Central Washington University

CWU's Kamola Hall ghost was invented in 1982 by alumnus Evan Sylvanus for a haunted house event. The university archives found no record of anyone named Lola dying in the building. But residents keep reporting doors opening on their own and knocking in empty halls.

The ghost of Kamola Hall was invented in 1982 to promote a haunted house event. Everyone at Central Washington University knows this. The ghost is still there.

Her name is Lola. The legend says she was a student in the 1940s living in Kamola Hall, then an all-female dormitory on CWU's Ellensburg campus. Her fiance was drafted into World War II and never came home. Heartbroken, Lola hung herself from the rafters in the attic while wearing her wedding dress. Students have reported her presence since at least the mid-1980s. Doors open and close without drafts. Knocking echoes through empty hallways. Her figure has been glimpsed in corridors late at night, pale and silent.

The problems with this story stack up quickly. The university archives conducted a thorough search and found no record of any student named Lola dying in Kamola Hall. During World War II, Kamola wasn't even a women's dormitory. It housed roughly 400 U.S. Air Force cadets as part of the war effort. The building didn't return to women's housing until after the war ended. The attic where Lola supposedly hanged herself doesn't match the architectural layout that Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter designed when the building was completed in October 1911.

In 2003, The Observer, CWU's student newspaper, interviewed alumnus Evan Sylvanus. He said he made the whole thing up. Lola was a fictional character he created in 1982 for a Kamola haunted house event that needed a backstory. The name was catchy. "Lola in Kamola" rhymed. The story got retold enough times that it stopped sounding invented and started sounding like history.

Kamola Hall is a striking building, even without the ghost. It was the first dormitory on the campus of what was then Washington State Normal School, founded in 1891 with just 51 students. Cutter gave it a Swiss chalet style that makes it look nothing like the other residence halls. He also designed the Davenport Hotel in Spokane and Seattle's Rainier Club, which puts Kamola in unusual architectural company for a college dorm.

The debunking hasn't slowed anything down. Students who've lived in Kamola continue reporting the same phenomena Sylvanus's fictional Lola was supposedly responsible for. Doors that swing open when locked, with no wind and no one in the hall. Footsteps outside rooms at hours when the building should be quiet. Knocking that starts, stops, and starts again without pattern or source. A few residents over the years have described seeing a figure in white moving through the corridor before disappearing.

CWU's student media has covered the legend multiple times. PULSE Magazine ran a feature on campus legends. The Daily Record News published a piece called "Lola in Kamola: CWU's Resident Ghost." Each new class of students discovers the story, learns it was fabricated, and then has their own experience in the building that they can't quite explain.

The Kamola story doesn't hinge on whether Lola is real. The ghost was definitely fake. The question is why the building didn't get the memo.