back to his office to work. Again he heard the footsteps on the stairs. He yelled one more time
to see who was there, and when there was no answer, he decided it was time he left the
building.
A number of years ago, The Clarkson School and the man who ran it, Tobin Hart,
decided to hold a seance in the house. Late one night he and some friends took a Ouija Board
into what is now the reception room. The Ouija board spelled out that the ghost's name was
"Elizabeth." After a short time, they began to hear footsteps on the stairs. In addition, the lights
started to flicker on and off. At that point they decided to leave.
Lynne Mullen, director of Academic Support Services, had many experiences with the
ghost. Her office was on the third floor of Holcroft from 1984 until it was moved in 1990. One
of the more common occurrences had to do with her solar calculator. Every night she would
leave it with a zero on the screen, and almost every morning it would have strange
configurations; such as parts of numbers, dashes, and apostrophes on the screen, none of which
were duplicatable by human hands. This occurred only in her office. She found that if she took
the calculator home, it wouldn't have the strange symbols on it. She also left it in other people's
offices at Holcroft, but these configurations would never appear. A few weeks after moving her
office to Price Hall, the calculator stopped working completely.
Another time, Lynne was in her office and the telephone rang. As she walked over to
answer it, the receiver suddenly jumped about six inches in the air and then fell back into its
cradle. Later, a worker in the office picked up the phone to make a call. As she put the phone to
her ear she heard a hushed conversation between two women. The secretary immediately put
the phone back down, thinking it was a party-line. She thought nothing of it until she realized
she was at work and this couldn't possibly happen. She picked up the phone again just a few
seconds after hanging up, only to find a dial tone.
The most bizarre episode Lynne experienced happened on a Sunday afternoon. She was
working at Holcroft and so was a man by the name of Rich Watkins. As she was getting ready
to go downstairs to use the copier, she heard it running. The machine was partially hidden in a
hallway near the stairs. When she got downstairs she saw a shadow of what looked like a
person wearing a long, dark coat. She thought it was Gary Kelly, who worked on the second
floor as headmaster of The Clarkson School. When she turned to face the copy machine no one
was there, yet the machine had been turned on and was running.
Later she learned that Gary Kelly never came in that day. Mary Theis had been working
on the second floor at the time, but she said no one was around and no one had been using the
copier. They searched the building because it was supposed to be closed, but found no one.
Later that afternoon, Mary had left, but Lynne and Rich were still working. Rich told Lynne
that he was going downstairs for a couple minutes and said jokingly that if he didn't come back
she would know the ghost had gotten him. When he came back a few minutes later, he went in
his office then back into Lynne's, looking pale. He asked if she was playing a trick on him, but
she had no idea what he was talking about. When he had gone back into his office, the chairs
which had been facing his desk, were turned in the opposite direction. They were very heavy,
yet someone or something had moved them. Soon after that, they left.
Before Lynne began working at Holcroft, Gary Kelly had brought in a guest speaker to
give a presentation on the Love Canal, a story which the speaker had just broken. The guest had
also delved in the supernatural as a hobby. Upon entering the house, he asked if there had been
any stories of the house being haunted. Apparently he felt some kind of presence as soon as he
