When I went to OSU I lived in Canfield Hall. It really is a pretty sort of gothic building from the outside, and when I lived there in '98 it was one of the oldest buildings with no plans for remodeling. We lived at the end of the hall on the top floor, and though our room was unusually dark and creepy, I didn't mind it at first. There was a large mirror across from my bed so if you roll over in the middle of the night awake, you see your face staring back, as well as strange laundry-pile shadows. All of our friends said the mirror was creepy and some people wouldn't even look at it. I hung a sheet over my bed canopy-style and I was fine. As the school year progressed things started happening in the room that were a little odd. My roomate's bible kept being hidden somewhere in the room and she would blame me for it - of course I didn't do it!
There was a large pipe that used to be for steam heat that went along the heads of our beds and at night there would be scratching inside of it - we thought it was mice and tolerated it for maybe two hours before I ran down and got the RA, and of course as soon as she stepped in the room it stopped. This continued for months, and everytime she'd come it would stop. Then eventually it just stopped on its own. Well to me all of this wasn't scary, just the weirdness of an old dormitory. But one night my roomate was out of town and I was up alone in the room. I was playing on the computer until way late and as I went into the hallway I could tell that all the other girls were asleep because it was dark under their doors. I left my door open and when I returned from the bathroom I prepared for bed - closing the big heavy curtains and turning the light off. The room was so small it was the sort of smothering darkness and the curtains dampened the sound so I could tell the distance of all the noises from my bed - the clock ticking, the heater's rumbling. I remember all of this so well, I was almost falling asleep - the type of tired where you are aware of everything, but your body is absolutely still - when I heard the distinct and unmistakable sound of 3 loud, shuffled footsteps on the carpet stopping at my bed near my face! I had the canopy, so I couldn't see on the other side (and I'm almost thankful for this). I laid paralyzed and burning all over because I was so panicked for nearly ten minutes waiting for whatever/whomever to come when I finally burst through the canopy and turned the lights on. There was nothing there. The carpet was entirely free of even a pair of socks. But the sound was unmistakeable; I can still hear it when I remember this story. I explained it to myself that it was a plastic bag shifting in my closet. Of course in the morning when I checked there was nothing in the closet that could have fallen or was made of plastic. I wrote it off to my imagination or some blood pumping in one ear.
A couple of months later we had some friends come visit from out of town, and one girl needed to change her clothes in my room for privacy. I left her in the room alone but it took only two minutes before she came out with her face pale and she wouldn't look anyone in the eye. She just said "I can't go in that room, it's evil." I was offended, assuming she was talking about how messy it was. About fifteen minutes later another girl went into the bathroom and came out without going. She told us, "I saw a ghost in the bathroom!" She couldn't describe anything about it, only that it was a shadow that passed behind her as she looked in the mirror. Both girls were entirely freaked out about our hall, and both wouldn't even set foot in my room because of its "presence." I wrote this off as crazy wiccan-punkgirl stuff and/or snobbery at my messy room. But definitely there was something sinister about that room - even our phone number spelled out an upside down cross and we would get crazy prank phone calls at all hours of the day.
K., a former president of the OSU chapter of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority, has this to say about her experiences there:
"What I can say is that many unexplainable things happened in the house while I lived there, and that these things were as mischievous as they were mysterious. Personal items would be 'stolen' from locked rooms and then found in highly unusual places, like way up on shelves buried beneath hats and gloves or very neatly stacked underneath beds. On one occasion, a small Halloween candle was found to be lit spontaneously in a locked bedroom after both roommates returned from class. A glass fixture fell suddenly on a sorority member in the basement chapter room (of course, maybe our
house was just literally falling apart in that instance!).
"While I never personally saw an apparition, there were a few instances in which a ghostly form seemed to have been witnessed in the house. Two women, including the house mother (a practical person who only gingerly admitted to this experience), experienced someone sitting down on the edge of their beds and felt and saw the beds sink beneath the weight of this unseen person. One
woman saw the door of her bedroom open late at night and heard footsteps walk across the room and up the ladder to the top bunk. She assumed it was her roommate until the roommate, my closest college friend, came home an hour later and saw that there was obviously no one in the top bunk. I experienced a sudden uneasy feeling once on the third floor landing when I ran down the stairs to answer the front door. It is hard to explain, but it was a feeling like I had been doing that exact thing over and over and over and over, much stronger than a deja vu experience, yet I had not even moved into the house yet. It was actually kind of creepy living there, and I never had a good night's sleep in that house."
K. goes on to relate another possible encounter with the "other side" at the sorority house: "The only story related to the apparition of a woman in the ADPi house involved a sorority sister named N. who actually did pass away tragically in a car accident in early 1994. Two residents of the house say that they saw N. come around the corner of the third floor hallway and disappear." The witnesses in this case were still grieving, K. reminds us, but they did both see the same thing.
Visit the sorority's official website here and take a virtual tour of the house, which is located at 94 East 15th Avenue. (Note: In 2004 the house was sold to the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, which now occupies it. Members of this fraternity have apparently seen plenty of weird things there, if e-mails I've received are any indication.)
