In Brief
St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota doesn't hide its ghosts in a brochure. It keeps them in an orange file folder, maintained by the Dean of Students, who has been writing down student reports since the fall of 1991 and reads them aloud to the freshmen every year.
The Full Story
St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota keeps its ghosts in an orange file folder. The Dean of Students, Greg Kneser, has been adding to it since 1991, and every fall he walks the first-year dorms to read the reports aloud to the students who just moved in.
It started in Thorson Hall. Kneser was the director of housing then, and during a dormitory bonfire two women saw a boy in a red baseball cap in their window, watching the fire. They were certain he was a ghost, and they came looking for the file, sure the school must already have one. He cornered them later, asking what they'd seen, and left the conversation with three pages of notes. The folder began there.
The same room had more. A stereo would cut out partway through a certain Led Zeppelin song and come back playing Pachelbel's Canon in D. Two young men kept appearing at the end of the loft. One student looked over and saw the pair sitting on the floor, playing cards.
The boy in the red cap is still reported there, a former student by most tellings, sometimes with a dog at his heel that no one can account for. He's the one the file opens with, and he gave the building its standing legend.
The folder has filled out across the campus since. In Mellby Hall, the oldest residence hall, named for Agnes Mellby, the school's first woman graduate, a woman in white is seen on the staircase between the second and third floors. People standing outside the building say they've watched her cross the third-floor windows. The story has it that the woman in white is Agnes herself, walking the hall that carries her name. Over in Kelsey Theater there's an apparition tied to the piano onstage, a woman in a lavender dress in most accounts, who plays the same melody and, some actors swear, whispers their lines to them from the dark. Hilleboe Hall has children singing and a piano no one is playing. The library has a former English professor who sorts the books. Between the residence halls, the theater, and the library, St. Olaf turns up sixth on Mysterious Heartland's list of the most haunted campuses in the Midwest.
Kneser is a folklorist about all of it, not a believer. "I like folklore, storytelling," he has said. "It's a way to captivate and connect with people all over campus." He just happens to be the one institution in Minnesota that filed its hauntings instead of forgetting them.
