There may be some validity to that chill you get when you walk into the Tower Room, or the fact that you feel eyes on the back of your neck when you walk to the reserve desk (or around First Floor Berry, but that's a different article). According to Ron Kolek and Maureen Wood, the heads of the New England Ghost Project, you can stop feeling crazy.
When I took Kolek and Wood for a tour of some of the College's most prominent buildings on the night of Oct. 8, I learned that while two mysterious souls named Reginald and George like to hang out in the Tower Room and some unidentified spirits may be lurking near the reserve desk, Dartmouth's most famous ghostly resident prefers Sanborn. Yes, that's right: Daniel Webster, arguably the College's most distinguished alumnus, likes to chill in the Rupert Brooke Room.
It was a surreal evening, to say the least.
I met Wood and Kolek in the lobby of the Hopkins Center, where they arrived slightly behind schedule with three other members of their crew. There was nothing inherently conspicuous about the five of them -- they wore faded jeans and collared shirts with the NEGP logo discreetly stitched where a breast pocket might have been. I learned that most members of the crew were devoutly religious. I was actually quite surprised by how normal they all looked; nothing about the group screamed "crazy ghost hunters."
While Wood had been trained as a psychic from the age of 15, she showed no sign of it in her outward appearance -- no crystal balls or hippie scarves. Kolek, similarly, looked no different from the average middle-aged man, though he had not been dealing with ghosts for nearly as long as Wood. He terms his former self a "wicked skeptic" who concentrated on environmental science; he only believes in the supernatural now because of the scientific methods he uses to test its existence.
The crew's ghost equipment, however, made them stick out from the average leaf peepers. I was slightly embarrassed when halfway across the Green, one of Kolek's devices, called an EMF monitor, picked up some disturbance in the electric field and began beeping and flashing wildly. This scene repeated itself again near the reserve desk, where I sheepishly had to go up to the workers behind the counter and ask them if there was any metal around that might be responsible for the irregularity in the EMF field. All of this, of course, with the hateful stares of disturbed studiers boring into the back of my head.
The crew shared an easy Ghostbusters-esque camaraderie; while going about their serious investigation, more than a few unseemly jokes were cracked. When both Kolek and a member of his crew pulled out their EMF monitors at the same time, the wife of the crew's tech expert joked, "Let's see which one's bigger!"
Kolek and Wood bickered constantly and immaturely, almost like an old married couple, although Wood's actual husband had tagged along for the investigation. I had to shush them as we walked through the Tower Room and Sanborn Library, again incurring the wrath of ever-studious Dartmouth undergraduates.
Needless to say, I was relieved when the team agreed that the Rupert Brooke Room would be a good place to commune with the dead; it was out of the way and hopefully would not earn me any more dirty looks. As soon as Maureen walked into the room, she put her fingers to her temples; she complained that she "felt a tingling in her forehead" followed by her "whole head buzzing." When I asked how the others, who were not psychics, could tell that there was a ghost in the room, they simply replied that there had been a subtle change in atmosphere. For cynicism or lack of training, I didn't feel any different.
Wood didn't know immediately that the ghost in the room was Daniel Webster's spirit. To come to this conclusion, she used a process called dousing, in which she asked the ghost a series of yes or no questions.
She used a long chain with a crystal at one end and asked the ghost to specify what certain directions of the spinning signified. In this instance, the answer to the question was "yes" if the crystal spun counterclockwise, "no" if it spun clockwise, and "maybe" if it moved in a straight line. It was soon determined that the ghost was male who'd died between the ages of 50 and 60 and that he had been a professor at the College. Because Wood is psychic, she did not always need the crystal to understand the answer; she often knew before the crystal spun in the right direction. Though Kolek pointed out how steady her hand was while holding the chain, the skeptic in me noted that she could, with a high degree of skill, be manipulating the direction of the crystal.
It started to get tricky when members of the crew wanted a name. "I'm seeing somebody very, like, distinguished, and this mustache sideburn kind of thing," Wood said. She also determined that that the spirit's first name was Daniel. I, being the helpful person that I am, offered help by asking if his last name was Webster.
Of course, it was.
The members of the crew who knew who Webster was were stunned. Kolek kept asking over and over again, "Really? Daniel Webster? The Daniel Webster?"
By the time we'd finished asking questions of Mr. Webster, Wood said her head was ready to explode. Apparently, communing with the dead takes it out of you.
We learned a lot from Mr. Webster. Though he wasn't exactly sure how he felt about the Alumni Association's choice to sue the College, he was happy with the way the College is being run now. However, he'd rather revert to how things rolled in his golden days of yore.
Wood, who could have more contact with Webster than the rest of us because of her psychic abilities, said, "He still thinks of it [the College] as his."
They wanted to see the graveyard next. I showed them around for a few minutes before excusing myself -- I had a meeting to go to, and, frankly, being in the graveyard at night with a bunch of strangers proclaiming the strong presence of the dead in the air creeped me out. I could hear their high-pitched laughter as I walked back to my dorm.
I checked Wikipedia when I got back to my room. Webster did not die in his mid-fifties, like Wood had deduced, but rather at age 70. Maybe Wood got a detail wrong. Or maybe the members of the NEGP are crackpots who enjoyed tricking me. Who knows. But next time you're up in the Tower Room, I think you should say hi to Reginald and George. Just in case.
