LYNNE'S STORY

This is a report of some strange events which took place in room 410 Wilder Hall, Mount Holyoke College during the month of October 1986.

My roommate, Kathryn ’89 and I, Lynne ’89, had only completed about one month of our sophomore year when we experienced the following:
One night Kathy reported being very cold, I was not; the next night I was and she was not. Thus, began a series of events. Sudden gusts of wind hit my face one night, yet our window was closed. Lying in bed I felt like the bed was vibrating and I experienced cold shocks like electricity up my arm then down a leg, as though something was passing through my body.

Each night for about three weeks Kathy and I encountered this inexplicable feeling along with a feeling that something was trying to keep us awake. Whenever we were just about to fall asleep, we felt like we were falling into something awful. That is the only way I can describe the event, as though something was preventing us from falling asleep. Also, on different nights we each felt something jiggling our vocal chords (throat) and we felt compelled to speak. We each (on different nights) squeaked out a sound that scared the other to death. Neither one of us knows what forced the sound to come out. Every night at around 1:00 a.m. we would both be lying in bed and we would feel movement through our bodies like a breeze, and we would feel like there was another presence in the room.

The worst night was when we both of us felt like something was rubbing our faces. We felt the rubbed spot for the entire next day too, as though we had rubbed our cheek all night with a washcloth. To top it all off, our door mysteriously broke and neither one of us could open it with our keys. We had to call in a locksmith who climbed through the area transom and after examining the lock reported that a tiny piece in the lock had fallen out.
Neither one of us had ever experienced anything like this before, and we did not believe in the supernatural before these events took place. We even went to the college archives to see if there was a history of a ghost in Wilder Hall. Nothing was documented on a ghost at that time.
Kathy and I could not move out of our room because we were too busy, so we basically told ourselves that the room was ours and that whatever was bothering us had to leave. That weekend we threw an all-night party in our room, and my brother and his friends from West Point slept in the room (ten guys). Kathy and I decided to sleep on a friend’s floor to see if anything happened without us around. They reported nothing. For some reason Kathy and I never again experienced those feelings described above, and we lived in the same room for all of second semester! Whatever it was, it got the point that we had no time for it and that the room was ours. We could not help it (the ghost) and we certainly would not move out.
Wilder Hall has reportedly had strange occurrences like the ones above and others in it for many years. I decided to write ours down and give it to the archives for future students, who as Kathy and I did, go to the archives to see if there is a reason for the events or a history of the strange experiences at the college.

I hope this helps someone in the future who thinks she is going crazy because she can not figure out what is happening in her dorm room. She will then know that she is not crazy and that others have experienced similar situations in Wilder Hall at Mount Holyoke College.