewed for the article, was particularly knowledgeable. I credit her with my introduction to Oberlin’s hidden stories.
And, for some reason, all these ghost stories really stuck with me. There were so many tales that didn’t make it into the final piece that I still wanted to tell. So, skip forward a bit to this semester, I am taking a class called Literary Journalism (which I highly recommend). For this class, everyone has to pick one topic that they thoroughly research throughout the semester and transform into a creative journalism piece. Appropriately, I was still feeling so haunted by last year's ghost stories that I decided to continue pursuing them.
When I began pouring over old Oberlin Review articles about these ghosts, what interested me the most was not the one-off tales but the consistent threads of stories that pointed to particular buildings as the culprits of hauntings: Tank Hall, Johnson House, Shurtleff Cottage, and Warner Center. Warner was especially interesting to me because it was a building I had spent quite a bit of time in over my college career for swing dancing practice. Warner is an old building, it creaks and groans. Bats inhabit the dark corners. In 1901, when construction finished, Warner was used as a men’s gymnasium. Now, it stands as the college’s dance and theater building.
In a 1996 Oberlin Review article, the then technical coordinator and lecturer of theater and dance, Jean Davidson, stated that it was difficult to find people to work in the building at night because of the stories. The article also included mention of a student who died in Warner in the early 1990s, though I could find no actual source for this claim. Most intriguing however is the slew of spooky encounters recounted in the October 26th, 1990, edition of the Review.
Multiple accounts recalled the apparition of a red-haired woman wandering the building at inaccessible hours. During the summer of 1985, a teaching assistant for the summer theater program heard the phone ringing late one night. At first, she decided to ignore it. Soon, however, a red-haired woman appeared before her in the empty lobby and told the assistant to answer the phone. The assistant rejected the idea but the woman insisted. When the assistant finally answered the phone, the caller told her about a family emergency. And the red-haired woman was gone. Later, in 1987, two electricians were similarly stunned to spot a red-haired woman roaming the building at a time when they were the only ones with keys to enter. Other interviews in this article corroborated sightings of the redhead.
I couldn’t tell you what prompted me to pick this specific legend to pursue. Maybe it was the consistency of the red-haired woman. Maybe it was my familiarity with the building. What I can tell you is that on Wednesday, November 12th, under a night-blue sky, I entered Warner Center at 10 pm to conduct a séance. Three of my friends: Camille of course, Natalie, and Charlotte, joined me in the basement, in Studio Four, with battery-powered candles and a plastic ouija board.
We seated ourselves at an unsteady table, turning off all the lights but one. Lit by the glow of flickering LED candles, we all placed our hands on the heart-shaped planchette on the board. My phone was recording audio of our session. As we began the session, the churning of the radiator dissipated. I asked the walls of the studio, “Are there any spirits here with us tonight?”
At first, nothing happened. It took a while for the planchette to start moving. When it did finally approximate answers on the board, they were erratic and unclear. Camille suggested that the spirit might be uncomfortable with being recorded. So I asked whatever was moving the planchette if it would be more comfortable if I turned off the recording. The planchetted hovered over “YES.”
The movies don’t tell you how slow a séance is. The spirit’s responses to each of my questions were often interspersed with long pauses and only slight movement on the board. We seemed to be speaking with the spirit of an Oberlin student.
I asked, “What did you study here?”
“DRAMA,” the spirit spelled out.
“How long have you been here?”
“45” (years or since 1945, I wonder).
“Are you a redhead?”
“NO.” This was extremely disappointing to me. But it appeared that we were getting somewhere. The ghost’s answer to my next question was what stuck with me the most from this note.
“Can you describe where you are right now?” I gently asked. And the planchette hovered over the letters ‘S,’ ‘T,’ ‘D,’ and the number ‘4.’ Natalie looked up at me, her eyes wide.
“STD 4 — Studio Four,” she whispered. The room we were sitting in.
After that, the ghost’s replies began to fizzle out and steadily grew less and less comprehensible again. At 10:45, fifteen minutes before the building closed for the night, a student worker entered the room to make sure it was clear for locking up. I can’t imagine how we looked to her, a little coven in the dark, lit only by weak light, and hunched over a ouija board. A comically spooky group. We laughed to clear the air, embarrassed by the occultish-ness of it all.
Back in my dorm, I feverishly recounted the experience in my notebook. I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any details, everything was still fresh and burning my mind. Though ouija boards are typically explained by the ideometer effect — subconscious, involuntary movements that push the planchette across the board — “STD 4” seemed like an awfully strange coincidence as a result of this effect, being so close to the name of the room we had been in. While I wouldn’t say that I felt “shook” or “frightened” by the experience, it lingered in my mind long after. There wasn’t any real danger, just a brief glimpse of something that may lie beyond the veil.
11 pm, as we walked back to our dorm in the dark of night, Natalie turned to me. She said, at that moment, as the board had spelled out the room name, she had felt something brush against her back.
