In last week’s Post Brandi Neal put out a request for ghost stories in honor of Halloween. While I have thankfully never seen or heard a ghost, I’ve been spooked quite a few times. It happened to be that most of those times were when I was in college.
    After high school I went to a small women’s college in Nevada, Mo., called Cottey College, established circa 1884. A place with that much history is bound to have some spooks, either real or imagined, roaming dormitory hallways and while I never saw them, the stories the second year students told had me sleeping with one eye open.
    I will admit, I am gullible, and so spooked easily, but one story in particular always sent the shivers right through me. Not long into my first semester the girls in my suite told me about the “man in black.” It was rumored that the man in black was once a professor at the college who had a love affair with one of his students. The story went that he would sneak into her dorm room at night after everyone went to bed. Well, apparently the student eventually broke off the relationship, leaving the professor heart broken over her.
    Now here’s the ghost story. It was rumored that the ill-mannered spirit of the professor, a black shadowy figure, was forever roaming dorm rooms, looking for his lost love. He would stand over a girl’s bed and if you happened to be that lucky lady, you were supposed to say, “I’m not her,” and roll back over and go to bed.
    Well, I put a lot of thought into this at the time and decided there would be no rolling over and going back to bed should the man in black decide to pay a visit. I had a roommate for most of the two years at the school (meaning, of course, that she would protect me) but during the last semester I was left alone in a single room. Like most college students, I had Christmas lights hanging throughout my room. In an effort to discourage the man in black, I kept the lights on all night.
    I also left my door unlocked in case I had to spring out of bed and out of the clutches of the man in black. Maybe this was extreme, but it was worth the peace of mind it gave me.
    While the man in black was the creepiest ghost story I associated with Cottey, there were others. Like the ghost of Vera, a former student who caught herself on fire while making candy and later died from severe burns. She supposedly haunted the suite next to mine, so my girlfriends and I would try to channel her through the Ouija board.
    Main Hall was also supposed to be haunted so we would sit on the front steps with a flashlight again trying to draw out the powers of the Ouija board.
    Now, remember how I said I was gullible? For an entire day I thought my closet was haunted. My roommate Stephanie had very long, dark hair. So, one day she plucked out a hair and tied one end to my hairbrush and the other to the rack in my closet. The result was that my brush looked as if it were floating and spinning in mid-air.
    She had me going the whole day. I wouldn’t touch the brush until she felt bad and told me it actually wasn’t possessed. After that everyone tried to get me. They would scrawl messages on my wall with glow in the dark paint or make handprints on my windows. I smartened up and played a few tricks of my own, but I still never stopped worrying about the man in black