It was a day like any other. Mary, a secretary for an army recruiter, is arriving to work early. Mary’s office is in the Casa Blanca building near Sarkeys. Mary goes to log into her computer so she can get an early start to her day. Lately the building has been experiencing some odd electrical problems. Mary’s boss, Jeff, walks into the building. He tells Mary they have quite a few recruits coming in today and she needs to hand out uniforms to the new recruits. Mary tells Jeff, “I will go ahead and hang the uniforms up in the basement.” Mary heads downstairs to hang up the clothes, she notices some things are out of place but just thinks “Oh, Jeff must be rearranging” and goes back upstairs to finish up her office work.
Later that day the recruits start to show up. Jeff gets the recruits to start filling paperwork out and then sends them to Mary to give them further instructions. Mary tells them that she needs their paperwork so she can enter it into the computer and then instructs them they need to go try on their uniforms in the basement. Tim, one of the new recruits, gets down there first and immediately realizes that it is at least ten degrees cooler down there. He assumes it is only because he is in a basement.
He starts to change into his uniform and then Jeff yells for him to come back upstairs because Mary gave him the wrong uniform. Suddenly all the lights shut off and girly giggles start to emerge from out of nowhere. Tim thinks it must be the secretary since she is the only woman in the building. Then he notices it sounds like a whole sorority giggling at him. He thinks to himself, “Is this some kind of initiation trick?” He quickly runs back upstairs in the dark to see what's going on.
Mary is at the electrical box trying to figure out why the lights are off but cannot seem to figure it out.
Tim asks Jeff, “What other girls are here? I heard a lot of giggling down there.” Jeff has flashbacks to last week when a recruit said the same thing.
Jeff tells Tim, "I think that this place might be haunted by the sorority girls who used to live there many years ago." Tim laughs at Jeff thinking he must be joking but Jeff has a very serious look on his face. The lights begin to flicker back on, and Mary comes to join the guys.
She apologizes to Tim and the other recruits, telling them that this always happens when the boys go down there to pick up their uniforms. Tim is now a little freaked out, mostly because he doesn’t want dead sorority girls watching him change. He has no choice but to go back down there and get his other clothes, but once he gets down there, his clothes are gone, and the giggling comes back. He decides he doesn’t care enough about his clothes and sprints upstairs and leaves the building.
Mary and Jeff sit in disbelief that some sorority ghost giggles scared off an army recruit. Jeff tells Mary to cancel the rest of the appointment's that day until they can figure out how to fix this problem. He doesn’t want any more of his guys being scared off. The sorority ghosts must have heard Mary cancelling the appointments because all the power goes off this time. Jeff decides this is the last straw and tells Mary, “We need to find a new office space.” They lock up the powerless building. Mary turns around to take one last look at the building and through the windows she notices the lights are back on.
Casa Blanca at The University of Oklahoma
Author's Note: I got my idea for this story by reading the book, “Campus Ghosts of Norman, Oklahoma." In this book, it tells many different ghost stories on the OU campus. This particular story was called “Casa Blanca." In this story, Jeff Provine tells us the history of this particular building. I have always wondered what this building was so that is why I chose this story. Casa Blanca started out as the Alpha Chi Omega sorority house until they were able to build the house they are now in. After it was a sorority house it became a boarding house and then a military recruiting office. It is now home to the Chickasaw Nation Student Services building. It is said that when it was a military recruiting building, giggling girls could be heard when the men would go change into their uniforms in the basement. The power would also go off quite frequently when the boys would change too fast. The house had been checked many times by an electrician but no problems were ever found. I decided to do this story because my last story I wrote was pretty scary and this one is more casual. It is still interesting to me because I now know what the history of this building is.
Bibliography:
Campus Ghosts of Norman Oklahoma, "Casa Blanca." Jeff Provine (2013)