From: "Thomas, Sara" (Sara.Thomas@qwest.com)
To: "'obiwan@ghosts.org'"
Subject: Haunted Athens
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:14:18 -0400
After reading the stories about strange happenings at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, I decided to contribute some of my own experiences while a student for four years at OU.
My freshman year I was bombarded with the typical dorm ghost stories (some of which I later believed!) and a number of stories of the surrounding areas. My freshman year I lived on Old South Green, two buildings down from Crawford where the unfortunate student had plummeted to her death one year before (I lived in Brown Hall, for anyone who knows the area). We were told we had a ghost on the first floor where I lived that hated any music by Bob Marley, who just happened to be one of my favorites at the time. We all thought it was pretty funny and would try to scare eachother by putting in a Marley CD after telling the story to a visitor, then having someone sneak over and unplug the stereo right after it began to play. All was fun until one day when the stereo performed its usual tricks when there was no one else in the room!! Upon checking, the cord was unplugged from the wall. Now I was the only one there, and I know it was plugged in when I pushed play and not plugged in two seconds later!
Also on that floor, alarm clocks would go off at odd times of the day in many rooms at once. We would turn off our own clocks which were blaring the only radio station in town (terrible station, by the way) only to hear the same music coming from behind closed doors up and down the hall. Now we all checked, and all of our alarms were not set for 3:00 in the afternoon or 10:00 at night, but for sometime in the morning. We attributed this to an electrical glitch, but that explanation doesn't quite explain what happened.
I had other experiences throughout my 4 years in Athens, most of which occurred in off-campus housing (most student rentals in Athens are in very old, somewhat rundown houses that have been around since the whole area was nothing but mining towns.) I'll save those for another time. Anyone else who has heard about haunted Athens?
Sara Thomas
If you have an account of a famous haunting you'd like to share, or more information to add to a haunting already listed, please feel free to email me.
This page (http://www.ghosts.org/moreohio.html) last updated April 14, 2005.