Long after classes have let out and most professors and students have retired for the day, some say an older and more ghastly group seizes Plant Hall and other campus haunts.
There’s Bessie, the protective spirit who killed herself after finding out that her husband was cheating on her with one of her fellow actresses.
Bessie reportedly guards Falk Theater and the actors that perform there. Wearing red is quite the faux pas for a leading lady.
Bessie, a leading lady who wore the taboo color, will likely prevent any future leading lady from wearing red on stage.
Or there’s always James and Jennifer, the two lovers who both died on UT’s campus. Jennifer, a performing arts major, is still heard singing sometimes in Reeve’s Theater.
Fraternity brothers Tim and Terry lived on the fourth floor of Plant Hall back when it was still a dorm.
The pair died untimely deaths within a couple years of each other.
They were said to have put the Greek letters on one of the doors that is now the employee entrance to the financial aid employee office.
Most students have heard of The Tampa Bay Hotel’s servants that are said to still haunt Plant Hall’s Science Wing.
“Late at night it’s eerie, like someone’s watching you, especially by the mailroom where that hallway narrows on the second floor,” said student Davis Owen.
Other students also agreed that they felt a creepy feeling in Plant Hall at night.
“It’s always cold at night,” said Jonathan Torrivilla. “You feel a strange presence.”
“It’s a scary building. It’s very old and I do get creeped out walking at night,” said student Christina Cusati.
Librarian and UT historian Art Bagley has heard rumors of the occult on campus, but he says they have never proven anything more. However he can confirm that eerie things have happened around campus.
Perhaps some of the rumored ghost stories came from an incident in the mid-thirties.
While giving a Plant Hall tour to friends, he was climbing the stairs inside the minaret and had a heart attack. He was pronounced dead on the scene.
Student Patrick Tretola said he once felt something when he was high up in Plant Hall. “When we were coming down from the fifth floor, we felt a push,” he said.
Bagley also told of a girl who was found dead in the old Lykes cattle barn in 1982.
The girl was thought to be a prostitute and not affiliated with the campus, but that didn’t change the fear that came from knowing someone was killed and dumped so close to campus.
The killer was never identified.
Still, there is reason to believe that some of the weird things that happen on campus are connected to the supernatural.
Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric Tracy Morse said her friend Santiago Echeverry, Assistant Professor of Art, has even encountered one of these supernatural beings.
“He said he saw two ghosts last year in Fletcher after the Halloween party,” Morse said.
Theater professor Michael Staczar saw something odd late one night.
“This cloud of mist… fog, and it was obvious that there was some kind of physical shape to it. And as soon as I saw it, it literally sucked into the wall,” he told an online reporter. “It wasn’t a trick in the light. It was very obvious that it was some kind of shape, a physical shape. There was a presence there… a faint outline of a human body.”
According to another story printed in The Minaret:
One female student had accompanied her father, a worker in the campus mail room, to school early one morning.
Wanting to explore, the girl wandered from the post office to the lobby stair case closest to the Plant Museum at approximately 5:30 a.m.
Upon reaching the 2nd floor landing, she saw a “man dressed in a three-piece suit standing there. His clothes were of an older style, and he didn’t seem to belong there.”
The girl was standing approximately 300 feet away from the man when she called out to see if she could be of assistance.
The man remained silent, but when he began to walk towards her, the girl was able to see that his eyes were glowing bright red.
The student promptly ran away in fright, and didn’t realize until after the encounter that she had seen a ghost.
While going down the same stairwell, a second student saw the same man in the brown suit siting in a corner of the landing, drinking what appeared to be a cup of tea before he disappeared.
No, I didn’t have the heart attack, Cody. For proper credit, the main article above was written by two UT Journalism II students, Megan Fernandez and Sarah Gottlieb. Hopefully by now (June 2011) they’ve improved their proofreading skills!
The man who died in the minaret on Feb. 2, 1938 was August Ingley, a UT music professor and composer of UT’s alma mater (the tune, not the lyrics, which were selected by the student body).
The jilted actress Bessie (mentioned above) reportedly had the last name of Snaveley and, as the story goes, committed suicide (by hanging) backstage in Falk Theater when it was a vaudeville/cinema site in the ’20s and ’30s.
In truth, UT actually had a live student (and subsequent alumna) named Mrs. Bessie Snavely, class of 1943, BS in Business Administration. At that time, she was approximately 55-years-old (based on her portrait in the “Moroccan”). A fictional interview with her ghost appeared in the November 17, 1977 issue of “The Minaret” (p.6,col.2); Gary Yarusso wrote it up (made it up?).
I’ve got a folder in my Library office on all the ghost stories that have cropped up through the years; it’s a very popular topic for a “Minaret” article just about every October!
Art Bagley
Creepy stuff… but who was it that had a heart attack in the minaret? was it the librarian? or did that happen in the 30s?