Introduction

"Of campus beautiful by day and NIGHT ..."

It's true, the University of Oklahoma has a beautiful campus at all hours. But at night, corners of campus seem to come to life, their dark — and sometimes tragic — histories being revived for unsuspecting students. The actors in these ghoulish productions: ghosts, those who passed into the afterlife but who refuse to let their stories die with them.

In this storybook, we take you back to the beginnings of each ghost story. Accounts from students, journal entries from eyewitnesses and newspaper clippings tell the stories of tragedies on campus as they unfolded, at the exact time and place where each haunting starts. These stories will take you from the stacks in the Bizzell Memorial Library, where a student fell through the glass floors of the stacks, to Holmberg Hall, where a professor unhappy with building renovations slams doors and plays a phantom organ. In Cate Center, laughter from a little boy whose head was severed in a dumbwaiter still fills the hallways. And of course, there's Ellison Hall, where a boy who was injured riding a skateboard can still be heard rolling through the hallways. Each of our storytellers happened to be in the right place at the right time — or maybe the wrong place at the wrong time — to witness the beginnings of each of these stories.

Keep reading, if you dare, but know this: after learning of OU's haunted halls, students have reported many more hauntings. You may want to avoid wandering the stacks late at night, and sometimes it's better to walk through Cate with headphones in to drown out the giggles of the long-gone little boy. Still, it's only a matter of time until OU's next ghost chooses a building to make her permanent home, so you can't avoid these stories for too long.

Maybe it's better to be oblivious, but if your curiosity can't be helped, read on.