Ghost hunters find nothing at Neihardt

Editor's note: During the month of October, four DN arts reporters -- Tessa Jeffers, Neal Obermeyer, Josh Harrison and Andrea Heisinger -- went ghost hunting. In this week leading up to Halloween, these reporters will recount their experiences and any ghostly encounters that may have occurred.

If you live or work in Neihardt Residence Hall, you know how the ghost stories run rampant.

The oldest residence hall on campus seems to be a harbinger for strange occurrences that have been attributed to ghosts.

After hearing some of these tales, many of which have been written about numerous times, our ghost-hunting team decided to spend the night at Neihardt to see what we could find.

At about 11 p.m. we went to the residence hall, once again with Mello Yello and other provisions to keep up our strength.

We made our way down to the basement, which is the site of a lot of the stories.

Our first stop was the Cather-Pound-Neihardt lounge snack bar, where we sat and waited for ghosts to appear, but only encountered people studying, eating and staring at us curiously as we ate our generic potato chips.

We chose the snack bar because of its proximity to one of the supposed ghost haunts.

As legend goes, a student was down in the basement's boiler room practicing his guitar when the boiler exploded and he was killed.

After that happened, a student reported hearing the sounds of someone tuning a guitar and thought it was coming from a student's room, but found out no one who lived in that room played the guitar.

The door to the boiler room is located off the stage of the snack bar, but it was behind a piano and locked, so alas, our team could not investigate.

We then left the snack bar to investigate the rest of the basement. It also is said that in the trash room there is a pentagram on the wall, a remnant of a cult a student formed. The pentagram was painted over, but supposedly the paint kept chipping off where the pentagram was, and the maintenance people finally had to put up corkboard over it.

After finding the trash room, we again discovered a locked door stood in the way of us confirming the existence of any part of the pentagram story.

It was then after midnight, and we ventured out of the decidedly ghost-free basement with our guest Daily Nebraskan ghost hunter, Laura Schreier, who showed us one of the most notorious ghostly sites: the Raymond 3 study lounge.

This is where "Sarah" comes in. There is no real proof of her ever existing in real life, but tales associated with her abound.

It is said "Sarah" once lived in a room where the lounge now is. She died during a flu epidemic and thus haunts the room, opening and shutting the curtains, as she requested during her sickness.

A maintenance worker, Pat Carlin, said during a break when the residence halls were closed, he repeatedly found a window in that room open, despite shutting it every day. He was the only one with access to the building.

Another story that may relate to "Sarah," actually has some physical evidence.

Marcia Baughman works in the CPN Dining Services office. She said that throughout the last eight of her 10 years of employment there, several incidents have occurred involving change in the office safe.

It usually contains cash drawers from dining services, and on several occasions she or the only other worker with the combination have opened the safe in the morning to find the change stacked inside.

"She likes the dimes," Baughman said. "Sometimes she does dimes and pennies. No money is ever missing, though."

Whoever was doing this didn't stop, even when the office moved in the building.

"It was a good two to three months before it happened again. I think it took her a while to find us," Baughman said.

Our ghost-hunting team didn't investigate the safe, but it acts as an interesting side note.

Nothing strange happened while we were in the study lounge, either. By then, our ghost-hunting team was getting bored with the lack of anything remotely scary, so we again ventured down to the basement to set up camp for the night. By then it was about 1 a.m.

We noticed as we sat down at the intersection of the two basement hallways there was a light on under the door of the maintenance room at one end of the hall.

The light had not been on before, so we went and knocked on the door, but no one answered. We just chalked this up to "unexplained phenomenon" or some maintenance person who liked to work really late at night.

The basement wasn't really conducive to ghost hunting, we discovered, as every room was locked and there were bright fluorescent lights drowning out any shadows.

So, we sat and traded ghost stories while eating Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls to keep ourselves awake.

We discussed the story Neihardt Residence Director Josh Deacon told of how his keys stood straight out from the wall while hanging from a lanyard.

We discussed the merits of Will Ferrell.

And then we discussed the lack of anything even remotely ghostly and how tired we all were.

Then we left, pausing only to say goodbye to "Sarah" and leave a Mello Yello with the Neihardt front desk worker.