I’ve been properly getting into the Halloween spirit over the past week and remembered my days as a local folklorist of hauntings and the paranormal. This was in my late single-digits to early teens. It was a good time. So, from the top of my head I present to you a tour of local hauntings around Bloomington! To overcome the monotone reading voice of the Internet, I’ve added DRAMATIC EMPHASIS to the particularly SPOOKY or UNEXPLAINABLE bits, and have links to Google street view so you can visit on your own… I wonder if the Google street team caught any UNEXPLAINABLE IMAGES as they drove past these infamous locations?
1. Former Porticos restaurant
This is now a lawyers office, but when it was a restaurant it was a favorite of both the living and the formerly living. Living-type guests traveling from the first floor dining room to the upstairs bathroom would often ask their waiter who the young children playing on the stairs were. Equally as often, the waiter’s reply would be, “Ah, but madame! There ARE NO CHILDREN DINING HERE TONIGHT!” It was said that these were the children of a family who had lived in the house before it was a restaurant… until they DIED TRAGICALLY IN A FIRE. Waiters would also note that when closing time came, table settings had a mysterious way of moving about the room ALL ON THEIR OWN. Spooky.
2. Read Hall Dormitory
Now dorm life can be a real drag, and many a nights in Read I did feel overcome by the urge to cut a bitch, but I was able to control that urge. Unfortunately, one student from the 1970s was not able to control this urge while studying for his anatomy final–he took his scalpel (a tool of knowledge) and stabbed his girlfriend TO DEATH (now a tool for stabbing) in the basement of the dorm. Unable to complete her education and thereby gain the freedom of a good job and financial independence from a stabby douchebag husband, she remained in Read, haunting the halls and most especially the GROUP SHOWERS. Read, as you may know, is shaped in an X–which concentrates the evil right in the center of the basement, where the girlfriend was killed. Near the McDonald’s. Fact.
3. Stepp Cemetery
You will hear many stories about this ancient cemetery located somewhere in the Morgan-Monroe State Forest just outside of Bloomington. My favorite involves a young mother whose baby died of cholera back in… the choleric days. The mother was beside herself with grief, which drove her to CERTAIN MADNESS, for every night she would visit this cemetery, unearth her poor dead baby and rock it to sleep in her arms. The gods took pity on her, and one night during a terrifying storm lightning struck a nearby tree leaving a stump shaped like a rocking chair. Or rather, a ROCKING CHAIR!111! Crazyface continued rocking in that hollowed-out stump until she herself succumbed to death… or perhaps she NEVER STOPPED. Legend says that if you visit the cemetery on a cold, dark night, you will see her sitting on the stump looking over her child’s grave. And if you should be so bold as to sit upon the stump yourself, you will be CURSED and will die seven years to the day* you were so foolish.
*Note: I sat upon said cursed stump on July 15, 1995 and I dropped dead that same day in 2002. It was the worst.
4. IMU (The Union)
If you’ve ever spent the odd night wandering through the student Union, then you too will join me in believing that it is most definitely haunted. I mean, there’s a cemetery right outside it. I can’t remember the story, but I have heard that an INEXPLICABLE PHANTOM has been seen in the windows overlooking the entrance to Alumni Hall, in the Student Activities Tower. Let’s make one up… a student in 1964 had just failed his Billiards exam, the one class he thought he could pass without trouble. He ran up the tower’s spiral staircase, out into the study area on the third floor and FLUNG himself through the window to the HORROR OF ALL BELOW. He continues to phantom about in the tower, pondering whether it was really such a good idea to waste his parents’ money on Billiards in the first place.
5. Memorial Hall
So I haven’t heard any tales about this being haunted, but late one night as I walked back from a final, bleary-eyed and browbeaten, I came across this inscription in the breezeway of Memorial Hall: “Evil spirits cannot enter an inhabited house unless invited. Sir Walter Scott” …which is all well and good when it was a dormitory in the early days of the school. But now it’s not an inhabited house, so by that argument can evil spirits enter as they please? I didn’t linger to pursue this train of thought for too long.
6.Rose Hill Cemetery
Here’s another location that may not technically be haunted, but you can find Batman’s grave there. If you’re feeling extra adventurous, you can visit his house in town which is now a half-home-half-antique-store called “The Garret.” But enter at your own risk. As noted in an earlier post, it’s CREEPY.
Happy haunting! This year you may see my partner and I investigating any of these paranormal sites as the famed comedic duo Mulder and Scully. With our little caterpillar alien in tow. OR WILL YOU????!?
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