Shortly after beginning to work as a patrol officer for the Department of Public Safety, part-time worker Kate Miller found herself walking through Addison Hall. It was late at night, and as she looked into a classroom, she saw a face staring back at her through the glass. At first, she thought it was her own reflection. When she looked again, she came to a chilling realization: another woman was staring back at her, clad in all white.
“She’s a very common myth,” said Miller. “If you don’t want to see her, you’re not supposed to look through the doors of the classrooms or at the end of the hallways.”
Though the experience spooked her, Miller said that she didn’t feel threatened by the woman in white.
“She doesn’t get close enough to make you feel like you’re in danger,” said Miller. “She just makes you know that you’re not alone.”
In its 162-year history, CUC has its share of ghost stories. Though some longtime members of the Concordia community like Director of Public Safety Dave Witken and assistant professor of theology Kirk Clayton say they have never had any run-ins with the supernatural, many, like Miller, say they’ve encountered the paranormal on-campus.
While some experiences may be unique, others have been experienced by multiple people. Eduardo Hinds, a 2024 CUC graduate, said that he experienced something while alone in Krentz late at night. Hinds said that he was staying late in the e-sports room, which used to be located on the first floor of Krentz. He went to use the bathroom, and while using the bathroom, he said that the lights shut off on their own, and he heard a woman scream at the top of her lungs.
Hinds said that he immediately left, and when he went to the DPS desk to ask who was on patrol, he was told that the worker on patrol wasn’t anywhere near Krentz when Hinds heard the scream. Miller says she had a similar experience.
“I was on patrol, and I knew e-sports was gone because the keys had been returned and the room was all locked up,” said Miller. “I went to use the bathroom, when suddenly there was a blood-curdling scream from the corner of the bathroom. It sounded like a banshee. I can deal with voices and bumps, but a banshee scream in a locked building? I’m good, no thank you.”
Miller said that ‘voices and bumps’ make up a large amount of the supernatural activity around campus, especially in the network of underground tunnels that stretch across campus. DPS uses the tunnels to get across campus quickly, and they are allegedly a hotbed for paranormal activity.
“The tunnels have a creepy feeling,” said Miller. “If you’re walking down the tunnel in the Mary Martha basement, it eventually splits off, and you can hear whispers coming from the left-hand tunnel. It’s very hard to mistake the sound of footsteps running right behind you.”
It’s not just DPS workers that have run into ghostly former students. Several faculty members claim to have experienced the unexplainable. One such faculty member is Elisabeth Unruh, an adjunct professor.
“One fall evening I was in the adjunct office [in the West Annex] grading at the desk and waiting for the evening class to start,” said Unruh. “Out of the corner of my right eye on the floor moved past a black raccoon-sized thick black shadow by my feet. It scared the crap out of me—it was definitely there and my heart was beating very fast.”
That is not Unruh’s only potential experience with the supernatural at CUC. Her other experience also comes from the West Annex, and features a shadowy figure waiting for a meeting to start.
“I was walking from the adjunct office to the staircase heading to class,” said Unruh. “As I walked past the meeting room I noticed someone was sitting in the dark in one of the chairs at the long meeting table. As I kept walking I thought well that was strange, who would be sitting in the dark? I decided to turn around and check because it just seemed so peculiar. But when I looked in the room no one was there. I even stepped in and looked around but there was no one.”
Some people make a game out of seeing who can get in touch with the supernatural, and one of those people is Dave Golitko, an assistant softball coach. As part of the “Cougolympics,” he has done three campus ghost hunts over the past 12 years. Golitko explained that before the athletes are let loose on the campus, they are first educated on what they could potentially find.
“They first would listen or watch some past evidence my son’s group had found and we test them on what they heard or saw,” said Golitko. “After that I explain some of the tools we and most groups use and I show them what they are used for and then they have an hour to go to the places of their choosing to investigate around campus.”
Golitko says he has heard several stories from former players about what they encountered in their ghost hunts, as well as what they encountered in their daily lives. Some of the encounters even happen very close to the athletics offices, as Golitko said that students told him they heard voices, noises, knocks, and scratching sounds in the south gym and at the doorway leading to the tunnel system below the baseball offices.
One former softball player and staff member that claims to have had some paranormal encounters of her own during her time at CUC is Sydney Vizi, who was a student before serving as a pitching coach for the softball team, as well as in the athletic communications department. Vizi even said that one ghost latched onto her room. More specifically, her television.
“I was convinced while living at CUC that a ghost attached to my TV,” said Vizi. “I would play music on it and songs would skip or turn up and down depending on what started playing. The ghost had preferences!”
The ghost that haunted Vizi’s TV is not the only ghost to have allegedly enjoyed music. Golitko said he heard stories about students hearing the sound of a piano playing in the KCC, while Miller said that when she’s been doing her rounds in Bergmann Theater, she has heard disembodied theater scores coming from the green room.
Vizi said that one of her experiences was a bit personal, and that she was able to use a spirit box–a machine that picks up radio waves and converts them into white noise, in theory allowing the user to communicate with ghosts–to speak with a spirit in the Kohn basement. According to Vizi, she got some answers about who the spirit was in life.
“I asked the ghost about its life and it explained it was a professor and had two remaining children,” said Vizi. “They also confirmed they were around during the Addison Hall fires.”
In 1970, Addison Hall was nearly destroyed in an act of arson. It was the second time Addison was ablaze, the first time being February of 1914, just four months after the building was dedicated in the fall of 1913. It is speculated that those fires could be the cause of the ghosts that allegedly walk its halls today.
It’s not just the older buildings that are rumored to contain the supernatural. Miller says that she has encountered a ghostly child that runs around the Early Childhood Education Center in the Christopher Center, one of the newer buildings on campus.
“Toys will turn on in the ECEC and you’ll hear fast footsteps,” said Miller. “If you turn around fast enough, you’ll see a kid looking around the corner at you. It’s not a bad kid, it’s a mischievous kid that has free run of the building and runs all over the place.”
Despite the common connotation denoting ghosts with the creepy or scary or eerie, Miller says that the ghosts aren’t malicious or evil. In fact, Miller thinks it is the opposite.
“Spirits stay with places that hold lots of emotional value,” said Miller. “Places that people love so much or have lots poured into it, those are hotbeds. It’s wherever there is a lot of emotions or pride, which is why 99% of experiences are completely benign.”
To Miller, the spirits that may walk Concordia’s campus are not here because they are stuck here, they are here because there is nowhere else they would rather be.
“It holds people here,” said Miller. “Not in a bad way, it just holds them here. Because they have a connection, they stay so close.They have that connection to the place and what it represents.”
