Honestly, they’re kind of boring with their whole “woe is me, my body has decomposed into the sands of time wah wah” nonsense.
October welcomes us with a flushed, haphazardous greeting. Around campus, students must contend with the frequent tour groups guiding prospective students as well as the scheduled rise of ghost sightings of the People Who Came Before. TU upperclassmen understand the drill: play nice with the potentially recruited students and avoid direct contact with the spirits, whose pleading eyes and agape mouths beg for attention.
Here is a list of supernatural creatures you can potentially encounter:
1. The spiritual mass of foreign exchange students smoking in front of Keplinger Hall. Indeed, the largest concentration of spirits occurs in front of Keplinger Hall. There, the ghastly visage of smoking foreign exchange students stands in perpetual wait, silently chain smoking.
“It’s a little annoying to get around these guys,” says sophomore Chemical Engineering student Aaron Williamson. “Like, you can’t get their attention so they can move away from the damn door, and if you do, they kind of just… lazily blink at you and reluctantly move.”
“Oh, and that’s not to mention the cigarette smell,” Williamson adds. “I don’t know if ghosts, um, can get arcane afterlife cigarettes or something, but this smell just sticks to your skin.”
As a result, classrooms in Keplinger Hall reek of cigarettes, and this smell has also spread to the Esports and Gaming Lounge, populated by frequenters to Keplinger. “That’s actually fine with me, though,” Williamson says, “since it hides the natural musk of the people who use the lounge.”
2. Oliphant Hall has its own haunt: student journalism, which died years ago. At night, the glow of the long abandoned Collegian office welcomes any straggler. Come in, something inside of you stirs as you examine the newspaper-layered door. Oh, yeah, by the way, there are some windows open, that force within you advises, because Managing Editor Zach Short demands a fucking breeze.
The editors inside welcome you in, needlessly enthusiastic. $10 per article, $5 per photo. “It’s a great way to make easy money,” the editors say, their voices mingling yet ringing hollow all at once, “and it looks good on a resume.”
Cookies sit on the table in wait for consumption. The editors stare at you with unblinking eyes, but there’s something—an emotion, surely—you can’t quite grasp that hides behind their gaze. Then, you notice the shackles laced upon the editors’ arms and that their mouths never quite move when they speak, and you realize all too late that the emotion you read was perpetual agony, a desperate plea for help in the shallow, shadowed realm that was once student journalism.
Write for The Collegian, won’t you? Please?
3. The asbestos in the air of our Arts and Sciences buildings. Years ago, TU’s administration promised to improve the air quality of buildings like Chapman Hall or Oliphant Hall. Untouched and unconquerable, the asbestos unionized, and the only method TU has taken to thwart its conquest is a sign on the walls warning all who enter these buildings of the silent menace, lurking and looking.
4. Janet Levit, former Provost, who is still here for some reason. “Yeah, so, we voted no confidence two years ago, right?” says law student Jessica Hatsfield. “Why is she still here? Is she, like, trying to lower our law school ranking even more?”
5. The incorporeal form of Captain Cane, a stab wound buried in his chest. Every night, Captain Cane takes on his self-imposed glide around the campus perimeter. His mascot form seems deep in thought, the words leaving his foamy lips mumbled and mournful. If a poor student manages to break his concentration, he launches into a soliloquy: “If thou didst ever thy dear university mascot love,” he says with uncharacteristic solemnity, “revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”
“‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my mascot chambers, a serpent stung me. So the whole ear of the University of Tulsa is by a forged process of my death rankly abused!” he exclaims.
The rising sun paints his blue lavender. A pause, then a sniff. “But soft, methinks I scent the morning air. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me,” he wails helplessly.
Jesus, dude, talk about trauma dumping.
6. My ex-girlfriend, Rhonda Stiltsberg. Baby, please, come back. It wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.
