According to sophomore Leslie Morgan, ghosts roam the fourth floor of Loyola’s Marquette Hall. She and her friends experienced paranormal activity firsthand early last year when they were exploring the building late at night.
At about 10 p.m., they were wandering the halls when a door at the end of the hall opened by itself and the light to the classroom turned on.
“We were like 15 feet away,” Morgan said. “After the door opened, I went in to investigate. There was nothing in the room. As soon as I walked out of the door, the light turned off and it slammed shut behind me. We ran out of there as quickly as we could.”
Morgan and her friends were not the first to experience unexplainable activity on the fourth floor. For years, faculty members and students have noticed slamming doors, flickering lights, and temperature changes in the building.
“It gets really cold in here sometimes,” said Tina Cordova, who works in the Office of Student Finance. “I’m not really sure why.”
Some think that the ghostly inhabitants of a particular room cause the disturbances. For years, room 501 of Marquette Hall housed an anatomy lab where pre-med and pre-dental students practiced medical procedures on human bodies. According to Liz Scott, an instructor in the communications department and an alumna of Loyola, the students would lift the bodies up on the outside of the building with a type of pulley and hoist them through a door.
“If you were sitting by the window in class on the fourth floor and you heard the pulleys creaking, you knew they were bringing a body up,” Scott said. “Sometimes the stretcher would tilt and a bare foot would stick out from underneath the sheet.”
The lab was transformed into an art studio and later a zendo after the closing of the dental school in the late 1960s. Benjamin Wren, who currently teaches Zen classes in the room, has never experienced any haunting activity, despite the fact that he has been up in the room very late at night. Although some of the components of the room still remain, such as the door that students would hoist the cadavers through, he has never seen anything out of the ordinary in room 501.
Cordova is also convinced that the building is not haunted. Although the temperature does change frequently, she thinks it has more to do with the building’s old heating and cooling systems.
“The building is old, and that makes it spooky,” she said. “I don’t think it’s actually haunted, though. I’ve never seen anything that proves it.” Despite the opinions of skeptics, Morgan still believes that something lurks in Marquette Hall. It’s not because she’s frightened or exaggerating. She just doesn’t see how it could be any other way.
“There’s no logical explanation for what happened,” Morgan said. “Yes, it was a ghost.”
Ben Wren teaches his Zen class in the room that once housed the dissection lab. The cadavers held in the lab were used by the medical and dental students as learning aids. (Charles Costello)
The forboding entity that is Marquette Hall, which in addition to being home to classrooms and a former radio staion, was also home to a dissection lab for the medical and dental students. (Charles Costello)
