As the seasons change and TLU looks forward to the first hints of fall in the air, campus remains sunny and bright . . . But in spite of the lingering warmth outdoors, you might feel a little shiver run up your spine when you walk into Trinity residence hall or Wupperman Little Theatre. That’s because these two campus locales are said to be haunted.
In Trinity, there is a small room in a corner—an odd size because of where it’s situated. “So we don’t usually house students in there,” explains Dr. Steven Vrooman, TLU vice president for Academic & Student Affairs and professor of communications. “But students long have said it was closed because a young woman killed herself in there when she was mistreated by a young man.”
Vrooman is quick to debunk that bit of lore. “That never happened, of course, and it felt like an urban legend to explain the mystery of the locked room. But students who live in the room next to it used to also say that if you put a poster on the wall, if it had a male in it, when you’d come back to the room, it would have fallen on the floor.”
So perhaps the Trinity story is more folklore than fact. However, there is another spot on campus that is far spookier. Legend has it that Wupperman Little Theatre, housed inside the Schuech Fine Arts building, is the most haunted place on campus, inhabited now and again by two distinct spirits: the grumpy man in the hat, who lurks up the old winding staircase and frequents the sound booth above the theatre; and the little girl, who playfully bounces her ball along the hallways and sometimes gets upset if you take her seat—in which case, you will feel a light kicking at your back, urging you to move.
“I have never encountered either. But one of my former students says she saw the man in the booth, and he was angry,” says Vrooman.
When it comes to paranormal happenings on the university campus, Vrooman knows what he’s talking about. He’s actually taught a class called “Documenting Belief: Ghosts, Aliens, and Monsters,” during which he and his students did some actual ghost hunting, using EMF detectors, laser temperature guns, motion detectors, and photography, and explored the concepts of belief, disbelief, and what constitutes “proof.” Energy of some kind has been detected, and theories abound.
Vrooman himself will never forget one particularly unnerving experience he had in Wupperman. “I was there at night setting up a horror film festival I used to run, and felt suddenly a bit anxious and unnerved,” he recalls. “I am a skeptic, so I never really had that feeling in there before. Walking down the spiral stairs from the light booth I began singing a song to myself under my breath. That’s not a thing I usually do, and this song was not something I usually think of. The feeling and song passed, and I didn’t really think of the moment much.”
End of story, right? Not quite.
“Years later a professor shared an email he’d received from an alumna who graduated in the 1980s. Her sorority spent the night on the Wupperman stage, which I can’t imagine would be allowed now. She reported waking with a start, feeling watched. And she began to sing a song to herself softly… It was THE SAME SONG.”
Vrooman was in shock upon receiving that message—and swears he’ll never reveal the name of the song, so that he can wait and see if a third person has the same experience one day. “I still don’t know exactly what to think about all of that, but I always remember it as Halloween approaches.”
