Halloween is literally just a couple of days away, so it's time to get the spooks in while we still can. Today, I'm going to talk about my other major brush with the unexplainable.
It was the fall of 1997. Let's set the stage: Bill Clinton had just started his 2nd term in office. The first Harry Potter book was published in the UK. The birth of Dolly the cloned sheep was announced. The Spice Girls, Third Eye Blind, and Chumbawamba were all playing on the radio. And I was starting my sophomore year of college at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Last spring, my roommate had informed me that he was moving out to live in his fraternity's off-campus housing. Normally this would mean that I'd get a new roommate assigned at random, but I got in line extra-early one day and put in my request for a single occupancy room. By dint of me being something like third in line that morning - and convincing my parents that paying the extra room rate "would help me study better," my lily-white privileged ass managed to get that room all to myself for the entire year.
Only it wasn't.
Sure, my actual living, breathing roommate might have left, but there was still something else in the room. Suddenly a living space that I had been completely at ease in for an entire academic year felt alien and unwelcoming. It wasn't the sudden solitude - during freshman year, my roommate was hardly ever home because he was rushing his fraternity - but nevertheless I couldn't shake the feeling that someone, or something, was watching me.
Now, some of this can be explained - to a point. I went through an absolutely abysmal break-up of my first really serious relationship that semester, and my GPA tells that tale better than I ever could. I also spent a lot of time just holed up in my room on the internet as well, and this was back before New Paltz had high-speed internet; I was dialing off-campus on an old 486 I had taken to college with me that year, so while I might have been wallowing in my own self-pity online I was cut off from the outside world as well. Plus, I wouldn't put it past that old residence hall I was living in to have any number of construction issues - unshielded wiring could have led to high levels of electromagnetic fields, which has been known to mess with people's heads, and sounds under 18 Hz or so can also lead to odd perception issues as well, so I don't know if what I was feeling was imaginary, or was being caused by something valid - i.e. non-supernatural.
In other words, my mental and emotional states were, obviously, not ideal, and that makes me an unreliable narrator for this next part.
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So one evening in the middle of the semester, my ex-girlfriend comes over with her own homemade Ouija board. Yeah, I know, there are two things wrong about that sentence already, but I was a dumb-ass 18-year-old kid that was still trying to be friends with the woman who broke up with me so she could start dating the guy across the hall. Like, literally across the hall. I could see his door when mine was open. Also, don't get me started on how Ouija boards are bullshit. I know all about how that little planchette goes scooting around the board thanks to the ideomotor response. I was young and I was hoping that if I spent enough time with this woman she might touch my pee-pee again. Men are stupid.
Naturally we begin playing with the Ouija board, asking it stupid questions and not getting much of a response at first. Finally the thing started giving us a little more to work with, though its answers were terse and sometimes a little hostile, especially when we started getting answers like "you are not welcome here." Finally we both started feeling really odd, like hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck odd, and the temperature in the room dropped precipitously. Naturally this freaked us right the fuck out and we both decided it was time to leave the room.
Now you can call bullshit on this as much as you want, but I've got a couple of things going for me here. First, those residence halls were notoriously hot. The heaters came online on October 1st and didn't get shut off again until March 31st, no matter how warm or cold it actually was outside. Many of us had to sleep with our windows open in the middle of winter because otherwise we would wake up in pools of our own sweat every morning. This means that to have the temperature drop like that, with the windows closed, was nigh impossible.
Understandably freaked out, my ex and I went across the hall to (you guessed it) her current boyfriend's room. I had befriended Joe, his roommate - commiserating over how much we despised the guy of course, and he came over to see what was up. He walked up to the door of my room - which I had left wide-open in our haste to leave - and put his hand up in the doorway, telling us how he could feel the difference in air temperature. I did the same, and I shit you not but there was a barrier of cold air in the doorway like one of those thick black-out curtains had been hanging there.
This of course spooked us all out, so we went back to Joe's room and played Dungeons & Dragons for a few hours. Finally I decided to bite the bullet, going back over to my room. The feeling of cold had dissipated, but there was still a lingering malaise left over in the room that never really went away.
Long story short, I ended up switching residence halls my junior year and actually ended up moving in with Joe. Never forgot my experiences from that first dorm, though, and on spooky nights I would go back to visit my old building, often with friends in tow that I had told the story to - and usually after hitting the bars pretty heavily. Either my friends were humoring me or they were caught up in the story, but they always said they felt weird when I walked them by the door to my old room in the hallway.
The residence hall is still there of course, and countless college kids have lived in it over the last nearly 20 years. However, if you're ever in New Paltz, New York, go take a stroll on the second floor of LeFevre Hall. Look for Room 214B if you have a moment. Or don't. Might be safer that way.
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