Happy Halloween: Hauntin’ the Haute

Ah, Rose-Hulman. Located between nowhere and huh?, with only a single major highway nearby. Surrounded by woods so thick you wouldn’t have known of its existence if not for the near constant stream of Taco Bell runs that torrent onto Wabash Avenue. Built over an ancient burial ground for insects and small mammals, it is no wonder that the undead haunt her halls. I do not speak of the students stumbling into class at 8:05 and those that take to moaning about brains during tests, for I have it on good authority that they are not actually zombies. The fact that they stink terribly and wear moldy rags is merely due to poor hygiene and a wayward sense of fashion.

I’ve always suspected that there was something odd about this campus. Every night as I go to sleep, I would hear the ghostly sounds of keyboards clicking away into the night. Every two weeks or so, the student body suddenly become dejected and listless, almost as if something was draining the life right out of them. Perhaps the most dramatic of these strange cycles occur every third full moon, when the older students barricade themselves inside their rooms; busily writing arcane symbols onto crossed paper and rapidly reading large books speaking an incomprehensible secret language. After that strange week passes, many freshmen simply disappear from this world, their names mentioned only in hushed whispers.

Of course, one must not forget to mention the meatballs ghost. It is said that sometime in the late 1900’s, a girl died of lead poisoning while taking her conservation principles and balances test because she had a habit of chewing her mechanical pencil when she was nervous. For years afterwards, her ghostly voice could be heard moaning “meatballs… meatballs… meatballs…” in the halls with high concentrations of chemical engineers. Strangely enough, this ghost has not been seen in recent years. There are rumors floating around that say she has relocated to the Woods as a professor of undeadology because “she was tired of the people laughing instead of scream in fear whenever she moaned about meatballs; it was extremely disrespectful and hurtful to her role as a currently-dead-but-previously-alive-person.”