University campuses and college towns are notorious settings for ghost stories. Is Rolla one of them? Is Missouri S&T haunted? We asked about your spooky Rolla experiences. Here’s what you told us.
Two incidents occurred within a couple weeks of each other at the same house a few blocks from campus in Rolla. First, I usually fell asleep listening to the radio playing softly. One night I was awakened by my radio as it was turning itself up until the volume was blasting. This was an old tube radio with a mechanical volume knob. Second, I was awakened one night by the shower running full blast, not from broken plumbing but from the handle being turned wide open.
Mark Buhr, MetE’89
Washington, Mo.
A few years after graduating from S&T, I brought a group of college students to campus for a conference. While taking the students on a tour of campus, sharing with them what I remembered from my ambassador days, the students asked “Do you have any ghosts?” You see, there is a residence hall on the campus where they go to school that is supposedly haunted. I laughed and explained that when engineers hear weird sounds from the attic, they go upstairs, nail down the floor boards, seal the windows and make sure the mouse traps are set.
Aimee Rea, Psych’06
Maryville, Mo.
During my freshman year at S&T, in the fall of 1980, my grandmother asked me to visit the Pi Kappa Alpha house, which had been the home of my great-uncle, Carl Cromer. He had been a member of Pi Kappa Alpha long ago and passed away during his sophomore year after an October 1937 car accident on Highway 63, near the present-day Stonehenge.
I was surprised to find out that Carl was reputed to have haunted the Pike house for years. Many members refused to occupy his room, which had been dedicated in his memory. Many unexplained phenomena had occurred over the years, ranging from the sound of glass crashing, to “ghostly images” and dogs barking and jumping up and down on the tiled crest just inside the front door.
Perhaps the strangest occurrence happened after the fire that destroyed the Pike house in February 1999. My husband, Chris Ramsay, MetE’83, MS MetE’85, who is chapter advisor to the fraternity, and several members scoured and searched the rubble of the house looking for the memorial plaque that hung on Carl’s door. They searched and searched, but found no plaque. A year later on the first Founder’s Day after the fire, my husband returned to his desk in the metallurgy department foundry to find the plaque, a little discolored, bent and scarred by the fire, mysteriously sitting on his desk.
Darlene Ramsay, MetE’84
Rolla, Mo.