An Invisible Man Sleeping in Your Bed

Every Halloween, we renew our interest, fear or fascination with the paranormal. When we think about supernatural beings on campus, two names come to mind: Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Tennyson Wellman and Campus Safety Officer Shamus Denniston. The latter led a ghost walk last week and frequently ghost hunts on campus; Wellman plans to host two sessions of ghost storytelling on Mischief Night and Halloween night this week. Given Wellman’s extensive knowledge of the supernatural (he will be teaching his favorite class, “Supernatural in American Pop Culture” in the spring), I sat down with him in hopes of breaking down this idea of ghosts, why we fear them and how our belief in them may be tied to historical, cultural and religious influences.

In a survey produced by The College Voice, with questions suggested by Wellman, 57.9% of students said that they had heard of (not experienced) events of a supernatural nature at Conn.

However, Wellman said, “There are some campuses that are allegedly very haunted; this campus is not one of them.”

Although many stories do exist on campus, Wellman said that the biggest problem with supernatural stories is tracking down the firsthand source that saw the phenomenon. The only verifiable story on campus is the tale of a girl who appeared in Harris a few years ago. The source of the story has been tracked down, and the woman could even sketch a photo of what she saw. However, her account demonstrates how the story has become distorted over time.

“The story that she [told] was in some ways substantially different from the stories that I had heard about it. Which is one of the reasons I was interested in the survey, because one of the biggest problems with doing any type of study is that there is a huge amount of interference pattern between a firsthand account and what becomes lore and gets passed around. If you cannot track it back to the firsthand account it’s amazing how much things get distorted, entirely unintentionally,” Wellman said.

Even though Wellman is generally skeptical of most on-campus incidences labeled as “paranormal”, he agreed to recount some of the stories he hears most frequently.

Allegedly, he said, there are two ghosts in Palmer Auditorium. One is normally known as Ruth, though Wellman said some people also call her Grace. Ruth was supposedly a New London citizen who frequented theater performances on campus. Since her death, Ruth has been seen at random times, sitting in the same place in the balcony stage left. Wellman has never seen Ruth, though not for lack of trying.

The closest he’s been was on a ghost hunting expedition two years ago with officer Denniston and his Supernatural class.

“The only thing that we saw were the running lights [on the balcony] which looked like they were either being turned on and off or were being blocked in some sequence as if someone was moving back and forth in front of them. My guess is that it was probably mice or something like that, but we really couldn’t explain what was going on,” Wellman said.

The second ghost in Palmer is apparently the spirit of a professor who died from a heart attack while giving a lecture in the auditorium. “My difficulty with that one is that I’ve heard that story elsewhere and therefore that seems to me like a very common story that you hear at colleges. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it means I don’t have any way of measuring it,” Wellman explained.

Wellman has also heard of strange activity in Blaustein. For example, one night a Campus Safety officer was performing routine checks of the building – these normally happen anytime between midnight and 3 AM in all buildings on campus. The officer began on the third floor and finished in the atrium, after sweeping and securing all floors. While in the atrium, he happened to look up and saw someone leaning over the balcony on the third floor looking down at him. When he went back upstairs to see who it was, nobody was there. This was understood as a paranormal being inhabiting the old building.

Further, Wellman  confesses that he himself has had strange experiences in Blaustein, though he attributes them to the old, creepy nature of the building rather than to a supernatural phenomenon. Nonetheless, he was alone in the building late at night and swore someone walked behind him.

“The motion-sensitive lights in the hallway were going off when I was the only person in the building. I don’t think it was a ghost, but it was a strong enough impression that I could understand why people could think that there was somebody there,” Wellman said.

Blaustein isn’t the only suspicious building at Conn. Wellman has also heard secondhand reports that there is a third-floor room in Fanning where, upon entering, a Campus Safety officer saw a human-sized, dark mass that rushed at him and knocked him over.

Additional buildings on campus are said to have EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon). Officer Denniston has taken recordings in various buildings and, when playing the recordings back, heard strange noises. These are considered to potentially be the voices of ghosts. “I think it is white noise,” Wellman said, “We are interpreting sounds that fit patterns and EVP has been recorded in several buildings on campus that otherwise haven’t had reports of haunting.”

Finally, Wellman mentioned “the Arbo scream” which is the disturbing noise sometimes heard at night; what sounds like someone being attacked in the Arbo. “It’s usually but not always connected in people’s minds with the fact that Gallows Lane was the execution site for New London,” he said.

“My guess is that it’s actually just a screech owl. But apparently it has happened at times where people have called the police and the police have gone looking to see if someone has been killed.”

Generally in popular culture, and especially around Halloween, ghosts are represented as beings to be feared. Wellman attributed this fear to three things: psychology, culture and history.

“Psychologically, one of the things that I think ghost stories in America do for us is they help us to think about problems of presence and embodiment – can you exist if you don’t have a body and if you don’t have a body can you be someplace? People across the world have experiences where they perceive the existence of other beings that are either immaterial or weirdly material and that I think is cross-cultural. People all around the world say they see things. How they identify them depends on the culture.”

“Historically speaking, different cultures have different attitudes about the dead. And since most people think ghosts are dead people, I would say that it is interesting that American culture has a profound fear of the dead in general. Ghosts and our fear of ghosts as a culture are at least partly drawing on that general fear of death. Conversely, there’s also a great deal of titillation about it, which I think explains some of our love hate with ghosts,” Wellman said.

Wellman also believes that there is often a positive correlation between those who ascribe to a religion and those who believe in ghosts, although the degree of correlation varies depending on the religion. Sometimes, this belief in religion can also influence the idea of negative versus positive ghosts.

“It is interesting to note that many of the evangelical groups, for instance, will claim that the paranormal exists but that it is the devil doing it. So sometimes you’ll see there is the willingness to accept the reality of it but only in a particular interpretation,” he said.

Outside of religion, the portrayal of ghosts in pop culture also tends to be negative. “Regularly, our ghost stories are about negative ghosts which is interesting because our negative ghosts act very much like demons in traditional narratives. However, we’ve seen in the twentieth century the slow but steady humanization of demons and angels,” he said.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of having a paranormal experience is that it leads you to question all conceptions of what people are. “You’re faced with this sense of ‘Is my sense of peopleness accurate? Is there somebody here that I can’t see?’ There’s a great line in the Ghostbusters theme song, which I always note is actually scarier than the movie: the question of whether there’s an invisible man sleeping in your bed.”

Wellman’s class “Supernatural in American Pop Culture” will be offered in the spring on Tuesday and Thursday nights.