On the SciFi Channel’s Ghost Hunters, The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) team investigates places said to be haunted.

They listen to personal accounts of strange happenings and try to debunk as much “paranormal” activity as they can. When they can’t debunk the activities and have evidence enough (video and audio footage) to suggest they are not the only “entities” there, they’ll concede the place is haunted.

A handful of KeukaCollege students are acting as amateur ghost hunters in Ball Hall this semester. Their personal experiences are what prompted them to try to gather evidence to support their notion that ghosts inhabit the building.

Shanna Upright, a senior history major, and Annalea Sininger, a junior adolescent history education major, hit the KeukaCollege archives and Lightner Library looking for some facts that might explain who would have ties to Ball Hall beyond the grave, and why they might be checking in this semester. Upright has some theories.

“George Harvey Ball (the College's founder and first president) died in 1907,” said Upright. “So, this year marks the 100^th anniversary of his death.

"Also, the renovation might be stirring things up,”added Upright, who cited that the area was once home to Native Americans. Of Native American heritage herself, Upright knows how sacred the ground is to the culture.

Upright and Sininger aren't the first Ball Hall denizens to claim unexplained activity in their rooms and point to Ball's ghost as the prime suspect. Indeed, most of Keuka's spooky stories revolve around Ball and some Keukonian believe that his ghost resides in the building.

Like some Keuka students before them, Upright and her roommate in room 423 feel as though “someone is watching” them, especially during the night.

“The second week of school, about 2 a.m., I climbed into my top bunk and that’s when the whole bed started moving as if someone had a hold of it and was shaking it,” said Upright. “It lasted until I said, ‘I really need to get to sleep, please stop.’ My roommate was sleeping the entire time.”

Another time, Upright’s TV turned off by itself and “it’s not the kind that you can set on a timer.”

Yet another time, as her roommate was answering the telephone, Upright heard a faint woman’s voice ask, “Who called?” They were the only two people in the room.

There’s a similarly eerie feeling in Sininger’s room on the second floor. Aimee Sycz shares the quad with Sininger and two other roommates.

“Around 4 a.m. one night in mid-September, one of my roommates woke up smelling very strong cologne, which none of us has,” said Sycz. “At the same time, my other roommate felt as though someone was looking at her. I had that same feeling, but I also felt like someone might have been touching me.”

A couple of days later, Sycz took a rail off her bed and leaned it up against her roommate’s closet.

“When we woke up, the rail was in the middle of the room in a place where it would have been impossible to fall,” said Sycz. “Not only that, but when we tried to see how loud it would be if it fell, it made the loudest crash. We all would have woken up [to the crash]. Plus, I was the first one to notice it had fallen when I woke up at 4 a.m. to go to the bathroom.”

After the incident, the girls recorded sounds in their room overnight in an effort to collect Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), like the SciFi’s ghost hunters do. An EVP is a voice that shows up on a recording but is not audible to the human ear. When the girls listened to the recording the next day, they heard normal noises of four people sleeping—tossing and turning and breathing. But they also heard what sounded like a male voice.

“It seems like all of the activity is occurring between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m.,” said Upright. “We wonder what the significance of the time is.”

Their interest in “connecting all of the stories” is what’s driving the young women to gather as many facts and other ghostly accounts as they can.

If you have had what you believe to be a paranormal experience of your own this semester, or at a previous time, you can contact Upright at supright@mail.keuka.edu to share your story.

-- Tanya Cornell-Kestler