The ghost of Dolan Hall

Imagine: You’re lying in bed, an 8 am class in the morning, knowing you need to sleep, just praying it won’t happen again… but it does.

The bang shakes your room and causes you to either pull the covers over your head or go bolting out into the hallway. It can cause your computer screen to be momentarily out of focus and makes your radiator vibrate.

You may have heard the rumors, but the Ghost of Dolan Hall is no myth.

It happens anytime between midnight and 4 a.m. and we never know what day of the week it will be. The Dolan Ghost haunts the second floor east wing in rooms 231, 229, 227, and 225. The volume of the bang is incredible and occasionally causes objects in our rooms to shake and the lights to flicker.

Yet those just across the hall and upstairs cannot hear it. It jolts us from sound sleep and brings some close to tears.

We have tried to explain the noise away countless times. We went to the boiler room below us… it cannot be heard in that room.

The RA across the hall, who is convinced we are all mad, suggested it is the boys upstairs. We made the guys that live upstairs come down in the middle of the night to see if it will happen when they are not up there…it does.

We went outside to bang on the pipes to try to duplicate the noise…not even close. The housing and maintenance department sent people to try to find an answer… no idea. The phenomenon remains unexplained.

Sometimes the haunting is just a single bang repeated over an hour or two. Other times it is a series of four evenly spaced booms that can go on all night. We know that it cannot be the pipes because it has even played us a little song: “Shave and a haircut, two bits.”

It is always loudest in room 227, which makes us believe it cannot originate from somewhere else in the hallway. As many times as it has happened, we still cannot establish from which direction the sound is coming; it just fills the rooms.

We have spoken to students that lived in Dolan four years ago, and they too testify to the sonic booms in the night.

If, by chance, it is a haunting by clever students passed down through the years, please stop. We’re awfully tired.

Those who have not heard it may not believe, but the circles under our eyes do not lie. We don’t know the cause, nor where the sound comes from, but let it be said for the record:

There is a ghost haunting Dolan Hall.