While we are in the spirit of Halloween, Fran’s recent blog, “The Hotel Bel-Air’s Permanent Guest”, reminds me of the permanent undergrads at Mount Holyoke College. Established in 1837, Mount Holyoke is an old campus with beautiful dorms. However, at the right time of night, with the right urban legend, Mount Holyoke can spook any prospective student into second guessing enrollment in the fall. Mount Holyoke’s dorm, Wilder Hall, is perhaps most notorious for its hauntings — it was even featured on the Travel Channel‘s “Haunted Campuses.” As the legend goes, a student hung herself in her room located on the top floor of the dorm. The next student living in the same room apparently drove herself mad and left campus without notifying anyone. Rumors spread that the room was haunted, and so it was boarded up and closed off to the rest of the world, but, of course, the stories kept growing around it. For some students, the “Ghost Room” became the reason to stay in Wilder Hall, or to stay completely away from it. Upon hearing about the room during my first year in college, my friends and I paid a visit to the room at night to see if it was really locked up, and it was. Just jiggling the doorknob was enough to get ourselves so worked up that we immediately fled the dorm screaming. During my years at Mount Holyoke, I often caught wind of urban legends involved with that one particular room. During class, a friend of mine, who at the time was living in Wilder Hall on the same floor as the haunted room, shared a strange event that took place the night before. She told me she was awakened in the middle of the night with a horrible feeling she couldn’t describe. She was so terrified she ran out of her room and was completely stunned to see what was out there. Every student on the entire floor was standing in the hallway, also frightened out of their rooms! I never witnessed my friend’s experience personally, but it was the talk of the campus the entire day. But there was one incident that we all witnessed together as a campus. During my third year, I believe in the spring, there was a random gust of wind that took up in the middle of the green and knocked one tree down. The tree fell on Wilder Hall and damaged only one room: the ghost room! You can imagine the pandemonium this caused — girls shrieking “The ghost is free.” Perhaps it did finally set the ghost free because I never heard any strange stories again. -Courtney Centeno, account executive