Dominion Hall
Dominion Hall, another freshman residence, is no stranger to ghost stories. From eerie shadows to odd behavior, residents of Dominion have often reported an air of distress within the building–almost as if a presence is among them.
Alum Kaitlyn Kinney shared a friend’s story from 2010 of a room on the third floor.
“one of the rooms was like very haunted because like a student had like taken his life. uh and like you would see like shadows of like the sheet hanging. like in a noose shape and like, obviously there's nothing there to cause the shadow. [16]”
Reporting that there was a bad energy, and that objects would move with no cause, the student chose to switch rooms mid-semester.
A group of 2021 Dominion residents share similar odd stories from their time in the building [4]. For example, Sanai shares that her room also had an unexplainable shadow lurking in the room.
“There would be in the upper right corner… I don’t know what it is but that corner would seem darker than the other corners and I don’t know why. That corner was always dark no matter what I did. My roommate always freaked out about it. [4]"
Sanai’s roommate also chose to move out of Dominion before the second semester. She made sure never to mention the dark spot to the next roommate, not wanting to freak them out.
Perhaps the oddest occurrence is that Dominion residents in this year heard a different story of a past resident taking their life in the building. The group shared that within the first two weeks of school, they were told about this, and it shaped the way they viewed Dominion for the rest of their stay. The common sentiment among this group was that, “It almost felt like the air itself in Dominion drove people a little crazy [4]”.
The way these two narratives, a decade apart, mirror each other speaks largely to the way freshmen engage in storytelling. Elizabeth Tucker’s, Haunted halls : ghostlore of American college campuses, shares that freshmen are, “travelers from their homes to a new place where legends and rumors offer an important kind of learning” [20]. Given that college freshmen are away from home for the first time, they are attuned to the rumors around them and share their paranormal experiences in large circles. Furthermore, the 2021 Dominion residents were all living within the Residential Learning Community (RLC) for creative expression. With a natural gift for storytelling, it can be seen how such odd occurrences could be spread across their community.
While it is likely that the described deaths did not occur in Dominion, this still doesn’t explain the strange shadows–the sinister air. How do residents a decade apart report such similar uncanny experiences?