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Jefferson Hall, pictured above, is one of many dorms on campus that is said to be haunted. (Seth Archer | For The Post)

Students tell stories about ghost hauntings in Jeff Hall

Singing from the attic drew the attention of residential assistants in Jefferson Hall. They investigated, as people neither live in, nor usually visit the attic. What they reportedly saw startled them.

A woman in her 30s or 40s was singing and humming to herself while hovering a foot above a chair. Patrick Quackenbush, author of Haunted Hocking and a ghost hunter, recounted this story he said took place in the early ’70s.

The RAs, he said, “of course screamed and ran out of the room.” Once the RAs came back, Quackenbush said, the singing woman was gone. And that’s not all. Other incidences of a haunted Jeff Hall have been alleged.

“Other folks have reported the sound of what they said somebody dropped a whole bag of marbles upstairs, you can hear it rolling around up there,” Quackenbush said.

Since the early ’70s, the story of the singing woman and other accounts similar to the one he gave have appeared on several sites online, such as forgottenohio.com. It has even been reported on Yahoo, although, that story said the same tale occurred in the mid-1990s.

Despite the differences, some students who have lived in Jefferson have experienced what could be seen as evidence of a ghost.

One of those students is Shannon Tynan, now a senior, who lived in the dorm as a freshman.

Tynan, an education major, said she had heard the marble sound from the attic that Quackenbush mentioned.

“We heard the marbles and it was weird because I lived on the fourth floor, which is the top floor. So, that’s kind of strange,” said Tynan. “There was a slanted roof, so there literally was no one above us.”

Tynan said other supernatural things happened as well, from footsteps to knocking on doors when no one was there. She said, they would normally think it was partiers coming back in from the night.

Even through these occurrences, Tynan said she did not quite believe in the ghost stories that surround Jeff Hall.

“It was just an old dorm that had been there forever, so we knew it was going to be creaky and have issues,” Tynan said. “It was kind of like, ‘oh, that’s a ghost.’ It kind of made (living in Jeff) fun … kind of like ‘oh there’s that old lady again, playing tricks.’ (We) just kind of joked about it.”

Natalie Bowers, a junior studying communications, was another who felt she may have experienced a ghost. Although, her experience was different from the singing woman and the dropped marbles.

Her story took place during a trip to the bathroom while brushing her teeth as a friend was using a sink across the room.

“I just felt like someone … touched me and I got up, really scared,” Bowers said. “My friend looked at me like ‘what is wrong with you?’ and obviously it wasn’t her because I would have heard her run back.”

Other than that, she said she never experienced a ghost. Like Tynan, giving the ghost a name became a joke among her and her friends.

“We just played it off, like ‘oh, it’s just Marrieta or whatever.’ We would just make a joke out of it,” Bowers said.

While Bowers said she was unsure what she felt was actually a ghost, she did say she wouldn’t be bothered if it was.

“It would be cool if it was real,” she said. “Just to know that something else is there …nothing bad happened, so I don’t think they’re necessarily all bad if they’re there.”

ds834910@ohiou.edu

@drussell23

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